Obedience and Submission

Everything conspires to take away from a man who is set in authority over others the sense of justice and reason. Much trouble, we are told, is taken to teach young princes the art of reigning; but their education seems to do them no good. It would be better to begin by teaching them the art of obeying.  
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

Before chronic illness, if someone’s dog was being too aggressive at the dog park or I needed to confront someone who wasn’t doing their job of helping me to my satisfaction, all I had to do was draw myself up to my full 6’2” and look intimidating. It got the job done and, when I’m honest with myself, I must admit that I miss it. No one is scared of the stooped, gimpy, shuffling old man who mumbles that I am now, so I rarely stand on my rights with the full vigor of manhood that I used to.

I have always had a bit of a Dirty Harry attitude, with a go rogue, give ‘em hell, hold-my-beer approach to things. I’m impatient of fiddly detail and far too reckless to “go by the book.” But a few days ago I gave myself a nasty infection in the insertion site in my belly into which my medication pump delivers the drug I need to stay mobile. Now, I have no choice but to submit and obey, following procedure to the letter. If I don’t, I poke bacteria under my own skin.

So when I read the following in Morning Prayer, it gave me a lot to think about:

Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, the body of which he is the Savior. Just as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her…In the same way, husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hates his own body, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it, just as Christ does for the church, because we are members of his body…This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the church. Each of you, however, should love his wife as himself, and a wife should respect her husband. 
—Ephesians 5:21-33

First, I’d like to consider that opening verse: “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Subject to one another? What does that even look like?

The Little Flowers of St. Francis tells how Brother Giles showed that obedience is superior even to prayer:

As a brother was one day praying in his cell, his superior sent him an obedience to leave his prayer and go out to beg. The friar went forthwith to Brother Giles, and said to him: “Father, I was at prayer, and the guardian bade me go forth to beg; now it seems to me far better that I should continue praying.” Brother Giles answered: “My son, do you not yet know or understand what prayer is? True prayer is to do the will of our superior; and it is great pride in him who has submitted his neck to the yoke of holy obedience to desire to follow his own will in anything, in order, as he thinks, to perform a work of greater perfection.

Br. Giles also gave us an example of the “Holy Obedience” under which the early Franciscans remained “subject to one another.” Francis wanted to die naked on the bare earth, as he had come into the world naked and wanted to embrace “Lady Poverty” as his bride to the very last. Giles, seeing how cold it was, removed Francis’ habit and replaced it with his own, forbidding his spiritual father, under Holy Obedience, to remove it because it did not belong to him, but to Giles. Francis, happy to be placed under obedience in this way, and in the knowledge that he no longer had any material thing to call his own, died a beatific death.

But what about the rest of the passage—all that “wives, submit to your husbands” stuff? Let’s take a step back.

Medieval Christians of both sexes routinely referred to their own souls as “brides of Christ.” It was a common way of thinking and speaking about the soul well into the 17^th century. I think this was a beautiful insight, centered not on traditional roles for men and women, but on submission to God for all. We Christians talk a good game about submitting to God, but I have doubts about whether most of us actually do anything about it.

What would happen, then, if we were to degender the husband/wife metaphor, focusing our attention on the relationship described between human beings and God rather than the gender of the two partners? If we de-emphasized the demand of a patriarchal Bronze Age society that women be subject to men and instead centered the imperative that humans be subject to God?  

“No man securely governs but he who would willingly live in subjection,” wrote Thomas á Kempis in his classic The Imitation of Christ. “No man securely commands but he who has learned well to obey.”

To those who ask if being forced into humility and obedience by illness “counts”, I commend the wonderful Victorian phrase “making a virtue of necessity.” C.S. Lewis wrote that Hell is defeated “when a man knows that horrors may be in store for him, and is praying for the virtues wherewith to meet them.” When we meet our horrors, whether they move us to resentment and defiance, or to acceptance and as much patience as we can muster, is up to us. I figure if Nebuchadnezzar could praise God for teaching him humility through seven years of extreme mental illness (see Daniel 4), and even Jesus could learn obedience through suffering (Hebrew 5:8), I, too, can learn to submit and obey, following instructions and preparing my soul to meet its Spouse.