Christ’s Obedience and Ours

One of the benefits I believe that comes with age and the general disintegration of the body is that, like it or not, life teaches us to slow down from time to time. I like to joke with people that it always seems that around the holidays something bad always happens to me. I have had Covid two Christmases in a row, and this Holy Week, three herniated discs in my spine. I am so grateful that the lessons of the Church repeat every year in her cycle of feasts; what I may miss one year, perhaps the Good Lord will reveal to me in the following year. I am grateful for my very personal appointments I have had with human suffering, because through them, I hope that God continues to make me both compassionate and wise, like he is.

This Passiontide, I have been thinking a great deal about Christ’s obedience, and what it means. The author of the Book of Hebrews most notably remarks on this phenomenon, that by his obedience Christ was made “perfect” (Hebrews 5:9), a remark which is fascinating on so many levels. Contemplating the obedience of Christ, especially in his consent to his own passion, I cannot help but also think about Obedience as an Evangelical Counsel, a mode of life which is more perfect, but also the fact that I have received that mode of life via the Sacrament of Holy Order. Almost every Priest I have ever met has said that Obedience is the hardest promise he ever made; at best, it often almost rudely disturbs your life when things seem settled. At the very worst, it can become a source of bitterness if not lived correctly.

All the Evangelical Counsels in the past sixty years have fallen on hard times, if they ever had easy ones to begin with; the collapse in vocations across most of the Western World makes me think of so many young men and women who made Our Lord sad, like the Rich Young Man, not willing to part with the goods of this world for the Good which lasts forever. The Vatican Council and the times after were supposed to be dedicated, at least on paper, to a renewal of those sacred ideals given to us by Christ. It is still shocking to me who was not carried away in the tidal wave of postmodernity, and how slow we as a Church were to understand the hostility of the world around us. Regrettably, in many places, the psychological and the therapeutic still holds prominence over the spiritual and the realm of grace when it comes to expounding upon the Evangelical Virtues, as if they could be kept solely by means of the medical sciences and frail human strength. This is a profound error.

No more is this more clear than in the realm of Chastity. Chastity is commanded of all men and women, an obligation known even to the pagans and to the Eastern Religions, who often praised the discipline of the passions. Interestingly, most heretical movements in any religion can be distinguished by either total frigidity or total license in the matter. Yet we have always known, as even the Catechism admits, that the full flower of chastity often blooms over a lifetime, and manifests most fully in the power of friendship, the ability to forge intimate, disinterested and holy relationships which are life-giving and joyful. I daresay there is hardly a man or woman alive who has not committed a sin in regard to chastity. Yet in our desire to contain risk and churn out a predictable product, quite a few of our Bishops and Seminaries still remain cripplingly reliant on the advice of ‘experts’, who have disappointed us so many times, to evaluate candidates to Holy Orders, as well as to help and assist those who have already received that precious gift. In my opinion, even though we may rejoice that clerical sexual abuse in the Western World has plummeted to historic lows, I fear that this victory may be pyrrhic in nature, and a deeper rot may have been concealed by that fact. We always ought to be cautious of progressives who believe they can perfect human nature by social engineering and behavioral conditioning, because this can backfire in an extraordinary fashion. In the name of abolishing vice as their primary aim, I am saddened to say most Bishops simply wished to abolish embarrassment and liability, and so the flower of chastity in that environment can become more like a desiccated flower, its youth and vigor preserved pressed between book pages, rather than a living, vibrant source of vitality and creativity. I am not saying that we should forego due diligence in the psychological evaluation of candidates to Holy Order. However, I am saying, as many others have, that to evaluate candidates on those standards alone is in its essence imposing a materialistic and crudely behavioralist vision of the human person. There is a difference between the full flowering of a virtue and the mere impression imposed by force of fear and ‘good policy’.

This brings me to Obedience. Obedience, as Saint Benedict took pains to tell us, comes from ob+audire, or to ‘listen closely’. To listen to a person is one of the most fundamental ways to show human respect and love. Many forms of hatred and cruelty emerge when people forget to listen to what other people are saying, for closed hearts and closed minds can become fetid sewers of resentment and rage. Yet, just as Chastity, or least compliance with its external demands, seems to have increased, I do have my worries that Obedience likewise has been held together in many places solely by institutional and personal inertia. Returning to Saint Benedict and his Rule, a masterpiece for its understanding of human psychology and the power of divine grace, the full potential of Obedience is only fully manifested when the holy bond between a superior and his or her ‘subject’ is respected. Obedience can only fully blossom in the context of freedom, and the engagement of the conscience.

How different is the Obedience I see today compared to that of Christ in the Gospels! Our Lord’s Humanity winced at the Passion to come. Like in the Icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and the hints of Scripture, Our Lord foresaw from a young age the horrors of his own Passion. Often times, I consider it a mercy that we remain so ignorant regarding the future, because it would rob so many of us of our will to make sacrifices, especially the ones that are long and painful. Yet Our Lord foresaw the Passion, and, “despising its shame”, (Hebrews 12:2), literally carried it through. For Our Lord, Obedience was an active engagement of his Human Will with that of the Divine Will, and ultimately, his own subjection in love to the Will of the Father, in the Love of the Holy Spirit between them. Jesus’ Obedience, humanly speaking, was encouraged by his absolute confidence in his Father’s benevolence. Our Lord’s Obedience was so powerful because he faced the world and its cruelty with such love and dignity. We are mistaken if we believe that Our Lord’s Passion simply began with his entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. Our Lord’s whole life, from his human conception to his cross, was that true kenosis, that emptying of the self which is the principle of creative life.

All too often, in contrast, do many Priests and Religious live Obedience much like they live Chastity: not with joy, but under the lash. Although discipline and sacrifice is necessary for spiritual growth, to quote W.B. Yeats, “Too much sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.” There is an awfully fine line between sacrificial self-gift, and the cynical exploitation which occurs all too often today, which is always a sign, not of the Holy Spirit, but of malignant narcissism. Obedience is not supposed to be a shock collar meant to keep dogs inside a fenced cage. Obedience instead is a product of mutual listening, to each other and to the Holy Spirit. Obedience coupled with Wisdom is able to look at the manifested gifts and power of the Holy Spirit in a person, and to treat both with the dignity they deserve. I truly do believe that true Chastity can only flourish when true Obedience is upheld. How many times in the past half century have we had to endure the appalling behavior of clerics who witnessed and committed atrocious sins and crimes because they were ‘under obedience’? False obedience creates the spiritual terroir in which moral injury multiplies, causing incapacitating spiritual and emotional damage. False obedience empties people of a sense of agency and legitimate control over their lives. It may be the pious thing to tell Priests to look at the behavior of St. Padre Pio and others who had to endure indignity at the hands of their superiors. Yet there is a reason why these virtues are said to be heroic: they are uncommon. There is a reason why Christians in ancient times were told not to run into the arms of martyrdom, because the annals of the Church are filled with as many apostates as apostles. Heroic Fortitude, like Heroic Obedience, is rare. We may marvel that Saint Catherine of Siena drank the pus of her patients, and Saint Lawrence asked to be turned over on his grill. Yet we would be presumptuous to assume that such grace will be given to all.

I recently heard about a Religious Sister who was both brilliant and orthodox, the kind of person we rejoice to have ‘on the side of the angels’ in days like these. Like so many before her, she gave the vigor of her youth and the gifts God gave her to enrich others. Yet time and again, her Superiors, who I suspect were more jealous than wise, put her to the test, by giving her continued assignments which did not respect the gifts the Holy Spirit gave her, nor encouraged her in her legitimate zeal for serving the Church. Over time, this vibrant young woman transformed into a cynical middle aged one. She eventually would leave Religious Life altogether, but she never fully recovered from the experience of abuse in the name of Obedience. When I was younger, I would be more judgmental toward Priests and Religious who left under these circumstances. But the older I get, the more sympathetic and compassionate I hope I am becoming.

I have written about this sort of thing many times before among my essays. There is a fine line between self-offering and exploitation. The Church knows this, and has always known this, which is why we are a Church of laws. No authority on earth is absolute, just as no freedom on earth is unconditional. More and more I toast, like St. John Henry Newman, conscience over the Pontiff, as I have seen men and women and their convictions twisted because of the belief that Obedience means they should, or even worse, must, disavow their own reason, God-given dignity, and common sense. This is one reason why I heavily critique Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s concept of Obedience, which must be constrained by the practice of Discernment of Spirits. Obedience, obaudire, is meant to be patterned after the pattern of Christ, just like all the virtues. Christ and his Father were in constant conversation, in an uninterrupted communion of love. How many Diocesan Priests can say they have a similar warm, trusting relationship with their ordinaries? We know in the current climate that they cannot have this relationship, and moreover are dissuaded from having that sort of relationship, because of fear and distrust. Fear unaddressed often turns into aversion, which degenerates into resentment and rage. It is any coincidence that even now in Rome, the mood is said to be somewhere between fear and rage? This is precisely what we would come to expect where Obedience is corrupted into something arbitrary and divorced from principle. This has had a ripple effect throughout the Church, and will continue to discourage future vocations, even as it slowly wounds the vitality of present ones. I do not believe we will see the full flowering of Evangelical Chastity today, or even Poverty, if we do not see a true restoration of Evangelical Obedience after the pattern of Christ.

Just as humility is the cornerstone of all virtue, Obedience is the keystone of all order. As the Sisters used to say in grade school, order is heaven’s first law, and that order is manifested by the willing and loving cooperation between the divine and the human will. It is the true tranquilitas ordinis which Saint Augustine said was the definition of true peace. As the late Benedict XVI noted, the evils of the past century emerged in the midst of the breakdown of ancient structures of authority, law and order, and that same antinomianism is with us today. In fact, we live in the world drowning under the tedium of a thousand policies, and very few laws. As G.K. Chesterton quipped, the death of the Golden Rule does not bring no rule, but thousands of little ones, each one slowly chipping away at us. Is it any surprise that so many ‘laws’ now come down via Executive Order and Motu Proprio rather than by the messy, but ultimately productive, process of creating good laws? It is any surprise that so many people fail to respect the Law, as we see how flippantly and cynically it is abused and disrespected? Even heavenly hierarchy is partially maintained by the union of love and intellect which exists between the angels and the Godhead. How can we expect earthly hierarchy to behave similarly? Unlike angels, who see God via intuitive vision, we require, in statu viatorum, the engagement, the obaudire, of the human will with the divine will. Most tellingly, God does not impose his will upon us absolutely, neither in what he permits nor in what he enjoins. Christ begged that his chalice should pass from his lips, but ultimately, in his agony, subjected his un-fallen human will to the divine will.

This Holy Week, it is my sincere prayer that each one of us, but especially we Priests and Religious, take a thorough look at what Christ’s Obedience was, and what it means for us today. Christ was made perfect by his own Obedience, not in the sense that anything was lacking in him, but that his full humanity as the New Adam was at last offered willingly to the loving will of the Father. And the price to repair that first disobedience was his agony. Wherever we are, and whatever station in life we may occupy, may God grant us the grace to truly become listeners at heart, to willingly and lovingly engage with his plans. But let us also resist, with the equal measure, the perversion of Obedience. As the Romans used to say, corruptio optimi pessima, the corruption of the best is the worst kind of corruption. Obedience corrupted is a curse and a blight in the body of the Church. May Christ teach us after the pattern of his own Obedience to obey, not simply because it is what another says, but because it is right. Indeed, may the convictions of our conscience make obeying what is right a joy, just as Christ bore the cross an account of the joy that lied ahead of him, knowing that on account of his own Obedience, the many would be made righteous.