Thinking Out Faith
Incidental Writings on Books, Ideas, Theology and Culture

Sunday, October 05, 2008

Benedictine Obedience Defined: Obedience Part II

In my previous post I attempted to give enough of a positive picture of obedience to at least get the idea a hearing.

To continue recussitating the idea of obedience - to try to get it up on its own two feet so we can get it doing some real work - we need to flesh out a bit more of a definition.

For this work I'm turning again to the tradition of Benedictine monasticism. Where better to explore the real implications of a practice than with the supposed experts?

First, many authors point out the significance of the term's etymology. Contemporary Benedictine Esther De Waal is typical here in describing her prior assumptions and how they came to be challenged. She writes that the idea of obedience "used to present me with difficulties until I realized that it came from the word obaudiens, to listen intently, to listen to the voice of God, to hear God's voice and follow it-so that we are led along the path of God's will rather than our own." [1]

Grammatically the word is an intensification of the root word audir, to hear. So we have the word obedience meaning something like: to listen intently or perhaps intentionally. This might initially seem like a cop-out, a kind of saving interpretation. None of us think of merely listening to someone as constituting obeying them. But this objection is based on a misunderstanding. First of all, we do use the word 'listen' as a kind of synonym for 'obey' as in when children are told that they have to listen to their parents. What is meant is obviously more than that the child hear what is spoken. The parents want response; they expect obedience.

The misunderstanding, and the strong negative connotation to the idea of obedience comes from the same mistaken conflation I wrote about before where authority is equated with power. Here we see that when most people react to the idea of obedience, they are reacting to the idea of mere compliance. Instead of complying with a power under threat of force, I am differentiating here a willing obedience to a respected authority.

I remember hearing that phrase 'willing obedience' in a hymn a while back as if for the first time. It was a kind of forehead-slap moment for me. "Of course!" I remember thinking, "Obedience can still be willing!" Perhaps obedience can only be willing. Why is it that we always tend to assume obeying someone can only be in order to avoid punishment?

But while obedience is not fearful submission to power, it also is not just doing what another asks of us when we happened to want to do it anyway. The wind does not obey the voice that commands it to blow the direction it is already headed.

The reason that the mere coincident overlapping of wills is not obedience is that the whole point of obedience is growth. "Real obedience depends on wanting to listen to the voice of God in the human community, not wanting to be forced to do what we refuse to grow from." [2] If we want to grow through obedience - and if we want to grow, we must be capable of obedience - we will have to do things we don't want to do. There is no getting around this. Some things we are asked to obey and that we should obey will be distasteful. Some will of course turn out in the long run to have not been the best course of action.

Monks in the Benedictine order, the biggest and most influential in the West, do not make the vows most are familiar with: poverty, chastity and obedience. Benedictine monks are chaste and do give up owning much in the way of personal property, but their vows are: obedience, stability and conversion of life. And I think it's safe to say that the first two are aimed at the third. The point is to live in closer communion with God. Benedictines believe the way to do that is to commit to one community in one place and submit to the wisdom of that community.

But this seeming self-limitation must not be seen as oppressive but rather liberating. The first work of liberation is the liberation from the tyranny of the self to its own desires.

Another contemporary commentator makes this point well describing this first work of liberation as "the cracking of the thick crust around my 'I' and the orienting of myself to who or what has something to say to me." [3]

I think the dangers of obedience are obvious to everyone. We do not need to rehearse them here. The point to me is that it is clear where the pendulum has swung in the 21st century western world. Most of us as adults are really in no danger of willingly submitting to dangerous authorities. The very air we breathe is that of anti-authoritarianism. (The authorities now co-opt our insurection by marketing to it. The new standard of conformity is to be non-conformist. It is demanded of us that we be our own person. The only truly revolutionary stance is one of submission to an-Other who is not just any other.)

I say this is the case for adults. Where to draw the line in children is wholly another matter. We all know how the natural trust of children and their being taught to respect any adult authority can be tragically taken advantage of. Here too though it is possible to go too far. We could go so far in protecting our children from any possibility of danger that we would have damaged their ability to trust anyone. How much risk-avoidance is worth living a life of relative fear and mistrust? Part of the blame here is on the sensationalizing of the media of what really amount to very rare occurrences. The 'never talk to strangers' stuff we all had drilled into us endlessly is aimed at avoiding a vanishingly small possibility. Kids are almost never abducted by strangers but we're all afraid of it because we've all heard of the few cases where it has happened. [4]

The other serious problem is that with children a lot of what we often expect is just simple compliance. And we do often try to get this any way we can. (If you don't have kids you can't talk.) This is a thorny issue I can't solve here but let me just say that I think there is some room for growing into the willing part of true obedience. Perhaps in children the place of a fully-developed will and the rational mind capable of deciding to submit it, is filled by the loving attachment of trust and respect for the parent. I'm trying to think through my own theories of parenting so I'll have to return to this later.

Finally, it should also be obvious that willing obedience to an authority is not giving up the freedom of the will and the freedom to voice and act upon dissent. Also clear is that any Christian who is in the position of exercising authority would only do so with an eye to fostering the growth and development in freedom of the individual willing to be obedient. Exercising authority requires maturity and great self-discipline.

"The self-giving of real obedience is very clear to Benedict. When we follow the voice of the ones who call us to higher service, we put down our own concerns, allow ourselves to be led by the sights of another, treat our own best interest with a relaxed grasp. We empty ourselves out so that the presence of God can come in, tangible and present and divinely human." [5]

Being able to treat my own best interests (especially when I'm not sure of them) with a more relaxed grasp would sound many days like a little slice of heaven. Would that they were a little easier to actually lay down.


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1. De Waal, Esther. Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict p. 13

2. Chittister, Joan. The Rule of Benedict: Insights for the Ages p. 59

3. Derkse, Wil. The Rule of Benedict for Beginners p. 28

4. Daniel Gardner makes the case for how many of our most prevalant fears are not only irrational but downright dangerous in his book The Science of Fear. Fear of child abduction is just one example where we choose to avoid a tiny risk of a horrible event in favor of taking a much higher probability of fairly serious negative consequences like child obesity for example, because our kids aren't allowed to walk to school alone or play outside unmonitored as much as they were in the past. I heard him make his case in an exceptional interview on NPR's Diane Rehm Show.

5. Chittister, Joan. The Rule of Benedict: Insights for the Ages p.57

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