A roominess within the soul
In the Bible, freedom is always more than a simple choice or the absence of coercion.
Most of us wouldn’t survive 43 days in solitary confinement. Albert Woodfox endured 43 years of it. When he was released in 2016, Woodfox had to relearn the basics of everyday living. Getting more than a few hours of sleep each night posed a special challenge. “He sometimes jolted awake, overcome by the sensation that the atmosphere was pressing down on him,” wrote Rachel Aviv in a New Yorker article on Woodfox. “All four walls appeared to be inches from his face. He felt so constricted that he removed all his clothes. He calmed himself by pacing—four steps forward, four steps back—a technique he’d been using for decades. After four or five minutes, the walls of the room would snap back into place.”
To be released from prison is not the same thing as being free. To be free to swim requires more than permission to jump in the water. That view might confuse swimming with drowning, as Philip Gorski notes ("Becoming America"). To be able to walk out of one’s house in a crime-ridden neighborhood only to be shot while going to the grocery store constitutes an incomplete or partial freedom as well.
American journalist Terry Anderson’s journey to freedom began not on the day Shi’ite Hezbollah militants released him in 1991 but on the next day. That’s when he thanked God, declared his absence of hatred for his captors, and forgave them for his nearly seven years of mistreatment.
