Do we truly obey God if we are not willing to obey our communities, our superiors and, sometimes, we are unable even to accept ourselves?

This question seems to me anything but rhetorical, rather it is based on Christian revelation. To a certain sense, we can think of God as “Another”, with whom we can deal in a way similar to the way we deal with “others”. This is so true as our relations can become the index of our way to relate with the Father. This is true also for the thanksgiving, the  request for forgiveness, repentance, the capacity of trust and esteem. If we do not know how to thank our sisters or superior for the kindness we receive from them, and we feel almost humiliated to acknowledge their help, shall we be able to thank God, from whom we have received everything and on whom we feel much more dependent?

Co-responsible obedience

Does religious obedience grieve and reduce human personality, or is it an opportunity for personal maturation?

Let us review briefly some aspects of religious obedience: contents, purpose, modality of its exercise, the conditions of development and improvement of the person; let us think also of the temptation to reduce the fatigues of religious obedience.

Occasion for personal maturation

The fundamental content of our obedience is given by the prescriptions of the Constitutions, within broader juridical and theological ordinances (Canon law, revelation, natural law…). Many Constitutional texts, particularly for women, provide particular and more flexible “Directories”.

The goal of religious obedience is personal holiness in pursuing the values of consecrated life: community life, the vows, prayer life and the purposes of the Institute. This implies a constant growth in the availability to serve and, even more, “to self-sanctification in the service”, to which the community and the superior orient each member authoritatively. Shredding the contents of obedience to insignificant details risks the inertia of both obedience and authority. This partly explains certain historical clinging and negligence mentioned above. 

In particular, the religious obedience aims at personal development in charity, in the love for God and neighbours. This concentration presupposes a self-stripping.

We do not need a deep reflection on ourselves to catch certain second-floor intentions. Often, even when we make up our mind to do good and we look very generous in the eyes of others, in reality our concern has an egoistic significant valence. We speedily make our accounts, and have expenditures and incomes verified by skilled accountants. Even when we offer ourselves as volunteers, we aim at a range of secondary benefits that will repay our efforts. Though present, perhaps at the forefront of our intentions, the love of God and the desire of doing good are actually not at the forefront to motivate our action.

The motives that really move us  to act and which qualify us as “agents”, are surely more complex, partially unknown also to ourselves; even those which we have glimpsed are often very much different and less noble than the intentions we are aware of and which we publicly communicate. 

Personal answer to God

How can religious obedience be of help for us to progress in the work of setting ourselves free from “egoistic loves” and, in this maturation, to participate in God’s love itself?

Pre-supposing the fundamental notions of sanctifying grace, of the infused theological virtues and gifts of the Holy Spirit, I am going to mention some practical and operative aspects. It is about finding a way to act for the love of God in an increasingly intense way, and to accomplish what the Father wants from me here and now, so that He may love and spread his mercy. We need to develop in us, more and more, the awareness of living in the presence of God, adoring him in every act of obedience.   .

Have we ever accepted to exist and to live? Do we live freely? Are we happy to welcome us as we are, as a gift of God’s will for us? Are we aware of collaborating with his creative-redemptive-sanctifying act, or is our existence just a datus of fact to which we have become accustomed, if not a life to which we are attached only biologically and psychologically? 

Every day, we are called to cut off just a few minutes, in order to intensify our interior spiritual life, which we could define as fundamental option: your will be done. This is the teaching given by Jesus to his disciples. Obviously it is not a question of repeating the words, but to let a strong and deep desire find its structure and stratification, such as to of support and filter for all other dreams of the day and of life.

Without building this foundation in our heart, we may happen to do many other good things, running the risk of performing them for their intrinsic goodness, but not moved by God’s love.

Content, method, orientation

Mentioning the articulation of our voluntary action might be somehow binding and tiring, but it can also help us to better examine the way of acting freely and improving our acts of charity and obedience.

The described foundation is close to what in the middle age was called simplex velle, the most radical act of the will in relation with the ultimate goal, which is made perfect by the virtue of charity and gives a good orientation to the whole personal moral life. Today we tend to call it fundamental good option. The debate among philosophers, theologians, moralists concerning the analysis of this act has aroused very strong tensions and the magisterium itself several times has intervened about this.  

However, there are other aspects of free acts,  which recall the relation of obedience between religious and superior, and just because they are more directly involved, they are easily perceptible. The free act, like every other good, can be considered from three different points of view: the content, the manner in which it is produced, the orientation expressed in it, in other words, the end which directs our action.

In this search for the will of God, we can add that just because of our religious obedience, we have freely decided, according to our Constitutions, to rely completely on the community and the superiors. According to the charism of the founder or the foundress, in each Institute the service of authority is exercised in different ways. Allow me to draw an example from the Dominicans, the Order of Preachers, which I belong to.

Very sensitive to the socio-cultural transformations taking place in his time –disintegration of the feudal system, development of free municipalities- Dominic wanted communities of free friars. Consequently, he did not want that violations of the Constitutions should be considered as moral faults. He wanted the friars to change through the practice of  penances; he wanted the superiors to be “priors” –first among equals, elected by the friars for a short time, rather than being permanent abbots. He wanted to train the friars to be co-responsible in determining the good (what concerns all the friars must be defined and decided by all of them), to the end of being more convinced free executors. 

One can speak of the Dominican local “chapter” as a chapter of the “nine freedoms”, in which the superior has only one vote and all the friars have the responsibility to get involved  in the topics proposed by the prioresses, to listen to and to take into consideration the views of all the others, to discuss the proposals, to decide personally by secret ballot, to accept the decision of the majority, to practise the assumed commitments and, finally, to verify what the community has decided and practised.  

In concrete, the chapters –general, provincial or local- are called every three or four years, or monthly, to  make the charism actual and adequate to place and culture where the community lives, in full co-responsible freedom, under the guidance of the prior provincial and the acts of the chapters, without the need of any confirmation, since Dominic wanted that only the Order, not the Constitutions, was to be confirmed by the Holy See.

Focus on freedom and charity

We can still ask ourselves: “Why to choose, through religious obedience, a release from the responsibility of defining in an autonomous way the content of our free action? Could it not be a sign of fear, of immaturity or a practice that would favour similar attitudes?

To me, religious obedience is free for three reasons, and all of them are great opportunities for personal growth

If we truly seek God and his will, we must surely have made the experience of how much our temperament actually interferes in the perception of reality, in assessing situations, events and persons. Human truth is, above all, a historical communitarian construction: it increases with the help of confrontations and evaluations, and it requires a good organisation of our virtuous organism to be intuited, recognised and practised.

The way and the orientation of my free act are only in my power. Nobody, in the strict sense, can help me and, even less, replace me: though the content of my action is very important, its way and orientation are far more important and decisive. Moreover, they are closely linked among them.

Without a right orientation, whatever we do has no moral value for us, even when it is helpful to others. A simple daily example may help us to understand this truth: How much beneficial is it to travel comfortably and speedily, but …in the wrong direction? We would have to face the trouble of having wasted time and money as well as that of going back

Moreover, charity, as intention/motivation, cannot but grow to perfection and be produced by a personal free act. A free act is the specific and exclusive way of a person’s acting: the acting because of an inclination that each of us can bring to emergence, on the basis of one’s own judgement of values.

Another important moment in the process of humanisation is that in which we shall understand, and then we shall be its consequential, that the way of acting builds us up more deeply than the best acts. These, at most, can produce some external goods of utility for us and others, and obviously they are socially worthy; they can also exploit in us a series of qualities which will go to define our personality in its external dimension (we shall have acquaintances, refined sciences and techniques); but the way of acting builds up our personality to a deeper intimacy.

We must remember that a free act is immanent, closely linked to the subject who produces it and that, while it is being produced, perfects the subject; a bad action, instead, disjoints it and gradually finishes by destroying it. Sitting in a corner of our small chapel, we produce no external highly significant good, but our inner self can surrender to the gift of contemplation, usher the Spirit of God in us, to diffuse his light and holiness through our actions. On the other hand, agitated because of fear, pride  and vainglory, we might engage in thousands of externally meaningful activities, yet by acting in fearfulness, pride and vainglory we finish by making ourselves more and more fearful, proud and ambitious

Just because the way and orientation in which we act are meaningful and depend solely on us, it is important for the educators to pay attention to these processes.

Should we defend ourselves from obedience?

The flavour and fascination of our discoveries, intuitions and projects may develop intense, sometimes irresistible attractions. How many persons for the sake of a joke, of a shrewd intuition have provoked offences in their environment and have created around them  a wide circle of earth scorched by their own poisons? 

The single external actions, when we are very much involved in any project and its execution, can dominate not only hours, but also full days and life itself

If some perplexity (“Shall I stop my work or shall I bring it to completion?) prevents us from being obedient to the sound of the bell for the involvement undergone in a single external action, let us think of the many resistances that may develop in us because of long term involvements, developed with commitment, hard work and professional skill…How difficult to stand back, losing already consolidated positions and opportunities of spreading good! There are people with such a sensitive temperament and so much capable of involvement as every detachment and every new involvement become a true trauma, which demands an almost heroic virtue. 

Sometimes, however, if not often, even if we say that we act out of love of God and of goodness, in reality we act rather for the sake of “that” good and to feel at home in given circumstances.

Without realising it, we could reduce or even eliminate the real conditions of “obedience”; the subjective ones: by not cultivating the spirit of obedience and getting into the habit of acting “arbitrarily”; by habitually thinking and deciding for others, leaving no room for anyone, ill-disposed towards any advice, never available for collaboration; as well as the objective one: by making ourselves easily indispensable and irreplaceable, starting always new pieces of work. 

Offered frailty

I invite you to a Christian deepening of the concept and experience of sacrifice inherited from the Old Testament and even more from the old pagan world, which often we fail to understand and to live in its full newness. In our hearts and minds we are often convinced that sacrifice has a total and almost exclusive bond with pain and suffering, while Revelation in the Old and New Testament emphasises love and thanksgiving, rather than suffering.

Our weakness makes us inclined to think that an action is valuable because of the suffering it entails, but this is not true. This way of thinking is a sign of our guilt-feelings; these, anyhow, spur us to an atonement which is not according to a sound anthropology and an adequate understanding of revelation.

Not suffering, but love gives meaning to our action; suffering can be it’s external sign, the historical condition of its realisation. 

After all, should the virtues not make the good moral actions pleasant? If suffering and uneasiness were the metre of our merits, our commitment to the acquisition of virtues would have no sense…

At a time and in a world marked by sin, love certainly implies suffering which, accepted in awareness, becomes atonement, so far as we freely participate in the way Jesus lived. In him, we become “a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God”  (Rom 12,1), as we make our will totally surrendered, and we offer our humanity so that the sign of Incarnation may continue in history: a humanity sanctified by the Spirit of the Lord who offers himself, to witness to the love of the Father, in support of all the sufferers on earth and in fight against all human sufferings.

Totally “surrendered”

The “totally surrendered” will of good is a concentration of life on the mystery of Christ, which in turn implies our “self-stripping”, a participation in his  kénosis (cf Fil 2,7).

God gives and asks us to make our life a sacrament of his sanctifying holiness and calls us to an intimate communion with him, at the cost of reducing a range of historical and human potential of our existence, to make us radically involved in the mission of the Son, in many ways, but as fully realised persons. What, ultimately, is the content of the mission if not the spreading of our intimacy with the Father? Is there any greater human realisation for the human person, but that of being totally (with all its history and freely) a sacrament of the presence of the incarnated Word, who reveals and makes us partakers in his intimacy with the Father? (See John: 1,18).

Our will, made by “religious obedience” fully diffusive of the good He is, can in turn become, by grace and participation, a source of living water in a full manner (See: John 7,38-39), a source of salvation history, of holy history, being it inhabited by saints and therefore, sanctifying our “frail” and “poor” human history, “to the praise and glory of his grace” (Ef 1,6).

Bernardino Prella op
Piazza Pietro d’Illiria, 1 - 00153 Rome