St. Benedict — Obedience without Delay
“Hearken, o my son, to the precepts of thy Master, and incline the ear of thine heart; willingly receive and faithfully fulfill the admonition of thy loving Father, that thou mayest return by the labor of obedience to Him from whom thou hadst departed through the sloth of disobedience.”
So begins the Rule of St. Benedict, the document which would serve as the foundation for 1,500 years of monasticism in the West. It would inspire countless other religious orders through the centuries and would characterize a chief spirituality of the Catholic Church. The bulwark upon which this whole enterprise rested was the virtue extolled in the passage above: obedience.
Obedience, says St. Benedict, is to be pursued joyfully because “God loveth a cheerful giver.” Not out of human fear, then, nor mechanically, nor grumpily is obedience to be given. The true motive for this self-gift is to be the love which unites one’s will totally to God’s. This love is only possible because of an abundance of simplicity, that other great virtue which itself nurtures in the soul a love of obedience. Nothing could be more opposed to it than duplicity (“two-foldedness”), by which we hold back something from God, maintaining our own separate agenda as we praise Him with our lips to Whom we would not surrender our heart. Is this not the mentality we bear whenever we hold ourselves back from God? Whenever we pray, as St. Augustine once did in his youth, “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.” And indeed how much easier is it to speak of obedience to God than to show it in our deeds!
So often, we spend our lives aiming to fulfill our own desires and our own plans. St. Benedict’s life was a continuous example to the contrary: he was a man who gave up worldly honors, wealth, and family to follow Christ’s example of poverty and humility. At the advice of an elder monk, Romanus, set off to live in a cave as a hermit. However, St. Benedict never forsook others. Despite his concern that their customs were contrary to his own, he accepted the request of a group of monks to make him their abbot. Still, the monks, infuriated with St. Benedict’s insistence on discipline, tried to poison him. After returning to his cave, St. Benedict still did not refuse the request of others to live under him. He founded a group of monasteries around Subiaco, and would later move to Monte Cassino to found the great monastery there. In all of this time, St. Benedict was willing to be perfectly yielding to whatever God wished to do with him, never holding back in disobedience.
When I reflect on the abandonment St. Benedict had toward God, I am humbled about the many times in which I have despaired of the circumstances I have been in. Each of these times, I thought no good could come out of my situation. And each of these times, God has shown himself to be wiser in His ability to bring good out of evil. We would do well to imitate the obedience of Christ, praying as he did, “My Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will” (Mt. 26:39).
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