Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

I had a plan for my retirement. Once the kids moved out, I thought my spouse and I were going to teach in the Middle East for a few years before we put our feet up on the beach in Thailand. The Middle East is the gateway to the rest of the world. Wars have a way of changing plans. I am kind of used to it by now. Well into my mid-fifties, shifting horizons and still plugging away has become the norm.

……….

There are moments in both personal life and political history when the horizon narrows. Possibilities that once seemed open begin to close. The future, once expansive and undefined, becomes more structured, more constrained, and more difficult to imagine as genuinely new. These moments are often experienced as loss. Yet they may also reveal something more fundamental: not simply the limits of freedom, but its true nature.

Moments such as middle age, periods of war and militarization, and the event of Easter share a surprising conceptual thread. Each represents not merely a condition of constraint, but a transformation in how freedom itself is understood. Each forces a confrontation with limits that cannot be evaded. And each, in its own way, poses the same unsettling question: what remains of freedom when the world closes in? If the economy of one kind of freedom is eroded, what other economy and the freedom it empowers becomes constituted?

To understand this, one must begin with the experience of middle age. It is often described in biological or psychological terms, but its deeper significance is existential. Middle age is not simply the accumulation of years; it is the moment when time becomes concrete. The abstract infinity of youth gives way to a finite horizon. One becomes aware not only of what has been chosen, but of what has been foreclosed.

In youth, freedom is typically imagined as openness. It is the ability to choose among many possible lives, to redefine oneself, to move without finality. But this form of freedom depends on a certain illusion: that time is abundant and that identity remains fluid. Middle age disrupts this illusion. It reveals that every choice has excluded others, that paths have solidified, and that time is no longer a neutral backdrop but a diminishing resource.

This narrowing can feel like a loss of freedom. Yet it may also be its beginning. For when possibility is no longer infinite, choice becomes meaningful in a different way. Freedom is no longer the ability to do anything, but the capacity to affirm something. It is not expansion, but commitment. One begins to choose not because everything is available, but because something is worth choosing.

A similar transformation occurs at the level of political life during periods of war and increasing militarization. Here too, the horizon narrows. But the narrowing is collective rather than personal. Societies under conditions of conflict tend to reorganize themselves around necessity. Ambiguity becomes intolerable. Complexity is reduced. The world is divided into allies and enemies, threats and securities, loyalty and betrayal.

In such moments, the imagination of order itself changes. The political community begins to perceive reality through the lens of survival. Language hardens. Institutions centralize. Surveillance increases. The space for dissent contracts, not always through explicit coercion, but through a subtle redefinition of what counts as reasonable or permissible.

Freedom, in this context, undergoes a quiet reconfiguration. It is no longer understood primarily as openness or autonomy, but as protection. To be free is to be secure. And security, in turn, justifies constraint. The citizen is asked to accept limitations as necessary conditions of survival.

This transformation is rarely experienced as purely imposed. It is often internalized. Fear reshapes the imagination. The individual begins to see the world in the same terms as the state: as a field of threats to be managed. In this way, militarization is not only a structural phenomenon; it is a psychological one. It alters not just what people can do, but how they perceive what is possible.

Here the parallel with middle age becomes clearer. Both involve a contraction of possibility. Both replace openness with necessity. And both force a reconsideration of what freedom means when conditions are no longer expansive.

It is at precisely this point that the Easter event enters with disruptive force. At the center of the Christian narrative is the figure of Jesus Christ, whose crucifixion represents the convergence of political power, religious authority, and social consensus. It is, in every sense, a moment of total constraint. The individual is publicly exposed, condemned, and executed. There is no ambiguity, no escape, no remaining possibility.

Understood conventionally, freedom is the ability to act, to influence outcomes, to preserve one’s life. The crucifixion appears as its absolute negation. It is the point at which all agency is extinguished. The individual is reduced to an object within a system of power.

And yet, the Easter narrative does not end there. It moves through death to resurrection. However, this movement is not the restoration of the previous order. It is not a political victory in which one power defeats another. Nor is it simply a return to life as it was before.

Rather, the resurrection introduces a transformation in the very meaning of freedom. The social imaginary changes. Rather than being identical with control, the avoidance of suffering, or survival, freedom becomes something that is not ultimately dependent on external conditions.

This is a difficult idea, particularly in a modern context where freedom is so closely associated with autonomy and self-determination. But the Easter event proposes something more radical: that freedom may persist even where autonomy is destroyed, that it may exist even under conditions of extreme constraint, and that it may be revealed most clearly precisely when all institutional supports collapse.

This does not mean that suffering or injustice are illusory. The crucifixion remains an act of violence. The conditions of middle age and militarization remain real constraints. But it does mean that these conditions do not exhaust the meaning of freedom. They expose its limits, but they also open the possibility of something deeper.

What, then, is this deeper freedom?

It is not easily defined, but it can be approached indirectly. It is the capacity to remain oriented toward truth, toward meaning, toward what one recognizes as good, even when external conditions no longer support that orientation. It is a form of interior integrity that cannot be entirely determined by circumstance.

In middle age, this may take the form of accepting the limits of one’s life without collapsing into resignation. It is the ability to affirm one’s commitments, not because they are the only options left, but because they have become meaningful. It is a freedom that emerges not from possibility, but from fidelity and covenant.

In a time of war and militarization, this freedom becomes more precarious, but also more significant. It may take the form of resisting the totalizing logic of fear. It may involve refusing to see the world solely in terms of enemies and threats. It may consist in preserving a space of thought and imagination that is not entirely colonized by the imperatives of security.

Such resistance is not necessarily dramatic. It does not always manifest as overt opposition. Often, it is quieter. It is a refusal to allow one’s inner life to be fully shaped by external pressures. It is the maintenance of a perspective that cannot be reduced to the categories imposed by the moment.

This is where the Easter pattern becomes most relevant. It does not offer a program for political action or a strategy for personal fulfillment. Instead, it reorients the question of freedom itself. It suggests that freedom is not something that can be secured once and for all through the right conditions. Rather, it is something that must be discovered within conditions that are often far from ideal.

There is also a deeper psychological dimension to this. Both middle age and militarized politics involve a transformation of the imagination. In youth and in stable societies, the imagination tends to be expansive. It projects into the future. It assumes that change is possible and that the world is open.

But when conditions narrow, the imagination contracts. The future becomes harder to envision. Possibility gives way to probability. One begins to think in terms of what is likely rather than what is conceivable. This contraction can lead to a kind of existential claustrophobia, in which the world appears closed and predetermined.

The Easter event interrupts this contraction, but not by restoring the previous openness. Instead, it introduces a different kind of imagination; the present framework itself is not final. It does not expand the horizon; it destabilizes the horizon altogether.

This is why the resurrection is so difficult to assimilate into ordinary categories. It is neither a predictable outcome nor a strategic victory. It does not follow from the logic of the situation. In this sense, it resists being instrumentalized. It cannot be reduced to a lesson about how to succeed within the existing order.

Instead, it points beyond that order. It suggests that the structures which define what is possible may not be ultimate. And in doing so, it reopens the question of freedom as something that may exceed the system itself.

This has profound implications for how one lives under conditions of constraint. If freedom is tied entirely to external circumstances, then it will always be fragile. It will expand and contract with changing conditions, and it will disappear precisely when it is most needed.

But if freedom can be understood more deeply as not being wholly determined by circumstance, then it becomes more resilient. Constraint is not eliminated but neither is freedom eliminated by it.

The convergence of middle age, militarization, and Easter thus reveals a common structure. Each confronts the individual with the collapse of a superficial understanding of freedom. Each exposes the limits of autonomy, control, and possibility. And each, in its own way, opens the question of whether freedom might be something more enduring.

This does not resolve the tensions inherent in these conditions. Aging remains difficult. War remains destructive. The crucifixion remains an act of violence. But it does suggest that these experiences are not only negative. They are also revelatory. They reveal what kind of freedom is possible when the usual supports fall away.

In the end, the question is not whether one can avoid constraint. That is rarely within one’s control. The question is whether freedom will be defined by those constraints, or whether it can be discovered in a way that is not entirely dependent on them.

It is a difficult question, and it admits of no easy answer. But it is one that becomes unavoidable precisely at those moments when time shortens, when politics hardens, and when the structures of the world appear most fixed.

It is in those moments, perhaps, that freedom becomes most visible, i.e. as the capacity to endure them without being wholly defined by them.

……….

I still want to put my feet on the soft sand of Thai beaches. I still want to view my bathing-suit clad spouse coming out of the ocean on a sunny day. I still want to travel to parts of the world on the way. Portugal, Spain and Morocco call. South America sets an alarm in the soul. Greece and Italy still beckon. Meandering through Istanbul would be a delight.

Perhaps Easter, for me, is the final triumph over a culture of death.