Sebastian Fricke’s Reviews > Abuses in the Religious Life and the Path to Healing > Status Update

The book concludes the chapter on obedience with a remark, that we have countless opportunities to show obedience by letting go of our preferences and submitting our will, which are in no way dangerous. We ought to learn to disobey our internal disordered reflexes, compulsions and addictions. And as a Christian we don't have the obedience of a slave but of a king, freely, with the goal of learning how to love.

One important point is that the superior is always supposed to be obedient as well, because the community is within the church hierarchy and thus he must be obedient towards the church authority.
"When a community considers itself above all else and above (to an even greater degree) the church, aberrant, sect-like behavior is already firmly in place."

Next we have the limits of obedience, it can never ask us to commit sin, but it is tricky when we have to choose between disobeying our conscience or the superior, ideally the superior shouldn't put us into such situations. Also obedience should never demand us to stop discerning, we can only really obey if we are capable of disobeying and without understanding our obedience becomes the obedience of a robot.

There are 3 degrees of obedience, for the religious, that would be a submission ... 1. to whatever is commanded, 2. of the will and 3. of the judgement. One has to differentiate between situations, where there is a known truth or just mere preference. It cannot ask to override our conscience. And for the superior, he commands because ... 1. of being the superior 2. of love towards the religious and 3. of love of God

The topic of obedience is build up from the rule of Benedict, where obedience isn't vowed to one person but to an abbot under a rule. The religious and the superior have to always discern the will of God, by obeying the abbot the monk shows his obedience to God. This never asks to submit ones thoughts nor to obey without using ones reason and will and asks to disobey any command contrary to the commandments of God.

"The value of an act of obedience lies in submission to God, through the concrete mediation of the superior, but this mediation in no way transforms the superior's every whim into the will of God."

"... obedience can take on its full meaning, since its value lies not in the importance of the act but in the love that inspires it"

The chapter about relationships to the outside world highlights, how difficult it is to distinguish a healthy from a sect-like community. The separation from the world is needed for the contemplative life, more so with our modern communication. Why is a rule set up? Is the rule related to the goal of the community? Are you free to express yourself during communicate? Is an warped image uphold to the outside world?

"True unity demands that we are true to our word and that we agree to go on searching for this challenging unity that allows us to live out our personal differences in a way that does not cause division."

"Unity-uniformoty tends to produce tyranny, because it involves everything being standardized"
"An unconditional submission to a unity without divisions allows the superior to do whatever he likes."
Also the small case study of the Legionaries of Christ was shocking to say the least, the fact, that the community accepted for 50 years, a vow of charity, upon which nobody was allowed to discredit the superior anymore!

Next section is about a cult of unity.
Dom Guillaume Jedrzejczak:
"We tend to think that monasteries are places of uniformity, whereas in fact they are probably the places where we can find the highest density of original characters per square meter on the planet!"
"we need to set aside the desire to impose our preference, not the preference itself"