44 — THE VALUE OF OBEDIENCE

Presence of God. — O most obedient Jesus, make me understand the value of obedience.

Meditation

1 — “The Lord - teaches St. John of the Cross - prefers from you the least degree of obedience and submission rather than all the services you think to render Him” (AM. I, 13). Why? Because obedience makes you renounce your own will in order to adhere to God’s will, expressed in the commands of superiors; and precisely in the complete conformity of your will with the divine will consists the perfection of charity, consists the essence of union with God. Charity will be perfect in you when in every action you regulate yourself not according to your personal inclinations and desires, but according to God’s will, conforming your own to it. And this is precisely the state of union with God, since “the soul whose will is entirely conformed and likened to the divine will is, by that very fact, wholly united and transformed in God” (J.C. ASC II, 5, 4).

You find God’s will expressed in His commandments, in the precepts of the Church, in the duties of your state; but beyond this there still remains a wide field for your free choice, and yet it will not always be easy to recognize with certainty what God wants from you. Instead, in the voice of obedience, the divine will takes a clear, precise form and is openly manifested to you, so that you can no longer fear making a mistake. In fact, “there is no authority except from God” (Rom. 13, 1), so that, obeying your legitimate superiors, you can be sure of obeying God. Jesus Himself, entrusting to His disciples the mission to evangelize the nations, said: “He who hears you, hears me, and he who rejects you, rejects me” (Lk. 10, 16); and thus He teaches us that ecclesiastical superiors represent Him and speak to us in His name. Moreover, St. Thomas shows that in every legitimate authority - even of natural order, as for example civil and social order - when it commands within the just limits of its powers, there is a manifestation of the divine will. Precisely in this sense the Apostle does not hesitate to say: “Servants, obey your masters... as to Christ... doing from the heart the will of God” (Eph. 6, 5 and 6).

2 — One of the greatest obstacles to full conformity of your will with God’s is attachment to your own willing, to your own desires, to your own inclinations. Now obedience, asking you to regulate yourself according to another’s will, is the best exercise to accustom you to deny your own will, to detach yourself from it, and instead make you adhere to the divine will manifested in superiors’ commands. And, the stricter the form of obedience to which you are subject, that is, the more it tends to embrace not only some particular but your whole life, the more intense this exercise will be and the more it will make you enter into God’s will. This is the great value of obedience: to place man’s life in God’s will, to give man, in every circumstance, the possibility of regulating himself not according to his own will - so weak, fragile, subject to error, so limited and blind - but according to God’s will, so good, perfect, and holy that it can never err, nor will evil, but wills only the good, and not the transitory good that is today and tomorrow is no more, but the eternal, imperishable good.

Obedience makes you make this most happy exchange: to leave your own will in order to embrace God’s will. This is the reason why the saints ran to obedience. Of St. Teresa Margaret of the Heart of Jesus it is said: “not only did she fly to execute commands, but she rejoiced exceedingly and exulted in obeying” (Sp. p. 74). If for nature it can be costly to deny one’s own will, to renounce a plan, a project, a work so much loved and cherished, it is not upon this renunciation that the soul of interior life fixes its gaze, but, while suffering and struggling to overcome itself, it casts that gaze much farther: it fixes it on God’s will, which presents itself hidden in the voice of obedience, and to that will it yields itself with all its strength, because to embrace God’s will is to embrace God Himself.

Colloquy

“Oh, how sweet and glorious is this virtue of obedience, in which are all the other virtues! For it is born of charity; in it is founded the stone of most holy faith; it is a queen, and he who espouses it feels no evil, but feels peace and quiet. The waves of the stormy sea cannot harm him, because he sails in Your will, my God... He has no desire that is not fulfilled, because obedience makes him desire only You, O Lord, who can, know, and will to fulfill his desires. O obedience, you who sail without toil, and without danger arrive at the harbor of salvation! O Jesus, I see obedience conforming itself to You; with You I see it climb the little vessel of the most holy cross. Grant me, then, O Lord, this holy obedience, anointed with true humility, straight without any crookedness, which brings with it the light of divine grace. Grant me this hidden pearl, trampled by the world, which abases itself by subjecting itself, for love of You, to creatures” (St. Catherine of Siena).

O Lord, I have but one life, and in what better way can I commit it to Your glory and to my sanctification than by placing it directly under obedience? Only thus shall I have the certainty of not wasting time and of not erring, since to place oneself in obedience is to place oneself in Your will. And if my will is so defective, Yours is holy and sanctifying; if my will has the sad power to make me err, Yours has the great power to sanctify my poor life, to sanctify all my actions, even the simplest and most indifferent, done under its impulse. O Lord, it is precisely the desire to live totally in Your will that impels me toward obedience, that makes me love and embrace this virtue, despite my lively love for liberty and independence.

O holy and sanctifying will of my God, I want to love you above all things, I want to embrace you at every instant of my life, I want to do nothing without you, outside of you.