Now We Are Free

Written by Ashley Schumacher, M.S.

As we continue through this month dedicated to the Precious Blood and prepare to celebrate Independence Day, I would like to invite you to reflect with me on the mystery of freedom and the price by which it is given.

As Americans, and for myself as a Navy veteran, we rightly pause to remember those who gave their lives so that others might live in freedom. Every sacrifice in human history, however, seems to draw my heart beyond itself toward the One Sacrifice that changed history forever. The freedom won by Christ was never merely political, nor merely external. It reaches into the deepest places and interiority of the human person, into humanity's primordial rupture—Original Sin—and into the countless ways its consequences continue to unfold within us, our families, our world, and even creation itself (Rom 8:22).

We continue to encounter the lingering effects of personal wounds, fractured relationships, injustice, intergenerational trauma, and the countless ways humanity still bears the marks of Eden's first "no" and the haunting echo of Non serviam.

As I sit with this mystery, I find myself wondering how every human trauma unfolds within a world already marked by the effects of humanity’s first rupture. While trauma is not reducible to Original Sin, neither is it ever experienced outside the history and condition shaped by its consequences: mortality, disorder, relational rupture, and the enduring vulnerability of the human person.

In this sense, every wound we carry is situated within a creation still awaiting its final transfiguration in Christ. Trauma is not identical with sin, but it is always lived within a world that has been wounded by sin and is still groaning in hope of its redemption.

I continue returning to the same question:

What does it actually mean to live from a freedom that has already been won while we continue to experience the consequences of sin, suffering, and the wounds carried across generations?

How do we understand Christ's victory when the battle within the human heart still feels unfinished?

Perhaps this question belongs equally to the spiritual life and to the work of healing. What does it mean to live from a freedom that is already objectively won in Christ while still undergoing the subjective process of its interior reception and unfolding? What does it mean to live as people who are already free while still living with the effects of our own wounds and those of others that have not yet been fully healed?

What might it look like to live our freedom not as a temporal endpoint, but as a participation in eternal beatitude?

As I continue pondering these questions, I find myself returning to the music of Now We Are Free from Gladiator.

Though written within a different narrative, something about it stirs a distinctly Paschal resonance. It carries the sense of life emerging after the decisive passage through death. Not simply a battle ended, but the beginning of a new way of living because victory has already been won.

As I listen again, I find myself praying through the music. I invite you to join me in contemplating the lyrics with me now…

Healing to me... and freely to you... from the Son.

There is something evocative and beautifully open here.

Within a Catholic anthropology, such imagery calls back to me like a distant echo of the deeper truth that all authentic healing is received rather than self-generated. Healing, in this sense, is not a possession but a participation in Christ’s own outpouring.

As members of the Mystical Body of Christ, perhaps this is what we are continually being invited into. Not to become reservoirs, but conduits of authentic charity. Healing received gradually becomes healing poured out—not because we ourselves are its source, but because we have been incorporated into the One who is.

"Freely you have received; freely give." Gratis accepistis, gratis date. (Matthew 10:8)

The song continues...

"Wings of joy... Warmth of Day... Sun of Dawn... The Son of Righteousness, Son Morning Light."

For our Christian imagination, dawn is never merely another sunrise. It is Resurrection. It is Life overcoming death.

The prophet Malachi speaks of the "Sun of righteousness" rising "with healing in His wings" (Mal 4:2). There is something profoundly beautiful in that image. Healing is not simply something Christ does. It radiates from who He is, communicated to those who remain united to Him.

From our Lord, Jesus, True Sun of Liberty, healing you free.

Healing to me, healing to you. Now freely from the Son.

For all the world too...

Shine on high and below.

Shine now, O Great I AM.

Shine now, O He Who Was.

Shine now, O He Who Is to Come."

Perhaps every authentic healing encounter participates—analogically and by grace—in that one healing action of Christ.

We do not heal in His place, nor apart from Him. We remain within His healing Presence as members of His Body, the Church.

Perhaps this is why our own ongoing conversion can never be separated from our service to others.

The more we allow ourselves to be conformed to Christ through repentance, prayer, and the sacraments, the more capable we become of accompanying another. Yet even this capacity is never our own achievement. It remains entirely dependent upon the grace we ourselves first receive.

Grace restores nature, deepens our capacity for communion, and  enlarges our capacity for self-gift. What is received becomes a gift. Even the healing we receive is never merely for ourselves. Like the Precious Blood poured out from the Heart of Christ, it is intrinsically self-giving.

I'll say it again: As we allow ourselves to be continually formed, healed, and restored by Him, we become increasingly capable of accompanying others in their own healing.

Our own ongoing conversion is not separate from our vocation to serve—Vocati ad Servitium (U.S. Navy Chaplain Corps motto). It becomes one of the ways Christ continues His healing ministry through His Body. I can't think of a service more needed nor noble than this—participating in Christ's healing work within His Mystical Body by first allowing Him to continue healing our own hearts. 

Healing to me... and freely to you... from the Son.

Until every heart remembers the freedom for which it was created, may our soul's continued battle cry be:

Live on!

Now we are free… Honor Him.

For in Him, the One through whom all things are made new, we continue seeking the fullness of that liberty already won for us, yet still being brought to completion within us, until God is "all in all" (1 Cor 15:28).