Oh My Goodness

Doing good not only helps others. It also helps us.

My favorite line from St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians is “O stupid Galatians! Who has bewitched you?” (3:1). I can’t help but chuckle when I hear it at Mass. St. Paul never could have imagined that we would be reading those words at church nearly 2,000 years later.

My actual favorite line from the Letter to the Galatians is “For freedom, Christ set us free” (5:1). It sounds redundant at first, but Paul is distinguishing between two kinds of freedom: freedom from and freedom for. 

Most of the talk of “freedom,” at least in the United States, is freedom from. But that’s not the whole picture. Freedom is also for service, for love. True freedom is doing the good: