Our Supreme Aspiration
by Fr. Roger J. Landry - June 13, 2008
The great 20th century Christian apologist C.S. Lewis wrote that there are really only two types of people in the world, "those who say to God 'thy will be done' and those to whom God says 'thy will be done." These are the two groups, he confidently asserted, who will end up on the opposite sides of the great eschatological divide. Those who wish to end up on Christ's eternal right need to follow Christ in trustingly and lovingly saying to the Father, "Not my will but thine be done" (Lk 22:42).
The virtue of obedience, however, has for the past several decades been held in disrepute, even among many in the Church. While obedience has probably always been one of the most challenging of virtues — because it goes so much against one of the most prevalent and chronic vices, pride — what has changed in recent times is the recognition of the need for it. Past generations may have failed in obedience to God as often as those in our day, but for the most part, they recognized they should be obedient. It's one of the characteristics of our era that many reject even the need for it. Part of the reason is a false notion of freedom, which believes that real liberty is the ability to do whatever we please rather than to live according to the truth, to determine right and wrong rather than do good and avoid evil. Another part of the modern crisis of obedience flows from the error that obedience is an extrinsic adherence to a set of rules rather than a loving adhesion to the God who loves us and wants what is best for us.
This spiritual cancer has penetrated even those religious communities who receive the graces to live according to a vow of obedience. For that reason, on May 11th, the Vatican's Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, published an instruction on the nature and need of obedience. The document was the result of the fruit of a September 2005 plenary session of the Congregation on the theme of the exercise of authority and obedience in consecrated life. While some of the parts of the document refer to the specifics of life within religious communities, most of it contains a beautiful reflection intended to "offer help and encouragement to all those [like us who are] called to witness to the primacy of God through free obedience to his will, to live their yes to the Lord in joy."
The title of the instruction — Faciem tuam, Domine, requiram, the famous Latin expression of the Psalms, "Your face, O Lord, I seek" (Ps 27:8) — sums up its central point. Obedience is a loving search for God in the midst of all our choices. To have a proper understanding of obedience, therefore, begins with a proper understanding of God. The Lord is not a divine tyrant enacting arbitrary dictates to test our capacity for blind submission, but rather a benevolent Father who desires our true fulfillment.
"First of all," the instruction says, "obedience is an attitude of a son or daughter. It is that particular kind of listening that only a son or daughter can do in listening to his or her parent, because it is enlightened by the certainty that the parent has only good things to say and give to him or her. This is a listening, full of the trust, that makes a son or daughter accept the parent's will, sure that it will be for his or her own good."
Our personal fulfillment comes not from resisting the loving guidance of our Father but by following it. "We reach our fullness," the Congregation reminds us, "only to the extent that we place ourselves within the plan with which He has conceived us with a Father's love. Therefore, obedience is the only way human persons, intelligent and free beings, can have the disposition to fulfill themselves. As a matter of fact, when a human person says 'no' to God, that person compromises the divine plan, diminishing him or herself and condemning him or herself to failure."
No one shows us better how to obey the Father than Jesus his Son. "We are guided by the example of Christ," the instruction continues, "who has freed us thanks to his obedience. It is he who inspires our obedience in order that the divine plan of salvation be completed through us. In him everything is a listening to and acceptance of the Father (cf. Jn 8:28-29) … to the point of deciding to do nothing by himself (cf. Jn 8:28) but to do always what is pleasing to the Father… He also lived obedience when it presented a difficult chalice to drink (cf. Mt 26:39, 42; Lk 22:42), and he made himself 'obedient to the point of death, and death on a cross' (Phil 2:8). This is the dramatic aspect of the obedience of the Son wrapped in a mystery which we can never totally penetrate, but which for us is very relevant, because it uncovers for us even more the filial nature of Christian obedience: only the child who senses himself loved by the Father and loves him with his whole self, can arrive at this type of radical obedience."
In calling us to be obedient, therefore, Jesus is not saying merely "Do what I say," but rather "Follow me." Because of the centrality of obedience in the life of Jesus, it also needs to be central in the life of those who believe in him. "The Christian, like Christ, is defined as an obedient being. The unquestionable primacy of love in Christian life cannot make us forget that such love has acquired a face and a name in Christ Jesus and has become Obedience. Therefore, obedience is not humiliation but the truth on which the fullness of human persons is built and realized. Hence, the believer so ardently desires to fulfill the will of the Father as to make of it his or her supreme aspiration. Like Jesus, he or she wants to live by this will."
To want to live by the will of the Father is the essence of the Christian life. It is "the distinctive characteristic" of the New Covenant which Jesus himself established, and therefore must distinguish us who seek to live by that Covenant. It is the path of the exodus of personal liberation from self-idolatry.
Just as with that first exodus when God made known his will through the human mediation of Moses, so in the New Covenant God makes it known through the human mediation of his Church, and in particular, through Peter and his successors. "The task of following the Lord cannot be taken by solitary navigators," the instruction asserts, "but is accomplished in the bark of Peter, which survives the storms… Our obedience is a believing with the Church, a thinking and speaking with the Church, serving through her. What Jesus predicted to Peter also always applies: 'You will be taken where you do not want to go'. This letting oneself be guided where one does not want to be led is an essential element of our serving and precisely that which makes us free."
This, of course, puts a great correlative burden on those in authority to show that "when they give a command, they are doing so only to obey God." St. Ignatius of Antioch's advice to a fellow bishop is ever relevant to all leaders in the Church, be they bishops, priests, religious superiors, principals, teachers, coaches or parents: "Nothing is done without your agreement, but you do not do anything without God's agreement." True authority in the Church is not a power grab, but a higher and more demanding form of obedience to God.
This timely document is a God-send to help us learn anew how to be obedient and to exercise authority in obedience so that we may follow Christ more faithfully on the exodus to true freedom and eternal life.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
