Email me if you want to purchase the original cartoon. Or buy a fine art scanned print of the original. Check it out here!
Those with authority, those with power, those in control, believe that freedom can be doled out by degrees. Longer leashes. Bigger cages.
Then people like Moses or Jesus or M.L. King Jr. or Gandhi come along and they challenge that lie.
Because they saw that freedom is not just a bigger cage.
If you haven’t bought my book of cartoons, you simply must. It addresses concerns such as this. “Nakedpastor101: Cartoons by David Hayward“, from amazon.com, amazon.ca, amazon.de. Great for laughs and serious discussion!
My name is David Hayward, and I am the nakedpastor. I am a graffiti artist on the walls of religion.
Very nice touch having Jeremiah 34 in the background.
Excellent observation. I’ve managed to spend the better part of my life trading one cage for another and then another …ad infinitum.
So if the Son has set us free, why don’t we live like it?
The door to our prisons have been unlocked, but often we stay there inside our prison cells decorating it with curtains and a new paint job.
Church hoppers, a new breed of South Antlantic penguin are great at the above. The search for freedom always leads to another cage. The only solution is to give up the common ‘cage’ paradigm and run free in God’s great creation.
freedom is far to risky… not sure if it is even possible.
I have been chasing freedom for 25 years…
unlearning
trying something new
discovering another part of myself
then another…. and so on..
seraching, looking
embracing openess…
am I free…
yes i think I am more free then I was 25 years ago.. but i know that my passivity, my fear, my body keeps me captive..
I still havn’t found what i’m looking for…
Here’s what I don’t get about those in authority, etc. Church attendance is voluntary. When we ‘volunteer’ to come to a church, even if we join, we’re still there voluntarily. It’s not a legally binding contract! We’re not employees. We don’t have to listen to or do anything the pastor says (sorry, David). We are first and foremost God’s. We join together for corporate worship, prayer, fellowship, but not to be controlled. Where does that notion come from? David, you’ve used both metaphors of cages and straight jackets lately – who puts them on us?
David,
You keep feeding me with your daily cartoons and your thoughts. I just heard from a parishioner, who called me specifically this morning to thank me for turning him on to you. That was in response to this morning’s freedom cartoon. This is amazing stuff. Thank you so much
Yme
wow thanks Yme. that means so much to me. thanks for taking the time to tell me.
Somewhere back in the 80s I started hearing about delegated authority and that submitting to a spiritual leader’s authority was the same as submitting to God. I exchanged cage for cage for decades. I am no longer in a church cage but still find myself voluntarily staying in a cage of my own fashioning. I wonder if true freedom is really even possible for me.
http://public.wsu.edu/~dee/REFORM/FREEDOM.HTM
No doubt many are familiar with this. For those, who are not, it is one of those things one should read. “On the Freedom of the Christian Person” by Luther.
“Then people like Moses or Jesus or M.L. King Jr. or Gandhi come along and they challenge that lie.”
The freedom that they offered was only provisional.
True freedom only comes from Christ Jesus, and Him alone.
Love this one David….the only freedom is a cageless one, but that is often to scary for us or threatening to “them”.
Re Ed’s comment, ultimately I think we only make the cages ourselves, but those in “authority” are only to happy to “guide” us in by all kinds of means and are really happy to keep us there!
Steve… David’s jesus doesn’t do it for you… only your jesus gets it right…
no doubt you are also totally free….
are you free enough to be wrong?
sorry Brigitte it took me so long to approve your comment. it was because of the link. it’s a great one!
i love ALL you guys. thanks for helping me with such a great comment section to my blog!
I’m sorry james, I didn’t see Jesus’ name mentioned in the cartoon.
I must have missed it.
I’m glad you liked it, David. It is quite a pivotal piece.
Brigitte:
Even Luther had hate in his heart, especially towards Jews.In his latter years he demanded of his followers that Jews be hunted down and killed, along with the burning of their homes and businesses. Just like Hitler in his day ( Luther’s views didn’t influence the Nazi regime apparently – too far apart in history ) he wanted to eradicate them from the face of the earth. He beleved they were evil personified. In the 1980s ( I’m not surprised that it took them so long, the wheels of religion run along their own tracks, and slowly )the Lutheran church condemmed their founder’s views and struck them out of their literature. I guess they came under certain pressures from a modern society, just as the Morman church did with their refusal to allow black people in their priesthood. When asked why they had chosen to now accept them, they said that God had changed his mind about coloured people – they were now as good as anyone else! – Meaning that he didn’t think they were before?
Oh, how I despise organised religion with its awful people who, like much revered Luther, cause immeasurable suffering and bloodshed.( I’m currently reading a book about the Reformation so your comments were right up my street) Mind you, Martin Luther King Junior was no saint either in his personal life, but we love that ‘I have a dream” freedon speech of his, don’t we, and rightly so.
Anyway, nobody is without fault, including me, so I’ll leave it up to you if you want to know more about the Luthers of this world. After my session with the Reformation, I sometimes wonder what it really achieved. I read somewhere that none of the revolutions of the world ever achieved what they set out to do. Such a waste of effort, but there’s an element in the human soul that longs for freedom. I guess that’s what it’s all about. I don’t believe we’ve got it yet, any of us. We’re slaves to so much, still.
You mean Martin Luther King. He made the ‘U have a dream…’ speech, not Martin Luther King Junior, his son.
No Tigg. The same one of whom you speak is the Jr.
Dear Crystal: you did not comment on the “Freedom of the Christian Person”.
This issue about the very late document on “Jews and their Lies” does not fit here and gets brought up whenever one mentions Luther. You are not saying anything that most people have not heard about a gazillion times now.
I find the document very disturbing myself and have occupied myself recently with Anti-semitism through the centuries and read the most thorough and recent Luther biography (Martin Brecht, see Amazon) and come up with some observations.
It will not do that one cannot quote a thing by Luther without having “The Jews and their Lies” thrown around. It is not about Luther.
If David permits, I will link to some of my comments for Crystal, but there is not need to unfold this here. http://thoughts-brigitte.blogspot.com/search/label/Luther%20and%20the%20Jews
It’s a series of five or so posts and I wasn’t really done. You have to start at the bottom.