Servi Liberi Simus!

Thus the fruit of the breakfast table conversation this morning at Thomas Aquinas College, Northfield, where I am chaplain. My interlocutor (Int.) being a bright young freshman from Brazil. The reasoning went as follows.

Int. How did you sleep?

Plinthos. I usually wake up in the middle of the night, around 2 or 3 and have some time for sweet contemplation of God and being alone with Him. It seems to me to be a special preparation for death.

In fact, the daily human cycle of having to lay prostrate in the dead position and totally abandon oneself eight of every twenty-four hours, a full third of one's life on earth, is a great preparation for death, a ritual which is required of every man. This is a wonderful reality. It is part of our natural slavery.

Every one in creation, all creatures in the material world are, willing or unwilling, slaves to the law of God, the so-called "laws of nature." It is a universal and necessary obedience to the Creator and Lord of all!, as indicated by Saint Louis de Montfort in his little book Secret of Mary (32). He speaks of three types of slavery.

1. A slavery based on nature. All men, good and bad alike, are slaves of God in this sense.

2. A slavery of compulsion. The devils and the damned are slaves of God in this second sense.

3. A slavery of love and free choice. This is the kind chosen by one who consecrates himself to God through Mary, and this the the most perfect way for us human beings to give ourselves to God, our Creator.

So, the first and lowest type of obligatory slavery of nature is conducive to the third and highest type, that of freedom, of love, willingly and with interior desire. We could call it free slavery. We are free slaves! Servi liberi!

Int. The freedom of Our Lady at the Annunciation, "Fiat mihi secundum Verbum Tuum."

Plinthos. Fiat. It's the Fiat of self abandonment to God in all things.

Servi liberi simus! Ut sit ita! ¡Seamos esclavos libres!