Freedom Isn't Floating
Detachment doesn't mean drifting through life.
We often chase maximum optionality as if it were the ideal life. Keep every door open, every commitment provisional, every relationship light enough to walk away from. “Freedom,” it seems, means floating above the fray of real obligation.
So when Ignatian spirituality talks about “detachment” and “indifference,” it can sound like an endorsement of exactly that kind of drifting. Don’t get attached to any particular person or path? Stay flexible and open? Perfect—that’s what I was already planning to do.
Except that’s precisely backwards.
Ignatian detachment isn’t about refusing commitment. It’s about clearing away the false gods that prevent real commitment. When career success owns you, when others’ opinions own you, when security owns you, you can’t fully give yourself to anything.
The point of detachment is to knock those idols off their thrones so that God—and nothing less than God—can be at the center.
And here’s what happens when that center holds: suddenly you’re free to pour yourself into the people and responsibilities God has actually placed in your life. The spouse, the work, the community that needs you.
As David Brooks puts it, “Freedom isn’t an ocean you want to spend your life in. Freedom is a river you want to get across so you can plant yourself on the other side – and fully commit to something.”
Detachment clears the ground. Then the roots go down deep.