Br Alex Swain

Beloved in Christ,

As I reflected on today’s readings, the theme of obedience jumped out at me.

The readings from Deuteronomy use the word obey three times: “You and your children obey him [God] with all your heart and with all your soul…,” “Then you shall again obey the LORD…,” and “when you obey the LORD your God by observing his commandments….”

St. Paul also exhorts us to “take every thought captive to obey Christ.”

Obedience is, in our modern day and age, a fraught term.

Obedience means blindly following, right? Obedience means never asking questions, always nodding along, going with the group, never creating a fuss, right?

The word obey comes from the Latin audire, to hear; it is likewise the same in Hebrew shama, “to hear, to listen, to given attention to” (this is where the famous monotheistic declaration, the Shema Israel, comes from—“Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” (Deut. 6:4)); it is likewise the same in Greek akouo, “to hear/to listen.”

All three languages which inform Holy Scripture and our historical interpretation of it attest that obedience involves listening and hearing, rather than blindly following.

Obedience is a key ethic in the Benedictine tradition, too.

Nun and scholar Sr. Joan Chittister writes that obedience is lived out in “the ability to hear the voice of God in one another—in the members of the community, both old and young.”1

Obedience means listening for the voice of God in our various personal contexts.

We live in a noisy, crowded, and anxious world where societal norms suggest that the only voice which we ought to listen to is our own. Given these selfish impulses, our “listening” muscles may have atrophied. We may need to learn, or re-learn, how to listen.

Perhaps today, pray for the Holy Spirit to guide us in listening. How might we, perhaps even right now, listen closely for that voice of God—particularly for the voice of God from the people we are interacting with today, at work, at school, at the store?

In listening, we continue the long trek of holy obedience, which is a hallmark of a life of Christian faith.

—Br Alex

1 Joan Chittister, The Rule of Benedict: A Spirituality for the 21st Century (Crossroad: New York, 2016 ), 67.