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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Patrick Henry College, Paradigm of the Evangelical Liberal Arts?

I recently listened to a podcast of a booktalk by Hanna Rosin giving a talk (about a year ago) on her book, God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America.The book is about the school that seems to be a veritable breeding ground for White House interns, Patrick Henry College. In her talk, Rosin marvels at the juxtaposition of a student body which is intellectually sophisticated, culturally, well ... at least aware, and yet made up of students who maintain their rigorous fundamentalist faith.

Her main goal seems to be to understand this seeming juxtaposition and drive home just how unique a position Patrick Henry College occupies in the intellectual landscape. I would agree that the school seems to be quite an outlier in terms of many of its specific ends and means. I would not agree with what seems like the implicit assumption in much of Rosin's story: that the fundamental issues Patrick Henry College was specifically set up to address are all that different from other Christian colleges.

First of all Rosin sets up her story describing her view of the tension between the sacred and the secular in the lives of the student body. Rosin describes how she "could sense a real tension between the school's dual missions of leading a faithful Christian life and impacting the culture. The school really wanted the students to study Plato and Nietzsche or the modern novels or the enlightenment thinkers but they were worried that they might be corrupted by their ideas."

The way she characterizes the problem makes it seem like 21st century fundamentalists who are also busy competing for jobs in the White House are somehow the first set of Christians to feel a tension in how to live out their Christianity in public. But this is not a new problem at all. Christians have been wrestling with this at least since Saint Augustine penned his book City of God struggling with the right view of the Church after the fall of Rome. But of course it has really been an issue for followers of Christ from day one. Christians tend to adopt the language of 'two kingdoms' to deal with these issues. We sense two basic tensions: on the one hand there is the eschatological tension between the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’ of the kingdom, on the other hand there is the incarnational tension in how we are called to be ‘in but not of’ the world. And we Christians call these things ‘tensions’ with good reason. Answers in this arena are never merely plain on their face. I think anyone who takes their Christianity seriously and lives in a secular society, with secular neighbors or with a secular vocation - which is to say: everyone - struggles with striking the right balance in regard to these tensions at some time or another.

The next problem is that having missed how universal the felt tensions described above really are, Rosin depicts politically hyper-active Patrick Henry College as having somehow stumbled upon the idea of engaging in politics and the broader culture at the same time as maintaining a firm orthodoxy. She then backtracks and uncritically adopts Patrick Henry's characterization of other Christian insitutions of higher learning. Patrick Henry College sees itself as paradigmatic for any theologically robust evangelical liberal arts institution and views other schools either as lacking in true intellectual sophistication and thus not worthy of being called liberal arts institutions (Bible Colleges), or as accomodating too much to the secular University and compromising their orthodoxy (mainstream evangelical schools). Rosin apparently buys their story.

But Patrick Henry College is merely one recent, perhaps unique in some regards, example of a Christian institution of higher learning seeking to have some impact on the wider culture. Rosin is certainly aware not only that there are many other kinds of Christian colleges - liberal Protestant, Catholic, etc. - but even that Patrick Henry is exceptional among evangelical institutions; she mentions in response to a question, both Wheaton and my own alma mater, Calvin College, saying they are places that would almost certainly not hire a six-day, young-earth Creationist. So they seem to fit Patrick Henry's conception of an accomodationist school. But if she knew anything about these institutions, she would know not only that they maintain what most American Christians would see as a conservative core theology, but also that a central part of their missions is to have an impact broader than on their students private spiritual lives. Finally, if she did any more than scratch the surface she would also have know that, on the whole, places like Calvin College have very different ideas on how to go about this cultural and political engagement.

For example, in another place she mentions Farris [the school founder]'s model of reading atheist philosophers as one of doing 'opposition research.' As if one has to read this stuff just to be versed in enemy strategy. But I can't imagine an understanding of liberal arts education more divergent from this than the one in which my reading of atheist, secular or just plain old pagan books took place at Calvin. (Even on this front there is an internal discrepancy in that she admits that not all PH professors agree with Farris's views.)

The problem I think is that Rosin has appropriated wholesale Patrick Henry’s very wooden view of Christianity's two-kingdom mindset. From her viewpoint, a bright young student listening to secular music and reading secular philosophers on the one hand and then going to congress to lobby about teaching itelligent design, is seen as someone completely stepping in and out of their identity as Christians. They might listen to good music because it's entertaining and read secularists because it's useful, but they lobby congress because they're Christians; they do the former just because they're modern young people and only the latter specifically as Christians.

At another point she relates how the students "try and follow Farris's model of living in two worlds at once. Of keeping a running conversation with Jesus in your head at all times while still making it in the real world." ... "Michael Farris is not interested in adapters who bend to the will of the mainstream. He wants shapeshifters who can move in between two worlds with their essential natures in tact." As I've said, I think all Christians try to strike a balance here but Rosin does not see how the line could be tread in any other way than Farris's. Nowhere does she seem to contemplate the possibility of an orthodox Christianity that actually encourages an appreciation for art, even secular art, because it's beautiful and recognizes that all beauty comes from God, or a politics that seeks engage in the public sphere as Christians in order to contribute to the common good without merely seizing power and imposing as much theocracy as possible.

And this is where Rosin's lack of the ability to theologically critique Patrick Henry's understanding of Christian vocation matters. While I have asserted that all Christians feel tensions in how to live out their callings in life, the orthodox view is not that we navigate between purely sacred and secular spheres of life where we could alternately put on and shed our identities as Christians. This strict dichotomous view is not more orthodox or conservative but essentially an instance of the Christian heresy of gnosticism. Against this, Christians must recognize how, in Abraham Kuyper's words, "there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: 'mine!'" But while this means that we are called to engage specifically as Christians in all spheres of life, this engagement need not, and almost certainly should not, look like that of the stereotypical culture warrior.

Perhaps Rosin's portrayal of what Patrick Henry teaches its students to think is correct. I am not in a position to say. Even if it is, it is a serious error on her part to accept the school's own take on the theological landscape of cultural engagement and to uncritically employ its own self-assessment and characterization of the options available in Christian higher learning.

But this is probably exactly why she wrote the book. Patrick Henry's students and their mission are headline grabbing. They are more than likely unique, but not because of their intellectualism and not because of their desire to engage the culture, but merely in what they think constitute the right weapons for the Christian to take up and for which battles. If she had started out with a little background discussion of the historical significance of Christian conversations surrounding eschatological and incarnational tensions she could have given us a much more interesting account of exactly how Patrick Henry is, and is not, unique.

So Ms. Rosin and journalists everywhere, please take note, if you meet someone trying to act like a Christian out there in your 'public' sphere, know that we're not all from Patrick Henry.

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Cynicism, Faith and the Battle of Experience

In a review of a new Library of America collection of journalist A.J. Liebling's work, Fresh Air contributor Maureen Corrigan relates the following intriguing quote taken from one of his WWII pieces. He writes:

"Cynicism is often the shame-faced product of inexperience."

I found this line immediately striking as a succinct counterpoint to the overly relied-upon assumption that level of cynicism equates with quantity of experience.

We are all acquainted with that kind of world-weary skeptic who is always telling us that if we only knew what was really going on in the world, how truly nasty people consistently are to one another, we'd give up on our faith. This line of thinking will often present any religious faith in a good God as a holdover from the naive infancy of our species whereas now we should all be too grown up to get on with that kind of nonsense. As if human beings in centuries or millenia past were somehow less acquainted with suffering and death than is modern man, or too dull to realize that continued suffering in the face of God's goodness and power was difficult to comprehend. Not so the new enlightened man. We are all so very adult now.

When Liebling says it is inexperience that leads to cynicism, he seemingly says the exact opposite of the above assumption, but I think I know where he is going with this. The cynic usually assumes that the optimist has just led too sheltered a life. This is sometimes the case. But our experience of an event involves both the event itself and how we interpret it and the cynical interpretation is never just a strict conclusion from analyzing the facts.

What seems clear to me is that our interpretations of events, which we will have at least some control over, has much more to do with our overall level of cynicism than we might like to think. We all know that there are those who have lived through the worst humanity has to offer - think holocaust survivors - with their faith in God or maybe a general regard for humanity intact just as we have come across those who seem ready to resign themselves to a jaded view of all life has to offer simply because a girlfriend dumped them. The mere possibility of these two types existing side-by-side shows the lack of causation.

We need to keep ourselves open, whatever the events we live through, to interpreting, and thus actually experiencing life, otherwise than cynically. This openness to re-interpretation does not constitute a diminished experience but an alternative experience and offers a horizon vastly wider than that of the cramped complaints of the cynics.

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I Will Not Survive or, None of Us Gets Out of Here Alive

So I recently found out that I am relatively in-the-clear in terms of my cancer. The doctors have decided that I don't need any treatment following the surgery and will only keep me under close observation for the coming years. I am trying to be as grateful for this news as I ought.

This officially makes me a cancer survivor. In fact, I've been told that I'm a survivor from day one. Whatever that means.

I've been saying all along that I never really felt like a cancer-anything: victim or survivor. The diagnosis didn't feel that real when I had it and so the cure doesn't feel that real now that I apparently don't have it. So maybe my ambivalence about the designation 'cancer survivor' has to do with this lack of the news really sinking in but it has also made me reflect on the idea of survival as it is experienced in our present culture.

It has often struck me that our culture is positively obsessed with the idea of survival. Perhaps this emphasis on being a survivor of an illness is but one manifestation of a more general feeling in the air.

We really have a schizophrenic attitude toward life and death. We are at the same time more obsessed than ever with avoiding death and more willing than ever to tempt death out of plain boredom with the shallowness of our lives.

On the one hand, perhaps because death has been pushed back and life expectancies have gone up so dramatically in the West, we have fooled ourselves into thinking that death might just be optional. Believing the goal might be attainable, we become obsessed with avoiding death, even reminders of it. On the other hand, living in a world where day-to-day survival is no longer a pressing issue, members of affluent cultures invent artificial ways to make their survival a matter for their concern again. We see this latter manifested in, for example, the survivalist movement or just your now-everyday extreme sports where the whole point is to flirt with the brink of death just in order to feel the rush that accompanies it. The survivalist or skydiver is then merely inventing a way of replicating the feeling an ancient forbear might have gotten just in the course of trying to bring home food from the hunt.

In the following I will be exploring the former phenomenon of the hyper-avoidance of death and the elevation of the value of survival.

It is now apparent that we will not stop our war against death until we have banished its very countenance from our collective sight. We fight every sign of aging, every wrinkle and gray hair, with the utmost ferocity. Those who can no longer hide their age are themselves hidden away with the rest of their kind in retirement or nursing homes, well cared for, as long as we youth-filled ones don't have to be reminded of their, and our future, existence. When someone inconveniently insists on still kicking the bucket, we keep their body so chemically preserved and make-up caked that they probably look better in the casket than they have for years. By all means, don't let them look like what they really are: dead!

I believe that behind this disturbing emphasis of our culture on survival is the general loss of meaning in our lives. In the not-so-distant past a person had hope for an afterlife. In the new world we comfort ourselves with dreams of a really long life. (I'm ignoring here the theological difference between eternal life and the merely everlasting life-after-death which, though taken to be the default conception of heaven, is not really a Christian notion at all. Christians believe in resurrection not resuscitation. In fact, it may be that the weakness of our religious imaginations in respect to the afterlife is in part a result of the larger cultural shift of pinning all hopes on this life and attempts to lengthen it.) We tell ourselves that this is an improvement. "One life at a time" we call it. We pretend to celebrate living for the moment, or valuing life for life's sake but the truth of our feeling is expressed in the tenacity and anxiety with which we cling to our lives.

Lacking something beyond life to provide the context or substance for valuing life - a spiritual or religious dimension - we have come to grasp after mere survival with all our strength and at any cost. Paradoxically, the more we make life itself the focus, the less weight it seems to carry. Life used to be deemed nearly priceless, but it shrinks under the burden of our attempt to make it into the ultimate value. Our collective existential crisis is but our intellect's realization that without spirit, we really are no different than the other animals. The tragedy of our situation is that we are too smart to ever think that mere smarts can make us any more than a clever beast.

I came across one extreme instance of this attitude in an interview with Ray Kurzweil on NPR's Fresh Air a couple years ago. Kurzweil is the author of, among other books, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology and Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. In the interview, Kurzweil came across with an enthusiasm that was truly infectious but it was almost pitiful how much he seemed to have convinced himself that it was a reasonable goal to live forever through careful health maintenance until the day that technology can swoop to the rescue.

Setting aside the perhaps more profound difference between a person who believes in some kind of afterlife or resurrection and one who doesn't, imagine for a minute the difference between two individuals, one who knows she will die - eventually, and another who thinks there might be a possibility of not dying. I'm picturing these two individuals on their deathbeds each with a mortal gunshot wound, minutes from certain death. Either one might be experiencing any range of emotion: sadness, regret, devastation, fear. But the average person knows they will have had to die eventually. It was just a matter of time. Now contrast that with someone like Mr. Kurzweil and imagine the devastation someone in his position would feel if he were unlucky enough to have had a fatal accident before the fortuitous advent of nano-bots able to repair any possible wound or computers ready to upload our brains to be re-booted into a new body, or whatever the solution to death is that's supposedly right around the corner. The picture of this deathbed scene, much less the life lived trying to avoid it, is actually quite heartbreaking.

Secularists like Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens argue quite frequently that believers are more dangerous precisely to the extent that they hold a belief in an afterlife. The argument goes that since a believer feels personally immortal, they are more willing to use this life carelessly and thus more likely to take others with them. The obvious example is the modern suicide bomber, who - we can't help thinking - is more likely to blow himself up because of the reward he thinks he's headed for. This argument has a certain logic to it though I was never convinced that since it seemed befitting of the suicide bomber, it was thus appropriate for all believers. One need pay attention to what is being believed.

There is also an argument that cuts the other way which the picture of these two hypothetical deathbed scenes brings to mind. It makes a certain amount of intuitive sense that one who feels this life is the end all and be all would do more, right or wrong, to protect it or prolong it. The Psalmist understood this well when he prayed to be protected "from men of this world whose reward is in this life." [1] The more potentially fearsome is the one with nothing left to lose. Who truly has nothing to lose, the one who is entirely committed to this life or the one who loves life more than everything except the values from which it derives its meaning and value?

Theologian Stanley Hauerwas writes that "what people want today is not salvation, but health. ... The medical establishment is the counter-salvation-promising group in our society today." [2] I agree that what people are seeking through the new emphasis on health and longevity is a kind of salvation. What is sad is that what so many pursue as their only comfort in life: more life, is in regards to the full-blooded Christian story of death and resurrection a rather pathetic parody or at best a pastiche.

Again, it is not a matter of being against survival, but mere survival. Life is supremely valuable but it is not of ultimate value. Life is like joy, the more it is pursued as an end in itself the more it slips from one's grasp and the more the very goods it contains are corrupted by its receiving misplaced emphasis.

It could be argued at this point that pursuing survival is a matter of believing in the sanctity of life which people, including Christian people, often think of as an obvious conclusion of Christian convictions. To find out why this might not be so I turn again to Hauerwas who proclaims:

"I want to know where Christians got the notion that life is sacred. That notion seems to have no reference to God. Any good secularist can think life is sacred. Of course, what the secularist means by the word sacred is interesting, but the idea that Christians are about the maintenance of some principle separate from our understanding of God is just crazy. As a matter of fact, Christians do not believe life is sacred. I often remind my right-to-life friends that Christians took their children with them to martyrdom rather than have them raised pagan. Christians believe that there is much worth dying for. We do not believe that human life is an absolute good in and of itself." [3]

Hauerwas makes clearer than I ever could the difference between life as ultimate value and life as a very important though derivative value.

I don't mean to be overly hard-nosed in any of this. It is nothing if not understandable for human beings to cling to life. We obviously should love life. The difference is between the hopeful affirmation of a beautiful gift and the fearful clinging to what we take to be our only lot. Like so many other differences, like for example between lust and love, it could be said that holding out for mere survival is the worst coming from the corruption of the best.

In conclusion, I leave you with this final thought from Stanley:

"We Christians are people who must learn to live, as we have learned that life is a gift. We thus live not as if survival is an end in itself, but rather because we know that life allows us the time and space to live in the service of God. We should not view time as something to be lived through, nor life as an end in itself, but rather see life as the gift of time enough for love." [4]

To this I can only add an Amen, in the hope that I will myself continually learn this lesson.




1. Psalm 17:14 NIV

2. The Hauerwas Reader, p. 611 "Abortion Theologically Understood"

3. The Hauerwas Reader, p. 614 "Abortion Theologically Understood"

4. The Hauerwas Reader, p. 585 "Reflections: Suicide and Euthanasia"

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