I’ve been thinking a lot about freedom lately.

Haven’t you?

“Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation.” — bell hooks

I’ve been thinking a lot about freedom lately. Haven’t you?

A couple recent examples of how we invite people into our own freedoms — or how we are invited into theirs — keep me hopeful for a triumphant election in just a few weeks. Just yesterday, along with 250,000 other Georgians, I voted on the first day of early voting at my local library. My precinct (and city) is a blue island in a sea of red, and the air in the library was giddy.

“For some strange reason everybody’s been saying they couldn’t wait to vote,” a poll worker told me with an eyebrow raised and a barely-stifled laugh.

“Gee, I wonder why that is,” I replied in the worst deadpan.

Just a couple days before voting I experienced an expansive form of liberty. I’ve been going to a liberal, highly intellectual Episcopal church near Emory University in Atlanta on and off for many years. It’s known for its focus on social justice, and it quite often puts its money where its mouth is. There have been many challenges in that community that sent me away from them, but recently I’ve been tip-toeing back over the last few months. The rector, Angela, has spotted me in the sanctuary enough recently that she put me on an email list for those in the LGBTQ+ community, of which I am part. It was a group invitation to attend or participate in the liturgy for the Sunday of Pride Weekend. I felt oddly honored. “Please come to church because you are you” is how I interpreted Angela’s invitation, a beckoning that stands in such sharp contrast to religious spaces that do not offer this kind of hospitality to the Other, no matter who the Other is. Receiving this invitation into this loving, spiritually liberating community, I showed up, proud. Flags, banners, rainbow socks and colorful shirts festooned the building and its people.

I think often, too, of three men who ran the Gainesville Times in Hall County, Georgia, during segregation. One of them was my grandfather, Lou Fockele, along with fellow diehards for democracy Sylvan Meyer and Charlie Smithgall. When the paper started speaking against segregation at their behest, the men received death threats. They were risking their safety — and that of their families — to help encourage and eventually bring about the freedom of others.

Our childless Lady Cat, Sophie, doesn’t like being grabbed.

My polling place, the library, is itself a bastion of American freedom, not just for its stacks of intellectual treatises. From its shelves I recently borrowed two works of fiction: a novel about two couples’ complex, sometimes fraught friendship spanning graduate school and middle age all the way through one’s dying years (Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner); another contained a story about how to be a good mother and citizen outside the confines of the law (The Red Convertible, a story collection by Louise Erdrich). These two random choices represent a multiplicity of ways to be in this world — at least for now, while the books themselves are still safe from the hands of those who fear the power these books impose upon the brain from between their covers. It must scare certain people that the root meaning of book and library is freedom.

Also between the covers, we choose a partner to cling to, cowering against a torrent (real or imagined) that doesn’t seem to want to ever stop. That is a freedom not to be taken lightly. Your skin may differ than his. Her country may fight yours. Their customs are different from your family’s. Those body parts, according to society, don’t match up. To that I say, just keep inviting those you want into your own freedom. You just might change some minds.

One changer of minds I’ve been thinking of, too, is my writer friend Taylor. I had the pleasure of being in a workshop of his this past summer. In person and on the page, he invites us through his sparkling personality and razor-sharp words into his own hard-earned freedom. He shows us what it was like to grow up gay in small-town North Dakota. He wefts those strands with his environmental activism in which he takes multiple stands against fracking, which (ironically) fuels his family of origin. He’s inviting us into his own liberty — an acceptance of self combined with a love for the land. Taylor is writing for his life, and if that isn’t freedom, I don’t know what is.

Your turn. What are your personal freedoms, and how will you invite others to share in them? Not just those that will, with God’s grace, get our country “through” this 2024 election unharmed and poised for newness. Your freedom has to go wider than that. It has to be so big, so gracious, so inviting that it feels like a personal invitation from a dear friend.

And it must endure. You must invite others to wallow in it, but before they get too comfortable, they have to pass it right down the line. For in the end, isn’t freedom all we really have that’s worth passing down? For if we hoard our baubles, whatever they are, we isolate ourselves in doing so. Wouldn’t it be a shame if we isolate ourselves by placing our freedom to read, love, vote, and worship how we want in jeopardy? We already know we will never heal that way.

Please vote.