IPLW-Faith, “True Obedience is a Friendship,” pp. 131-139
It seems obvious that in order to follow, we need looking at someone who is standing before us. The person that stands before us is the person whom we encountered that first nudged us, gave us an idea, a desire for seeking real happiness. Maybe it was a priest or religious sister or brother. Maybe it was a teacher, or a parent, grandparent or other relative. For me it was Luca and Daniel, the first two people involved in Communion and Liberation that I met. We met in a coffee shop in Princeton, NJ and while I really did not understand a lot of what they were talking about (this thing called “Method”), I noticed a difference about them. It was nothing in what they wore, or even explicit behavior. It was more of their entire being; I could tell that they lived life more deeply to the heart in its simplicity. It was an attraction to something spiritual which spoke right to the deepest desires of my heart. And it provoked me to reflect on the seriousness in living my life. Not life as merely health, money, relationships. All those things are part of life, but they are not life itself. Life is about a goal, it is about a meaning.
This naturally led me to the next step in following: a desire to imitate Luca and Daniel. What does it mean to imitate a person? First of all it means to understand what the person says and the steps they take. If all we do is hear the words of the person standing before us, we will not follow them. While it might seem to take great effort, in truth it requires the least amount of effort imaginable. It requires simplicity; having the heart of a child. Of course this mean also having the curiosity of a child as well.
After my meeting with Luca and Daniel, I certainly was curious to learn more about Communion and Liberation, since I understood enough to know that it was their involvement with Communion and Liberation that was the source of their “difference” in living life. So I started to meet with Luca and Daniel weekly for School of Community. I didn’t understand why we were starting in the middle of the book (Why the Church?), nor why we only read such a small section at a time. After all, I had been in academics for most of my life, and I usually had hundreds of pages of reading to do each week. But because I wanted to follow Luca and Daniel, I decided to simply do what they did, to live life.
The only other option to living life as following is instinctiveness. This means just following one’s emotions and gut feelings. Instinctiveness degrades man to the level of animal.
The key to following is understanding — both the words and the actions — and understanding is an act of reason. Understanding means to grasp the correspondence between what you are told and what your are (the needs of your heart). “To understand means to grasp the profound correspondence between what you’re told and your I, the needs of your I, the profound needs of your heart, the profound needs of your life” (Guissani, IPLW-Faith, p. 135).
Obeying begins as effort and work. We recognize that what the one standing before us is telling us is out of love for our life, and therefore should be heeded. As we obey, as we follow what we are told to do, our taste for life increases. Slowly, bit by bit, we begin to understand what the one before us is telling us, and slowly we no longer depend on who says it to us. We follow because we love, and we know that the one we follow loves us. This means that real obedience is friendship. “A friend is characterized first and above all by seriousness towards life, by the affirmation that life is a serious thing. Life is a serious thing: serious before the universe (thus it has a task) and serious before destiny (thus it has an ultimate meaning that must be reached)” (pp. 138-139).
I must admit that at first I found this understanding of obedience a bit of a challenge. Many years ago I read C.S. Lewis’ science fiction trilogy, and in one of the books a character makes a statement that in a certain sense obedience is blind, because if it was just because we following what made sense, then all it would be is being reasonable, and not obedience. The point was that obedience requires a surrendering oneself into the hands of another.
After thinking about this for a while, I realized that C.S. Lewis (at least in how I understood him) that both right and wrong. It seems that Mr. Lewis was making the common dichotomy between faith and reason. That obedience is rightly associated with faith, but that does not mean that it is opposed or beyond reason. Mr. Lewis is correct, though, that obedience requires trust, and surrendering of oneself into the hands of another. In this case it is following the one who stands before us, in whom we have recognized an exceptionality in how they live. That what they say and do corresponds to the deepest desires of our hearts, and so with the simplicity of a child we follow those before us.
