Browsing tag: obedience

  • Trust And Obey

    The first step of humility is unhesitating obedience, which comes naturally to those who cherish Christ above all.…  [T]hey carry out the superior’s order as promptly as if the command came from God himself.…  This very obedience, however, will be acceptable to God and agreeable to men only if compliance with what is commanded is not cringing or sluggish or half-hearted.…  (Rule of St. Benedict 5.1-14)

    Sheer cussedness is not a Christian virtue, even if you are from Texas.  None of the translators feature “stubbornness” anywhere in the lists of fruits of the Spirit.  “Perseverance” comes close, but perseverance implies that you’re going in the right direction.  Going the other way just because it’s your way is called “perverse,” and that’s not in there either.

    If you can’t tell the difference between persevering and perverse, ask yourself when was the last time you were wrong.  If you can’t remember ever being wrong, or admitting it, you’ll belong in the short word crowd.

    Watch out, because perverse can slide into “perverted” when you reject all correction, on principle.  The day comes when even your instincts are destructive, and so are all your friends.  That population does not perceive that the impulse carrying them over the cliff is their own ill will.

    Rebellion gets attention, but rebellion for its own sake only tears down existing systems.  The perpetual objector doesn’t contribute anything positive.  At school, at home, at work, waiting in line and anywhere else, the person who just won’t do what anyone asks makes life tedious for everyone else.  The worst part of leadership, when you are the one in charge is dragging along the grudging trudger.

    All human authority rests on the authority of God (Romans 13:1-7).  Where a derivative power contradicts the sustaining source, we surely should question that rickety racket.  So do open your eyes, prick up your ears and wrinkle your nose before going along with anyone.  But on the other hand, you can’t expect to develop sensitivity to divine cues, which are spiritual, if you refuse to heed human instructions, which you understand just fine.  Obedience to human authority is a way of expressing obedience to God’s authority, when the one does not contradict the other.

    This is why the goal of the Christian cannot be to rebel and get away with it.  The Christian goal must be to establish a just society, so that there’s no moral dilemma opposing obedience to God and obedience to authority.  In all ordinary occasions of everyday action, obedience to intermediate authorities is the Christian default.  Not snide reluctance but willing participation is what we offer to those in positions of responsibility.  If you are habitually helpful, when a truly moral dilemma comes along, most authority figures will be well-disposed to listen to you.  Even tyrants run low on energy and resources.  They lean on the person they can count on.  Ten to one they would rather accommodate your objection on that day, since you frame it in a respectful way.

    And if they refuse to listen, you will be able to mount an effective protest only if you can work with other people.  Working with people always does end up requiring systems of authority, hierarchy and delegation, because perfect unanimity in all things is a divine quality, not a human one.  Deferring to each other is the closest we can get to harmony.

    Of course, the ultimate question is whether we can trust God, to want to obey him at all.  In order to trust someone’s leadership, you need to feel confident both in the goodness and in the competence of the person in charge.  God is good, but is he good enough?  It’s the longing for goodness–to find it somewhere in the mess, to retrieve whatever’s left of it from annihilation, to set it back on its feet–that keeps driving us to throw in our lot with someone who does not guarantee that we will not suffer.

    We do accomplish something.  It is worthwhile.  Risks are worth taking for a life worth living.

    Obedience is trust taking that risk.  We trust the God who created the universe to figure out how to fix it.  He has a plan.  No one else does.  Christ is the only one offering redemption.  He is the one who climbs into the rubble of the world to rescue those trapped in the wreckage of ruined lives.  We follow him into dangerous places because we trust him to lead us through death itself into eternal life.

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  • King Once And King To Be

    It is love that impels them to pursue everlasting life; therefore, they are eager to take the narrow road of which the Lord says: Narrow is the road that leads to life Matthew 7:14. (Rule of St. Benedict 5.10-11)

    When my son was not yet six years old, he asked me at Christmas: “How can God be both everywhere AND a baby in a manger?”

    I said, “Yes, and he’s also a Spirit who is present to each of us at every moment.”

    He said, “That’s CRAZY.”

    So I said, “One day you’ll learn that the really dangerous crazy people make perfect sense.  Everything fits together neatly for them.”

    Fortunately, at that point he dashed off to something else, so I didn’t have to explain that the baby is an exiled king who will one day return, and we’ve given him our allegiance, which involves us in all sorts of struggles while we wait for him to reclaim his inheritance.

    Or maybe that’s not theologically correct.  Maybe he is already King of everything.  It’s just that his enemy usurps his territory and seduces the allegiance of his citizens—usually the easy way, with inducements.  For those who don’t respond to inducements, there are threats.  For those who disregard threats, there are punishments.  Some of these are worse than being condescended to at cocktail parties.

    Sell out?

    In other words, there’s a romantic loyalty in the Christian call.  Something about love.

    The Christian does not obey a set of laws, a system of ideas, an abstract principle or an impersonal force.  The Christian has committed to obey a person.  That person is Christ.  So, Christian faith is not an exercise of the imagination.  Nor is faith an intellectual assent to a set of propositions.  Still less is it membership in a club.  You do have both an imagination and an intellect, and you are free to join clubs, but faith is something else.  Faith in God is trust in a person.

    It’s exactly at the point of obedience that you start to wonder if you really believe in this guy.  Why should you put yourself out for someone you neither know nor trust?

    You shouldn’t.  If it strikes you that God asks far too much, proceed with caution.  Take a step in the direction of what he seems to want, and see what comes of it.  And begin to claim his promises for yourself.  It’s only as you begin to experience God making good on his word that you’ll begin to feel confident in him.  If you never expect anything of him, you’ll never know him.

    Also realize that if you are yourself untrustworthy, you will never know God.  “Faithless” means treacherous, fickle, false.  This sort of person is incompatible with God.  If you want to experience a relationship with God, be faithful in your dealings with other human beings.

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  • The Challenge

    This message of mine is for you, then, if you are ready to give up your own will, once and for all, and armed with the strong and noble weapons of obedience to do battle for the true King, Christ the Lord. (RB Prologue.3)

    St. Benedict is of course not the first to describe the Christian life as a spiritual battle: St. Paul used that figure of speech in his letters.  On the face of it, however, it seems a bit histrionic to associate the domestic life with anything as dramatic as “battle.”  Surely the metaphor is overblown.

    But then you hear of another teenager who has committed suicide; of another husband who has abandoned his family; of another wife who has had an affair.  You see people with all sorts of destructive habits hurting themselves and their children.  The national abortion statistics come in for the year.  Then it’s your own friends whose marriages rot out.  Their cute kids grow up and do shocking things in the janitor’s closet in high school.  You watch a four year-old fall apart emotionally because she realizes that her father just doesn’t care.  You watch a seven year-old learn to be stoic.  A battle?  It’s a rout; a massacre; a spiritual slaughter.  And if you abandon your post, not only you but your children will join the list of casualties.

    So there is a war raging.  Whether or not you want to fight, it will involve you.  But how can obedience be a weapon?  Isn’t that a hopelessly unfashionable idea?  In Discipleship, the WWII-era Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer makes the point that obedience to the commands of God is inseparable from faith in God. “You complain that you cannot believe?  No one should be surprised that they cannot come to believe so long as, in deliberate disobedience, they flee or reject some aspect of Jesus’ commandment.”

    Following the epistle of St. James, Bonhoeffer was explaining to a modern readership how false it is to think that an experience of faith must precede an act of obedience.  On the contrary, you must take action to obey in order to experience faith.  Bonhoeffer stepped away from the trend of Germanic philosophy since Kant and rejected the primacy of the thing in the mind over the thing in action.  He stood against Nazi Germany and lost his life as a result.  His side–our side–won that war, but insidious theories of self-invention spread through the post-war culture.

    These days a call to obedience sounds like an insult, to many people.  In the postmodern context, we are self-referential by default.  We find ourselves sequestered inside labile minds, no longer even able to rely on the modern concept of the coherent individual, who at least knew who he was and what he wanted.  More than in previous ages we need to obey the commands of God so as not to be constantly tossed about by our own confused thoughts and erratic feelings.

    But once we’ve obeyed the revealed commands of God—then what?  There’s all the rest of mundane life to live.  Must each individual at every moment debate every choice that needs to be made?  In a chaotic and arbitrary culture, willfully given over to the cult of randomness, it would be less exhausting to have some templates handy, some aids for the organization of behavior. A rational person faces relentless buffeting by the sheer nihilism of the surrounding environment.  A Domestic Rule would be helpful, to provide some guidelines for self-regulation.

     

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