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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Baptism, Why Bother? Sacramental Infighting and Clues to Original Meanings

This past Sunday, my son, Jonah Gregory, was baptized. But, "Whatever for?" you might ask. Well I've wondered this myself.

Everyone knows Christians get baptized. Few of us, even if we call ourselves Christians, think about why we were baptized, or why we should baptize anyone else.

Baptism is just one of those things. People don't want to talk about it or think about it because either A.) It's just what every Christian does, so who cares, and/or B.) Talking about it too much will lead to differences of opinion, disagreements between individuals or even divisions between churches, so it's better to leave well enough alone.

Baptism is central to Christianity so discussing its meaning is a shortcut to delving into the heart of the gospel itself. No wonder then about the disagreement. While the divisions we persist in are lamentable (let alone the violence perpetrated in the past by those willing to take just about any division as sufficient excuse), I subscribe to the theory that theological disagreements should be addressed and hashed out instead of ignored in favor of a race to the lowest common denominator. If the teaching of Christianity is worth thinking about, then it's worth arguing about. So we should maintain civility, but let's keep talking. Baptism is worth exploring.

I find it useful to address what baptism itself is from the angle of these divisions internal to Christianity. The basic split is between those who baptize babies and young children, and those who do not. The former group includes the majority of Protestants as well as Anglicans, Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians. This position represents what is called technically paedo-baptism (child baptism). The latter group practices believer's baptism or credo-baptism, holding that one must affirm belief before being baptized. They are commonly referred to just as Baptists (from Anabaptists, meaning re-baptizers because, since they do not recognize the validity of infant baptism, they re-baptize in their own manner those already baptized as infants in another Christian Church).

Now I am obviously a paedo-baptist. Both John Calvin, the founding father of my own Reformed tradition, and Luther, the original reformer, taught paedo-baptism. But, though I am personally persuaded by the reasons given in the tradition for baptizing infants, I fully recognize that the tradition of credo-baptism arises out of a sincere desire to be faithful to certain genuine aspects of the Christian life.

At its most basic, credo-baptism stresses the truth of human free will that is both the beautiful gift and terrible responsibility of every human creature. It also underlines the God-given integrity we have as individuals and the way in which God seeks us out often as individuals.

Another thing that can be said for believer's baptism is that it portrays a very clear grasp on the truth that "God has not willed the church to be reproduced through biology but through witness and conversion." [1] In other words, Christianity is not simply a hereditary religion. Rather, following Christ as a disciple is something all are called to regardless of parentage.

As I said, while I find the above elements attractive and the arguments offered in favor of them to be sincere, I am not persuaded. First of all, I have this sense that everything attractive about credo-baptism is covered just as well in paedo-baptist tradition; we do, for instance, obviously seek out and baptize adult converts.

Second, and more importantly, I just don't feel that denying the sacrament of baptism to children fits with my larger understanding of the faith, most especially in its insistence upon the absolute centrality and primacy of grace, even while affirming human free will.

My basic take on why elements of Baptist tradition are attractive despite my overall disagreement is that, like most theological mistakes and even outright heresies, credo-baptism arises not so much out of originating something opposed to Christian teaching as it does from an over-emphasizing of one strand of Christian teaching at the expense of the corresponding part of the paradox.

So just as the ancient heresies fought by the Church fathers were erroneous because they overly stressed, for example, either the humanity or divinity of Christ and ended up denying the incarnation. I would allege that credo-baptism (though probably not tantamount to heresy) has mistakenly over-stressed the role of human free will in conversion and at the very least muddied up a proper understanding of grace.

By way of caveat, I should say that being a Calvinist, the way I would navigate this mystery might be entirely predictable because, in the words of Richard Mouw, "When Calvinists get around to attempting to explain the relationship between God's sovereignty and human freedom, we are so concerned to protect the former that we are willing to risk sounding like we are waffling on the latter rather than to imply in any way that God's power is limited." [2]

So any potential disputant could just allege that their position occupies the center of the paradox and it is the Calvinist who has erred too far to the side of denying human free will. This has certainly been alleged before. But, as I've already said, on the issue of baptism, Calvinists happen to be in agreement with the broadest and deepest streams of the Christian tradition. I've never even heard anyone argue for an early historical precedent of anti-paedo-baptism, excepting, of course, the highly disputed interpretations over baptismal precedent in the New Testament itself, which is an issue I can't address here. In general though, I would be suspicious of any major Christian teaching that is claimed to have been completely suppressed for 1400 years or so only to pop up again in the 16th century.

Because baptism is our entrance into full membership of the Church, our understanding of it will have a direct impact on our understanding of grace. If we want to keep grace in the center of our picture of the Christian life, it should be important not only to see grace at work in the sacrament of baptism, but to be unwilling to compromise on its working there in any way. Lyle Bierma writes, summarizing paedo-baptism in the Reformed confessions, that:

"Whether one is an adult being baptized after conversion or an infant being baptized before conversion, the situation is basically the same. Christ has shed his blood no less for washing the little children of believers than he did for adults. (BC) As the HC* says, both belong to God's covenant and community and . . . are promised forgiveness of sin . . . and the Holy Spirit, who produces faith. Both are called to embrace those promises by faith, the adult immediately and the infant as he or she grows older. Both are saved not by their baptism but by God's grace as they live in faith and obedience as members of the covenant community." [3]*

But it is not just a matter of technical freedom of will, the overall sense of the grace at work in a church that celebrates infant baptism and one that bars it, seems to me to be reversed in terms of who is in the driver's seat in the conversion of the sinner. Bierma again writes that, "baptism is primarily God's speaking to us, not our speaking to him. It is there that he signifies and seals an operation of grace that he performs in the context of a community that he has established. How can this salvation sola gratia (by grace alone) be any more graphically demonstrated than in the baptism of a tiny covenant child, helpless, uncomprehending, and wholly incapable of any meritorious work? Infant baptism sets before the church in sacramental shorthand the entire doctrine of God's sovereignty in the salvation of the elect." [4]

If you say that one can't be baptized as an infant, then you're saying that one can't become a Christian without a certain level of maturity, whether intellectual or moral. It seems to me that if you do this, you are making conversion to Christianity and the salvation it is all about, far too much a result of one's own effort and abilities. I believe, not just that one is saved through grace, but also that one is converted to the faith that affirms this truth through grace. (If one wanted to be dismissive, this would be the place to start throwing that dirty word 'predestination' around!) For me, one always and only enters the Church, whose threshold is baptism, through grace, with the relative understanding of a child, regardless of one's age or maturity. Affirming that we should baptize infants is a line in the sand that reminds us that our conversion, let alone our salvation, is not of our making.

The objection could be raised here that the boots-on-the-ground difference between most baptistic and Reformed churches, for example, is actually very slight because the former often practice infant dedication with adult baptism; the latter, infant baptism and adult profession of faith. This might be true. The pastor and writer Douglas Wilson wrote recently of the idea of a "wet dedication" as opposed to full covenantal baptism. To the extent that this distinction has been lost, the fault is probably that of insufficient doctrinal education in paedo-baptist circles. If Reformed believers know what they are about, then they will always understand the relative importance of infant baptism and adult profession.

The difference between the two might just be a matter of emphasis, but for me, the distinction of where the line for full Church membership lies is very important. I believe that my 5 month old son is just as much a member of Christ's church as his (hopefully) much more mature, obsessively analytical father.

Finally and in conclusion, I can't help squeezing in the following quote on baptism. It's from the mouth of the fictional pastor who narrates the story in Marilynne Robinson's exquisite novel Gilead.

"There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn't enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is power in that. I have felt it pass through me, so to speak. The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time." [5]

The very beauty and power contained in baptism, signaled to here, probably makes it nearly inevitable that it will be misused. Baptism requires, like every other creaturely gift we enjoy in this life, certain boundaries to keep it from eroding rather than contributing to the dignity of human beings. For me those boundaries are one baptism in the name of the one triune God.

_____

Notes.

1. Hauerwas, Stanley. The Radical Hope in The Hauerwas Reader. p. 512
Hauerwas here is not discussing baptism but the validity of singleness as a Christian vocation. The point stands as a possible asset for credo-baptism.
2. Mouw, Richard. Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport. p. 27
3. Bierma, Lyle. Infant Baptism in the Reformed Confessions. Collected in, The Case for Covenanental Infant Baptism, edited by Gregg Strawbridge. Accessed on 1-16-08 at http://paedobaptism.com/bierma.doc
* "BC" & "HC" refer to the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism respectively.
4. ibid.
5. Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. p. 23

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Birth, Cancer, Gilead

I've been re-reading Gilead, the Pulitzer prize-winning novel by Marilynne Robinson lately and I am constantly amazed by how much depth can be communicated in a novel. It is striking how a story about fictional characters can pack more insight into, well ... life, the universe and everything, than just about anything else. I just find it so exceedingly odd and wonderful that a total stranger can think and say things so important and meaningful to me; can be so important to me just because of words thought up, written down, and sent out into the world, directed to who knows whom.

The novel takes the form of letters written by an aging Midwestern preacher to his young son set around the mid-twentieth century. Through them, the father tries to communicate everything he would want to tell the man his son will become but won't have a chance to as he is not expecting to live long. Along the way he relays the story of the boy's grandfather and great-grandfather who were also preachers, but men very different from each other and from the writer of the letters, the boy's father. In this way, there is never any regurgitated platitudes, however noble, but a transfer of embodied ideals. The father strives to give the son as much of what he has learned about what matters enfleshed in the story of where the boy has come from even as the father lovingly, understandingly expects for his son a life very different from any of the preceding generations.

Well it may be more than a coincidence (though I'm usually quick to be dismissive of these kinds of things) but it is at the very least a quite remarkable coincidence that I am by happenstance reading a novel about a dying father addressed to a son who will barely remember him at the very time that I have a two week-old son at home and find myself with a cancer diagnosis.

My son, Jonah Gregory, was born August 18th, just past two weeks ago. He is doing very well by all accounts, including that of the Doctor who saw him the morning of Friday the 31st of August for his two week well-child visit. This was also the same visit that brought me to my first physical in something like eight years at which I heard that I had testicular cancer, something I should have seen as likely given the symptoms, but which was completely, totally, off my radar screen.

Now I don't mean to be melodramatic. I don't think I'm on my deathbed. I fully plan on raising and knowing and loving my new son and his older sister until I'm old and gray and they're so full of all the advice and insight I can manage from whatever wisdom I hope to be able to scrape together by then that they're just itching for me to quit it already and kick the bucket. But illness of any seriousness does put certain thoughts in mind. Reading a novel that depicts the most convincing, sincere attempt to reach out and love someone from beyond the grave, even if one's own situation is only a brief scare (as I hope this will be) is, well, a balm for the soul.

So as I've hinted at, I believe Gilead to be just about the most beautiful and poignant thing I can imagine being written in my age, in my language. At least every other page is a sentence or paragraph so perfect, so sublime that it would bear hours or days of reflection.

The proper response to beauty is on the one hand a recurring theme of the book, as much of what the father wants to say is about loving the world, and on the other hand constitutes the body of the book; the father's very act of writing is an overflowing of love and gratitude for the life he has lived. One of his refrains is to declare how much he will miss this world. What makes the novel so transcendent is how the sheer beauty of the writing and the story itself participates in and reproduces the theme, giving the appreciative reader the overwhelming urge to thank the bearer of the message and then to share it with others.

[Ms. Robinson, I can't imagine your ever reading this, but if you are, Thank you! I want to say "you'll never know how much..." or "there aren't words to say..." but I believe there are. You have said them. What you have written is a thing to be grateful for as well as a portrayal of the most sincere and intimate gratitude. So I believe you already know what I want to tell you. It's what anyone who feels a profound debt of gratitude wants to tell the one who has been a medium of grace in their life. The feeling is like the student who experiences that 'click' in their understanding - a small epiphany even - maybe over something small like a mathematical proof or a poem, and getting so excited by the elegance of it they want to go back to the teacher who showed it to them and explain to them exactly why it is so worthy of wonder. Maybe the teacher needs these reminders of the weight and worth of their material from time to time. It is all another example of that wonderful economy of love and grace, their way of increasing the more they are given away. {This also puts me in mind of how love might mirror knowledge in the paradox of the learner: both Plato's solution of positing that learning is mere remembering what we once knew - which is really less absurd than it sounds when one grapples with it - and also of Kierkegaard's reflections on the need for the teacher to bear both the message and the means of understanding the message and the relation this has to the learner-disciple of faith. But even I won't pursue this tangent further}]


(Again, related to this business of beauty eliciting or even demanding response, I've thought many times before of how the aesthetic dynamic has parallels to religious piety. True worship can really be thought of as just the same overwhelming impulse directed toward the creator of the universe as appreciative fans experience with respect to their favorite artist, movie star or sports hero. True evangelism then would not be some guilty obligation or arrogant imposition but just that love spilling over the brim of one's soul onto anyone who is nearby but especially toward those with whom one feels the bonds of affection. True love does not compel but woos. One should probably not attempt to evangelize someone one is not in love with or be an evangelist for a story one has not utterly fallen for. Evangelism then, should be like courtship in that it should be at least as hard to keep quiet about one's faith as it would be to not tell a friend about the person one has fallen head-over-heels in love with and plans to spend the rest of one's life with.)

(If you'll suffer me one more related parenthetical: I think it might be interesting to measure a book by its blurbs. Not by a who's who of the reviewer or which media outlet they represent type of yardstick but by how beautiful the language is that the reviewer is inspired to summon in their response. I am more swayed by poetic praise from a nobody than by pedestrian suggestions by the most noted of writers. I say this because the blurbs on the back of Gilead, about the author's previous novel, Housekeeping, are themselves beautiful pieces. Like all good writing, they give the reader the impression of stretching the language to say what it can't contain.)

Now Marilynne Robinson can write wise and beautiful things in just about any setting, on just about any topic, as in fact she has. But the setup of Gilead gives it a distinct advantage for reaching profundity. Art often reaches to extremes to depict the depths and heights of the human soul. Think the Iliad and the Odyssey, Henry V and Romeo and Juliet, Saving Private Ryan and Gone With the Wind. We find the deepest resonance in stories of war or love, or love in the midst of war, even if these extreme situations are utterly foreign to us. Even relatively shallow instances like my boyhood favorites: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and The Last of the Mohicans - stories of love worth dying for in the midst of a world in turmoil - point to the need of humanity to take up a meaning that exceeds it. Mankind can fathom no greater absolute than death and no greater force with which to oppose it than love.

The format of Gilead gives the author the unique ability to conjure a credible 230-page deathbed scene. This seems a fortuitous circumstance for a story but also a tall order to follow through on. Robinson does not waste one page of the opportunity. Some of the (I'm running out of adjectives) best parts are where the father steps back to try to explain again his purpose in writing in the first place.

Here are a few short selections:

"I'm writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you've done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God's grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you." p. 52

"I'm trying to make the best of our situation. That is, I'm trying to tell you things I might never have thought to tell you if I had brought you up myself, father and son, in the usual companionable way. When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters. There are so many things you would never think to tell anyone. And I believe they may be the things that mean most to you, and that even your own child would have to know in order to know you well at all." p. 102

"The history of the church is very complex, very mingled. I want you to know how aware I am of that fact. These days there are so many people who think loyalty to religion is benighted, if it not worse than benighted. I am aware of that, and I know the charges that can be brought against the churches are powerful. And I know, too, that my own experience of the church has been, in many senses, sheltered and parochial. In every sense, unless it really is a universal and transcendent life, unless the bread is the bread and the cup is the cup everywhere, in all circumstances, and it is a time with the Lord in Gethsemane that comes for everyone, as I deeply believe. ... It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for. If I could only give you what my father gave me. No, what the Lord has given me and must also give you. But I hope you will put yourself in the way of the gift." p. 114

These are not my words, but they are the words - the sentiments - I would want to communicate to my children, my wife, my parents, my siblings and all my family and friends, were I to leave tomorrow or some day decades hence.

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