Obedience: from Paul to Benedict

     This Sunday, we are treated to one of the most reviled readings from all of Holy Scripture, Ephesians 5:21-32. This is St. Paul's statement that "the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church", and so, "just as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands."

    Pretty ugly, isn't it?!  Hard for a 21st-century self-respecting woman to listen to without turning around and walking right back out of the church. Hard not to just write Christianity off as a relic, as representing all the shackles women have fought so hard to throw off in the last century or so. It is a bald statement of a paradigm under which countless women have suffered, and of which we are still not entirely free.

    But that's where I want to start with this meditation: that St. Paul lived within a paradigm in which a man was "head" of his household. By that, I mean to point out that St. Paul isn't suggesting that that is how it should be, he is reflecting how it already is. This is just reality as he knows it, it's unquestionable. Like, at the turn of this current millennium, it was the unquestioned paradigm that a "wife" must have a "husband" and vice versa, whereas now most of Europe and the Americas, at least, have fully legalized marriage between husband and husband, and between wife and wife. The paradigm has shifted, or at least it is well into the process of shifting.

    Seriously, people, why do you think we had so many virgin martyrs, so many women willing to be tortured and killed by the state rather than submit to marriage? And they have always been revered as saints, not sinners rebelling against what St. Paul taught in this letter to the Ephesians. Marriage in the Roman Empire (and Paul may have been a Jew and a Pharisee, but he was also a Roman citizen) was pretty much a form of slavery, not a romantic agreement between peers. Women didn't choose their husbands, or whether and when to have a husband at all. They were handed over as teenagers, by their fathers to their husbands, and they were in fact expected to be as obedient as slaves. There was no doubt a lot of variation in the lived reality of it, but the fundamental paradigm of the pater familias, the man as "head" of his household, was there.

    So, I say, Paul isn't saying male domination is how it ought to be in Christian marriages, he's saying something to us from within that paradigm. Then, what is he saying?  Oh ... he's saying "submit." Even within the paradigm, he's finding it worthwhile to insist that "wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is head of his wife just as Christ is head of the church, he himself the savior of the body. As the church is subordinate to Christ, so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything." No, that doesn't help much, does it?

    And yet ... stay with me for a minute. I say he does, still, challenge the paradigm. Look, the first verse is addressed to all the church members: "Be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ."  And after urging women to be subject to their husband, their "head of household," he goes on to spend two or three times as much ink on urging husbands -- who are under no legal or customary restraint -- to sacrifice themselves for the care of their wives. I mean, yes, presumably society did expect a head of household to see to the care and feeding of his dependents, but not like this. This is, "Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her to sanctify her," (that is, handed himself over all the way to death). And, "So also husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one hates his own flesh but rather nourishes and cherishes it, even as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." I say, the new thing Paul is adding is to push for marriage to be a two-way relationship, with both sides required to sacrifice their egos for it.

    And the letter goes on to exhort children to obey their parents ... and parents to stop provoking their children. And slaves, to willingly obey their masters ... and masters, to stop bullying their slaves. And none of that might be enough to stop you scowling at Paul's meek acceptance of the oppressive social structures, and I get it. Really, I do. Power corrupts, and how far did he really expect people to go in submitting to a harsh master? I don't know.

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    Still, Paul thinks there is some positive value, some Christian value, in willing obedience. And that's what I really want to explore here, for those of us who are neither slaves nor pre-feminist women. Yes, here I go getting all counter-cultural again! But obedience is one of the Benedictine monastic vows, and in fact it's one of the "evangelical counsels" that all Catholic religious commit to. Is it just a means of hierarchical, patriarchical control? Or is there still a meaningful, spiritual, human value to it? 

    And again, some of you might be wondering who I am to write about monastic obedience, given that I'm a hermit, with a couple of confessors but no actual superior. I have not taken a vow of obedience, so what do I know? Valid question! I know about obedience what the rest of you non-monks know: I was an employee for a few decades before becoming a hermit, and for the last 9 years I was an employee of a monastery. Granted, it's not the same thing. I never took a lifetime vow of obedience to an employer. If I found myself unwilling to do what was required, I was free to go looking for another job elsewhere. Still, obedience to somebody else's decisions, somebody else's rules and plans, is inevitably a part of any job. Even an entrepreneur has to obey a whole series of regulations, tax laws, contracts, etc.

    And I have definitely struggled with obedience throughout my life, and I'm still no good at it. The worst part of it, now that I'm really not bound to obey anyone else, is how damn hard it is to obey myself! I make so many good resolutions, and I'm like a toddler trying to get myself to follow my own rules, nothing but "no, no, no!" I have never been able to establish and stick to any kind of a reasonable horarium in the hermitage. There have been periods when I've been pretty good at praying the Office, mostly, at the hours I set for it, but otherwise? Manual labor happens when having something (like housework) undone starts to bother me worse than doing it. Lectio, sometimes, and it's so helpful when I do it conscientiously, but still I don't. Exercise, meals, nothing is on a regular schedule, or if it is on paper I don't follow it. It doesn't matter whether it's a pleasant task or an unpleasant chore, trivial or important, it's always a struggle to follow my own plans. These days, I go to the monastery for morning Mass and evening Vespers, which helps to put a minimal structure on my day. But hey: I have ADHD, you know? I am naturally undisciplined, naturally creative but chaotic, full of great ideas and enthusiasm but lacking in follow-through. The brain's "executive functions" are exactly my Achilles heel. That is the persistent thorn in my flesh that I have struggled with all my life. 

    I came by ADHD naturally, it runs in the family. I did not grow up in a household, or during a decade, characterized by consistency, rules, discipline, obedience. One of my brothers went into the Navy, which emphasizes obedience more than the monastic life does, and he has a capacity for self-management that I really envy. And that's one of the benefits of monastic obedience: just like good parenting, the external discipline gradually trains us to be able to exercise internal discipline. This is perhaps why St. Benedict disapproves of people like me who become hermits without having first lived a long time under obedience. And I envy the cœnobites their structure of obedience, even as I'm sure some of them envy my solitary freedom and independence.

    So, training in self-management is one benefit of monastic obedience, but it's not really relevant to Paul's submissive wife. I mean, true, girls were married off young, as soon as they were physically able to bear children, but still I think they must have been expected to be adults already in terms of knowing how to exercise self-direction and self-discipline.

    But there is another aspect of monastic obedience that benefits us both individually and communally, which is about letting go of the need to always be "right" or make the "right" decisions. Toxic perfectionism is a thing I've written about here before. We, and our culture, put so much pressure on ourselves to always be "successful" (whatever that means), to "optimize" our efforts, to choose the "right" path or the "best" tool or method. But really, most of the time, there is no right or wrong decision. Most of the time, we just get to choose. And if we make a choice and it doesn't turn out the way we wished, and there are negative consequences, that doesn't mean it was a bad choice -- it means, maybe, that we had the courage to try something new, to take a chance, to learn and grow. Learning comes from trial and error. 

    So, obedience is about embracing imperfect choices, choices sometimes different from the ones we would have made, based on different logic and priorities. And letting it be imperfect, messy, even clearly misguided sometimes. Going along with decisions that we don't agree with, willingly and generously, is beautiful training for forgiving ourselves, as well as our loved ones or our colleagues, for our own foolish or unfortunate choices. 

    In the monastery, in the Rule of St. Benedict, obedience is at three levels, at least: to the Rule itself and the community's constitutions, to the abbot or abbess, and peer-to-peer. Monks have told me that the first, most fundamental training in obedience is the bell that calls them to prayer, over and over throughout each day, to the Work of God to which nothing is to be preferred. Even the most absent-minded monk would never wander in late to prayer. The bell rings, and it commands us to drop whatever we're doing and get to the church on time. The whole virtue of obedience rest on the mastery of this simple first rule.

    The second level is obedience to the abbot. Just as Paul exhorts the head of the domestic household to loving care, Benedict's Rule goes to some pains to emphasize the abbot's responsibility as head of the monastic household. For one thing, he is to take counsel with those under his command on important decisions, including the most junior monks. The Rule also describes how that counsel is to be given: straightforwardly stating one's position, but then letting it go without getting into debate about it. There is also room to protest against being ordered to do something that really seems beyond one's powers. But in the end, the abbot decides. 

    Just as a spouse can be abusive, of course, so can a religious superior. One abbot I know insists on choosing each monk's confidant and confessor within the community. This seems a little close to abuse of conscience to me, but of course I'm on the outside, and maybe there are safeguards in place that I'm not aware of. The Church today does require certain safeguards: monasteries today are grouped into "congregations," whose leader visits each house once a year and meets one-on-one with each monk to hear their concerns, and there is also an annual opportunity to make a sacramental confession to someone from outside the community. And the ultimate defense against an abusive superior, another modern innovation, is the right to vote him or her out.

    So you see, the members of a monastery have chosen this particular person to lead them, to whom to offer their obedience. That doesn't mean they worship the ground he walks on. He's still a flawed human being, just another monk. So, they have to be willing to give him some grace, let him lead, speak up but without resisting his decisions even when they are obviously imperfect. Can we reflect that value in our own lives outside the cœnobium?

    The third level of obedience is peer-to-peer. Having taken that difficult step of agreeing to let the superior make all the bigger decisions, having learned to tame those demons of pride and perfectionism, can we also yield to each other in smaller things? You know I'm way out of my depth here, this hermit talking about community life ... but I can see, at least theoretically, the deep value in letting go of control in relationships, whether at home or at work or in the larger community. Let me practice going along with what you choose instead of what I would have chosen, for the sake of the relationship, and for the sake of learning to gracefully roll with imperfect choices. Let's put "optimization of effort" back in its place, and be human with each other.

    Finally, all this training in obedience should tie together with our loving submission to the will of God. Would the deliberate lifetime practice of accepting the consequences of someone else's flawed decisions make it easier to accept the hard things that God puts in my path? God is perfect, and I believe that from where He sits it all makes sense. But He doesn't usually sit us down and explain His reasons for putting obstacles in our way, or lay out for us to see and understand the whole path He has marked out for our lives. Very often we can appreciate even the hardest things in hindsight, as having diverted us from an easy path to a more rewarding one, taught us valuable lessons, developed gifts and strengths, or whatever. But it takes sustained effort to develop discernment of God's will, and it takes a lot of trust sometimes to go with it against our own reason or desires.

    But this, then, is the real prize of obedience: union with God. Abandonment of self-will and trust in God's loving care is the key, the very key to overcoming all the world can throw at us. Surrendering to crucifixion, or at least ego-annihilation, is the key to resurrection, the key to becoming more than we ever thought we could be, the key to coming into deep communion with God and with all Creation. 

    This got long ... if I were a better writer, I'd go back and edit it down some. But I'm going to run out of the day on which that annoying reading came up in the Lectionary, so I'll rebuke those twin demons of pride and perfectionism, and just put this baby out there as it is. Hopefully Google Translate doesn't garble it too much for my non-anglophone readers.....

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PEACE