Lately, I’ve found myself wandering through conversations about free will, determinism, neuroscience, consciousness, and quantum randomness. To be honest, some of these discussions leave me both fascinated and oddly unsatisfied.
Not because the questions are unimportant. They do matter—a lot.
But sometimes it feels as though in these conversations we accidentally lose sight of the human being.
We become very good at analyzing the pieces of ourselves: brain chemistry, genetics, evolutionary drives, trauma responses, social conditioning, neural pathways, algorithms, economic pressures, and cultural inheritance. All of these things shape us profoundly.
None of us created ourselves from scratch.
We inherit bodies and nervous systems, family stories and fears, opportunities and limitations, wounds and longings, long before we ever begin imagining ourselves as independent people. Even our desires often arrive before our awareness of them. We simply find ourselves wanting, fearing, reaching, resisting.
And yet, human life still feels irreducibly more than the sum total of our parts.
On spring prairie mornings, watching sunlight shimmer on dew-soaked leaves dancing in the breeze, or sitting beside someone carrying such loss they can barely speak aloud, it becomes difficult for me to believe we are merely biological machinery acting out inevitable scripts.
Human beings ache for meaning. We carry regret and longing. We create beauty. We wrestle with responsibility. We love badly and sometimes beautifully. We betray ourselves. We heal. We forgive. We become.
Reductionism often feels a little like trying to explain a great song by studying vibrating guitar strings.
The strings matter, but they are not the music.
I do not believe human beings possess limitless freedom. Our choices are shaped and constrained in countless ways. Biology matters, but so do trauma, culture, economics, embodiment, history, and the simple fact that we live among other people whose choices affect our own possibilities. Freedom has never meant existing outside reality altogether.
Still, within all of those realities, there seems to remain some genuine human capacity to participate in our becoming.
Not infinite freedom or magical autonomy, but meaningful freedom — the freedom to nurture one desire rather than another, to move toward healing rather than bitterness, to create beauty rather than despair, and to choose love, even imperfectly.
Maybe that freedom is most visible in ordinary human moments: learning from our failures, remaining tender after disappointment, forgiving when resentment would feel justified, or choosing beauty and compassion when no one could really blame us for choosing otherwise.
And history itself seems to bear witness to this strange and stubborn human capacity to move beyond what we inherit.
Again and again, people have resisted systems once treated as inevitable. We have seen movements toward greater dignity for women, racialized people, queer communities, and countless others whose humanity was diminished or denied. We have watched people choose compassion over cruelty, generosity over greed, and sacrifice over self-interest.
Not perfectly or universally, but genuinely.
Which perhaps suggests that human beings are not merely trapped inside the forces that shape us. Somehow, within all our limitations and conditioning, we remain capable of participating in healing, justice, courage, and love.
And perhaps this is where the conversation becomes deeply personal for me.
There was a time in my life when I began noticing that many of my caring actions toward others were not entirely as selfless as I imagined. I often helped people, listened carefully, showed kindness, or sacrificed for others partly because of what I hoped would quietly return to me in exchange. People appreciated me. Sometimes they loved me back or affirmed my worth in ways I thought I needed.
I do not say this with shame so much as tenderness toward my younger self on the road to more becoming.
Much of what I called love was still tangled up with fear, insecurity, obligation, and the longing to be seen as worthy of love.
But as I slowly reflected on the way God seemed to love me — freely, generously, without coercion or demand for repayment — and how love seems to work in nature, I began noticing the smudges in the way I loved others. Not because love was fake, but because it was still maturing. For me, the best sandbox was, and continues to be, the ups, downs, and sideways of thirty-eight years of friendship, marriage, and raising three wonderful sons together.
And over time, as healing slowly happened and some of those inner knots loosened, loving others became less exhausting. Less obligatory. Less like a subtle transaction or moral obligation I needed to fulfill in order to feel worthy or lovable.
Love began feeling freer.
Not perfect. Not pure. But freer.
Which perhaps says something important about freedom itself.
Maybe genuine freedom is not the ability to do whatever we want without consequence. That feels less like maturity and more like adolescence.
Perhaps genuine freedom is the growing capacity to participate well in the lives we actually find ourselves living. To become capable of deeper love, to move toward the flourishing of others as well as ourselves, and to take responsibility for the kind of people we are becoming and the kind of world we are helping create.
And honestly, I think this is the better story.
Not because suffering disappears or because human beings are endlessly good, but because this story leaves room for transformation. It leaves room for grace, healing, creativity, justice, beauty-making, responsibility, and hope.
Perhaps the deeper question is not whether human beings possess absolute freedom, but whether we possess enough freedom to help shape the kind of lives and world we are participating in.
Enough freedom to move toward healing rather than harm, to create beauty, to take responsibility for our relationships, and to keep choosing love, however imperfectly.
Perhaps that is already enough to change everything.
Not as sentimentality or naïve optimism, but as something real moving quietly through the fabric of existence, always inviting us toward deeper life — toward healing, beauty, tenderness, and one another.
Love will always matter.
Love is always at work within us, between us, and among us, inviting us into a deeper and more whole way of being human.
Perhaps freedom exists not so we can stand apart from one another, but so we can consciously participate in love itself—together.
Sola Caritas,
𝞃Michael
Of Interest:
June 15 – I’m looking forward to joining this free online Process Pop-Up conversation hosted by Process & Faith around my upcoming book, Made by Love, For Love.
We’ll explore Open & Relational Theology, evolving faith, relentless love, and the possibility that love is far more central to reality than many of us were taught.
If that resonates with you, I’d love to have you join us.
June 29–July 3 – I’m thrilled to be presenting at ORTcon26 this summer through the Center for Open & Relational Theology.
My session is titled:
The Shape of Love at the Heart of Everything
A reimagining of God, power, and faith in light of relentless love.
What if love is not merely something God does, but the very pulse of reality itself?
This presentation explores a renewed vision of faith shaped by Open & Relational Theology, the evolutionary spirituality of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and the possibility that uncontrolling love is the deepest truth at the heart of existence.
For those reimagining faith, wrestling with old stories, or longing for a more spacious and life-giving vision of God.
Join me and many amazing thinkers at ORTcon26.
Still time to Register