Freedom from Want?

When we visit my wife’s family, reproductions of Norman Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms” hang above the bed in the room in which we stay. I have always admired these images, but I have been as equally perplexed by the assumption of one of them. Freedom of Speech, Freedom from Tyranny, Freedom of Religion, and Freedom from Want. Freedom from Want? Can such a thing even be attained in this life? Furthermore, should we necessarily flee from want? Is “want” exclusively an evil with no shadow of merit? I would argue to the contrary.

“Want” is what secures in us a temperate understanding of ourselves. In want we understand that we are creatures with needs that we cannot always provide ourselves. In want we perceive our nature as fragile and limited, in need of a Guardian. In want we conceive that we are not the crafters of our own destiny, autonomous and complete on our own. And often, in want, we discover the desire for prayer, which we perhaps have allowed the demands of the world to muffle and silence. Whether in want of material necessities or in want of a more intimate unity with the All Glorious Lord, our want is often what presses us to prayer, reflecting on the truth of ourselves and hoping in the Truth of God. This is why Benedict XVI calls prayer “the school of Hope” (Spe Salvi, n.32). In this life, when we want we are compelled interiorly to reflect not only upon our predicament but upon our very selves – our nature, our being, our personhood – and by this we more firmly understand ourselves and our place in the cosmos with humility.

This is not to say that the state of want is the ideal – far from it. We want because we find ourselves in a state of imperfection, of incompletion. But neither do we merely endure want as just a burden of human life, because want can possess a meaning and purpose of its own, a catalyst that directs us toward some good, a glimmer of light within a dark cloud like a flash of lightning in a storm. Someday want will be no more, for “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away." (Rev 21:4) But this we still hope for and in the life that is to come. For now, we still want. But let us approach want in patience and temperance, permitting it to be the instrument it can be, so that good may flow forth even from where there seems an absence.