So many of the results of the elections yesterday are a cause of celebration that there's an added brightness as we pause to renew our thanks for the blessings of liberty. But our political freedoms are such a rare good fortune in the history of the human pilgrimage on the earth that the theme of exile in the preceding post on Dante stays with me. The thoughts of exile are made even more somber in remembering that the Bolshevik Revolution began on this date in 1917 and in thinking of the grim cost in human misery that was its harvest.



I don't read Russian but have been told that the current issue of Russia's premier philosophy journal Voprosy Filosofii is entirely devoted to Lenin's deportation of many of Russia's leading thinkers and artists aboard the "Philosophy Ship" in 1922. The philosopher and Christian thinker Nikolai Berdyaev was among those sent into exile and later wrote about the experience in his autobiography:



When we crossed the Soviet border at sea, there was the feeling that we were out of danger; until then no one was sure they would not make us turn around. But together with this feeling of entering a zone of great freedom, I had a feeling of deep sorrow at parting with my native land ...



And there were others in later years. It's impossible, for example, to forget the lines of anguish and pain added to the face of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who had already suffered and borne witness to so much, when he was expelled from his Russian homeland in 1974, torn from the land that he saw as a mother.



Our political freedoms come bound with a terrible responsibility and are only a part of the radical freedom to which we're called, as Berdyaev wrote in Christianity and Class War: Man's freedom is indissolubly linked with his obligations. Man's freedom is not a claim, but a duty, not so much what he demands as what is demanded of him. Man must be free. God demands and expects this of him.



We hear again the voice of the Lord Jesus in His command to Peter in Luke 5:4: Duc in altum --- Put out into the deep water. Meditation on this command has been a consistent theme of Pope John Paul II and is central to the Apostolic Letter Novo Millennio Ineunte, in which His Holiness entreats us to respond to the loving command of the Lord: Let us go forward in hope! A new millennium is opening before the Church like a vast ocean upon which we shall venture, relying on the help of Christ. The Son of God, who became incarnate two thousand years ago out of love for humanity, is at work even today: we need discerning eyes to see this and, above all, a generous heart to become the instruments of his work.