Obedience
Wednesday, March 10, 2021 at 12:45PM 
We had a conversation yesterday with the novices in the Order of the Ascension about the ways the elements of the Benedictine Promise (Stability, Obedience, and Conversion of Life) work together, influencing and shaping the whole. It was particularly helpful in this time where our normal sense of stability is shaken to recall the ways in which our parishes do offer stability, including through the Daily Office, Sunday worship in whatever form that takes, and opportunities to stay connected with one another.
A key point we covered is that faithful Conversion of Life is grounded in our Stability and our Obedience. We don’t change for the sake of change: we enter fully into this life as it is now, with these people, in this place, and we listen carefully for where the Holy Spirit is calling us to go. That listening includes taking seriously – being obedient to – our sources of authority, including scripture, tradition, priests and bishops, and our own conscience, as well as one another. We talked about how all of these elements of Benedictine spiritually exist on a spectrum. Rigid adherence to one way of Stability – for example, insisting that masculine images of God must be excised or insisting they must be used exclusively – is a distortion of Stability. So is claiming the Spirit requires us to change when mostly we’re drawn to change because we like it or maybe we’re bored or maybe we’re anxious about what we’ll find out if we stick with things that are uncomfortable.
As happens, the conversation turned to the often-visceral negative response many of us have to that word “obedience.” Many find it helpful to learn the word comes from the Latin verb “to listen,” and it is common to see writers on Benedictine spirituality talk about “obedience, holy listening” in a single phrase. And in the Order of the Ascension we spend a lot of time helping members develop and use listening processes in the parish, explicitly connected to deepening the expression of Benedictine spirituality. Of course, we’ve all been in places where they listen so much they never make a decision! That, too, is a distortion.
It’s critical to remember that obedience isn’t only deep listening or only doing what we’re supposed to, but it requires elements of both. Obedience exists on a spectrum where we have to hold a number of things in tension, something we Anglicans have a lot of practice with.
I think that’s all great. We need ways to talk about spiritual life that both make it easy for people to learn and ways to encourage deeper engagement for those ready to do that. My concern is that sometimes when we talk about listening, what that really means is listening to the stuff we like and ignoring what we don’t. One example of the challenge of Episcopal Church culture is that we value the BCP and our liturgy so much - an obvious product of external authority - but have such a tough time with the concept of submitting to authority generally.
Our ethos has a built-in comprehensiveness, a capacity for holding seemingly contradictory things in tension. I submit that while there are exceptions, our fault as a church is not pushing folks to blindly surrender their conscience. But I also see a fair amount of angst over the idea that we don’t get to be in charge of everything.
In my work I get to I hear a number of parish conversations and there’s sometimes a sense that whatever way “we” do things in this parish is the “right” way, even if that conflicts with Prayer Book rubrics, or the teachings of bishops. One priest was joking about not following the rules concerning celebrations of the Eucharist in this weird virtual time, and she seemed pretty pleased, in a light-hearted way, about breaking the rules. My own view was that the particular issue wasn’t that significant and there were solid pastoral reasons for doing what she was doing in these particular circumstances. What struck me, though, was that the parishioners who spoke up clearly thought the bishop was being unreasonably 
dictatorial in even trying to control this issue. I heard no curiosity about why he might be doing that or any concern that perhaps there were issues in this beyond the immediate preference of the priest or the parish. It may be that true obedience leads to breaking rules in some cases, but when we do that reflexively or dismissively, we’re not really listening and we’re not practicing meaningful obedience.
As a denomination, we can be a pretty free-wheeling bunch. At the same time, there are things that should and actually do transcend our personal preferences and inclinations. While I find the “listening” approach very helpful (and believe it’s critical to development of healthy parishes), I also find myself thinking that leaders would do well to spend more time contemplating their own aversion to straight-up “obedience” and spend just slightly less time making it more palatable by calling it “listening.” The ability to engage our own difficulty with healthy obedience is the first step in helping our parishioners do so. And I can’t help but think that healthy obedience is something we could all use a lot more of, both in the nation and in the church.
Michelle Heyne, OA
Presiding Sister
Order of the Ascension
Related
Benedictine Spirituality and the Parish Church
The Benedictine DNA of the Episcopal Church
Trust, listening, complete messages, and cooperation
Reader Comments (5)
“I heard no curiosity” captures the difficulty. Understanding obedience as listening is possibly most fully expressed when we show curiosity in regard to views that differ from our own. A vocational skill I had to learn was that to be a good priest or a good consultant I had to access my curiosity. It didn't do for me to wait for that to arise spontaneously, I had us to decide to be curious. One of the vocational costs I've learned to accept, sort of, is that when faced with a teaching, sermon, or writing by me that some found disturbing, I would usually receive a response of praise or condemnation rather than curiosity.
Michelle wrote: "It may be that true obedience leads to breaking rules in some cases, but when we do that reflexively or dismissively, we’re not really listening and we’re not practicing meaningful obedience." Thank you. We clergy often think that we're being prophetic or appropriately iconoclastic when "breaking rules." And there are rare times when we are. But too often we use it as an excuse to underwrite and justify either our laziness or our personal preferences. Ordination vows mean we give ourselves over to something greater than our personal desires or even what we might believe at a particular time and in a certain place. Giving ourselves in obedience to the 2000 years of wisdom in the Church doesn't mean the Church will always be right in her judgments, but my hunch is the Church is probably right more often than we are. It takes humility to accept that and to live into that.
Michelle - This is great...I love the quote that Robert pointed out (re: "there was no curiosity..). I also appreciated this one: "It may be that true obedience leads to breaking rules in some cases, but when we do that reflexively or dismissively, we’re not really listening and we’re not practicing meaningful obedience."
Somewhere I learned/heard/came to believe that one of the roles of a bishop is to be a "defender of the faith" - "obedient" to scripture, tradition, etc. But bishops are also the ones who can pull/push us towards change at times, through obedient listening to the world, culture around us, the flock, etc. Bishops who model living in a healthy tension on that spectrum are a blessing to the church, and we should take heed and follow their example by modeling the same as lay and clergy leaders in the parish setting. Thanks for this great conversation starter.
Michelle notes that for many people, the etymological derivation of "obedience" from "listening" helps to soften or loosen some initial resistance. I wonder how much this would remain, or perhaps be reversed, if every time someone foregrounded "listening" in contemporary culture, it was pointed out that it was strongly linked to "obedience." I grew up in a very rule-oriented context and in reaction I had for a while a definite swerve away from any sympathy with any emphasis on obeying, but I always knew it was a reaction.
My own perspective on this at the moment is not from parish dynamics but family dynamics, as my household continues to navigate the challenges of forced and almost-without-respite "closeness" which the pandemic has imposed. During a recent and quite painful interaction I had a lot of occasion to think about "listening" and I meditated quite a bit on how it is resonant with obedience. Even if we don't change a single thing in our outward behavior, the shift of listening itself is an act of putting down our own ego. The possibility of saying "you may be right" or even "I will think about that" is itself a form of obedience to the other person. I have heard that some spiritual counselors in Orthodox monasteries will sometimes advise those who come to them to simply find the first person they encounter in their regular lives and start obeying. There are reasons, some of them very sound, that this is a hard sell in our culture, but there are recurrent moments in my spiritual life when I need to confront this, over and over.
I have a model in the back of my mind for the Benedictine triad of stability, obedience, conversion of life. In my mind it works like a mathematical equation I once saw being tracked on a computer screen. I've forgotten the name of the equation, but it is related to the movement of planets and other living systems. Within the system there is room for freedom, creativity and unpredictability, but it is constrained within a relationship that gives shape and pattern to the whole. In my mind, it is like a figure 8 lying on its side.
On one end of the equilibrium is stability -- the constants, predictable, relatively unchanging ground. One the other end of the equilibrium is conversion of life -- change, creativity, openness to the new possibility. In the middle is obedience -- the deep listening that connects the whole in relationship. For me, the key seems to be for me to have a willingness to obey the listening. That takes a bit of courage and discipline. Courage to risk the call to authentic change and conversion; discipline to remain faithful to the grounded and stable foundations. The dance has a resonance with the patterns of the natural order, like the mathematical models of open, related systems. And it seems to have a relationship to the dance of Ultimate Reality, the dance of the Holy Trinity.