Weekly Lenten Reflections 2005: Week 4

Refrain:

We hold the death of the Lord deep in our hearts.

(BB 424) Living, now we remain with Jesus the Lord.

1. Once we were people afraid, lost in the night.

Then by your cross we were saved;

dead became living, life from your giving.

2. He chose to give of himself, became our bread.

Broken that we might live.

Love beyond love, pain for our pain.

3. We are the presence of God; this is our call.

Now to become bread and wine:

food for the hungry, life for the weary.

For to live with the Lord, we must die with the Lord.

THEME: “The evil twin” of obedience; compliance.

321. Jesus fulfilled in all things the will of the Father and redeemed all people. God calls us to place ourselves entirely at His service. Through evangelical obedience we answer this call, integrate ourselves into a fraternal community, and share Christ’s work of salvation.

322. Through temporary, and perpetual profession, we oblige ourselves by vow to a life of obedience in which we embrace the Salvatorian way of life and its ministries in obedience to our superiors, in accordance with our rules, so that we grow in the freedom of the children of God and respond as faithfully as possible to His will.

323. In communal dialogue and prayer we seek to discern God’s will through his word in scripture, through the directives of the church, through our rules, through the directives of legitimate authority, and through personal conscience, interpreting the signs of the times and responding according to the needs of the people of God.

325. Since we share in responsibility for the well-being of our Society and its mission, our obedience must be active, enlightened and mature. Responsible obedience presupposes a good relationship between the members and their superiors. This demands mutual trust and openness. We seek to fulfill our duties in community and in ministry wholeheartedly and in a spirit of obedience and cooperation (SDS Const.).

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As you read the Founder’s Chapter Talks you will see that when it comes to the vows he talks most about obedience, secondly about poverty, and he mentions chastity hardly at all. If we know a bit about the history of those early days we can easily discover why he stressed obedience so strongly. It was because shortly after ordination so many of the members were completely disobedient, not listening to their superiors or accepting difficult assignments. So many early members rebelled openly through their actions, and Fr. Jordan combated this by insisting on religious obedience. Over and over he repeated, just as Christ was obedient to the will of the Father, and the apostles were obedient to Christ, so must zealous Salvatorian apostles to be obedient to the rule and to their superiors.

Many of the early members rebelled openly against the Founder and the Society. But there are many ways of resisting obedience. The most subtle and difficult to see, but for that reason the most dangerous way is compliance, the evil twin of obedience. Compliance looks wonderful. The compliant religious does whatever he is told without question or complaint. The problem is, his obedience is completely external. It is the kind of obedience we find in a soldier who is promoted if he obeys and shot if he does not. No one cares what the soldier thinks or feels, as long as he obeys. No one cares what is going on inside the soldier–whether he is happy or sad, eager or unwilling, committed or uncaring–as long as he obeys.

Religious obedience is quite different from military obedience. Why? Because religious obedience is a matter of the heart. The truly obedient religious is attempting to conform not only his actions but also his entire will to the will of the Father. It is never enough for us simply to do what the Father says, we must come to will it ourselves; it is never enough just to fulfill what a superior says, we must embrace the direction of the Society; it is never enough just to obey the laws of the church, we must come to feel one with the church “sentire cum ecclesiae.”

The great danger for the compliant religious is that while he is saying “yes” with his lips he is saying “no” in his heart. He is divided inside and will never really be peaceful or happy. And sooner or later this religious will find covert ways to express his dissatisfaction–tools will break or go missing, messages will go undelivered, projects will be postponed, go unfinished, or be done superficially. In everything this religious does you will sense a kind of resistance, but you will never see outright disobedience! Never rebellion. Only smiling compliance.

This is precisely why religious obedience is so difficult, and also why religious obedience is part of our path to holiness. For true holiness is never simply a matter of externals, it is always a matter of the heart. Following Jesus, we struggle to see the world as he saw it, to do what he did, to love what he loved, to desire what he desired, to embrace the will of his Father as he embraced it.

So you might ask yourself, what is going on inside me when I know the superior wants me to do this, but I prefer that? When the timetable expects me to be here, but I’d rather be there? When I know the Society is planning this, but I desire that? Nothing is so painful or difficult for us proud and stubborn people, nothing touches us so intimately as the effort to put at the center of our lives a will other than our own–the will of the superior, the community, the timetable, the rule– to put our own plans, our hopes and dreams in second place, or maybe even last. But this is precisely what we vow with our religious obedience. And remember, Christ won our salvation through obedience even unto death, death on a cross.

By Fr. Dan, SDS