image from unSplash
In my last Lenten reflection, Amma Syncletica, having moved to a graveyard outside Alexandria Egypt, recommended to us the unpopular virtue of humility – not a beating down of the self, but a clear view of the self and its motivations that allows us to discern the appropriateness of the desires of our heart. To add to the difficulty, says Syncletica, we learn this humility by obedience.
Two hundred years later, St. Benedict writing at Monte Cassino in Italy, echoes this theme. The first step in learning humility, he says, is obedience without delay. This is sounding more and more controlling and, dare we say it, fascist. More like the “unthinking obedience” we are warned against in ethics and history classes and by our mothers. But let us keep going for a bit, past this common misconception. I argued in the last post that obedience is NOT a good in itself, but serves as an instrument to get us to something else: humility. Obedience serves us as:
a tool that pries you free from attachments. Free from attachment to possessions, concern with personal pride, free from achievement. Free, even, from attachment to the Desert Elder who is your guide.
Obedience can only do its job of freeing us from false attachments when it is when done with inner discernment. Inner discernment means being mindful, aware, awake to our motivations and goals in our actions. It is a desire to practice and follow in everyday life the right motivations, to be attached to those things of utmost importance (e.g. love for others and for God). But it also requires skills of being able to recognize those motivations and goals, to learn how to implement them, to see when one is off target, to learn from failure and success, to become more like the person (in motivation and action) you desire to become. It is attitude and skill in a constant practice of balancing the heart as it rests on the eternal.
Regular conversation with an elder, with a brother or sister, a friend, a spiritual director, a therapist, can help us practice these skills and develop them. It allows us to talk about the different motivations and thoughts we have. And we learn to discern those attachments we have that do not reflect the person we desire to be, that are not the person we hope to become.
Thus, by mindful obedience, we are made aware of those elements in our motivations that are impure. We obey, but know we are uncomfortable, then try to discern why. We disobey but feel resentful, and ask why. We obey and then sense we are more trying to please than trying to do the right thing. We disobey and feel the tension between obedience to a legitimate command or request and one that oversteps it bounds or misdirects. Is our reluctance because the direction or request is wrong or because we are somehow too attached to our own will? Asking questions like these is the inner work of discernment and mindful obedience.
“Mindful obedience is balancing the heart on the eternal -
never finished, always imperfect, always getting up again, always desiring the eternal”
In a marriage, a family or a community, in an organization, these minor frictions between our will and those of others can happen dozens of times in a day. Benedict devotes an entire small chapter to the ‘mutual obedience’ we practice in relationship with those with whom we live. Someone asks for help and the other generously gives. Someone criticizes and the other generously listens for the truth in the criticism.
But wait, then! Obey, disobey, think. Who are we trying to obey here? Think about what? How can we know we are right? Isn’t this confusing? Let me try to explain…
My partner Almut wrote a section of her (amazing, summa cum laude) dissertation on obedience. And her PhD advisor, a lifelong Jesuit, deeply familiar with the idea and practice of obedience, said her work finally explained obedience in words he could understand. And what was it? Letting God rule. Taken, of course from Kierkegaard. It is an act: letting, based in a goal, God ruling in one’s life. This is obedience as the balancing of the heart on the eternal. One looks for God’s truth in the words, desires, requests, needs, of the other, and allows that to be one’s guide. It requires discernment, and then balancing. Why balancing?
We are never so good that we always get our discernment right. We are never so pure of heart that we always let God rule in the right way, at the right time, with the right person, for the right reason. So, as walking is always a kind of falling forward while keeping balance, mindful obedience is always re-centering on the compassionate eternal after getting it somewhat, but not entirely, right. Or even after abject failure. As I have written elsewhere, it is about always getting up again when one falls.
This is mindful obedience. Obedience that sets us free. Obedience that balances the heart on the eternal. Never finished, always imperfect, always getting up again, always needing sound advice from others, always desiring, or wanting to desire, the eternal.
If you cannot pray,
bring your silence
despair
anger
angst
and your critical carping self
Bring them all before God,
limping, reluctant, unrepentant
and then wait in silence
God, in her infinite mercy
will accept bad coin
and refine it to gold.