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.