Obedience and Happiness

Last week I gave the chapel sermon at my school. Since the topic I spoke on is one that I have covered in some depth in this space as well, I thought I would post a link. It is mostly aimed at a high school audience, but I think there is relevance across seasons of life. The file is too big for me to embed in the post, but you can follow the link below to the Vimeo page. 

I start speaking somewhere around the 25 minute mark, though you can check out the opening band to see some representation of the level of talent at my school. Also, I hate the way my recorded voice sounds.

https://vimeo.com/199046800

Up With Authority

I just started reading Victor Lee Austin's book Up With Authority. Austin is a resident theologian at an Episcopalian church in New York City and most recently published a memoir on his wife's multi-decade fight with cancer and slow diminishment and death, called Losing Susan: Brain Disease, the Priest's Wife, and the God who Gives and Takes Away. I am hoping to read the book soon, but in the meantime if issues of God's sovereignty and pain are on your radar I recommend this excellent first things conversation between Austin and R.R. Reno. This conversation and an interview in Ken Meyers' extraordinary Mars Hill Audio first brought Austin's work to my attention. When I saw that he had written a book on authority, a subject near and dear to my own heart, I had to pick up a copy.

The dearth of respect for and trust in authority is undeniable in our culture. And there is without doubt good reason for mistrust. Washington, our national emblem of authority, is a cesspool of corruption, cronyism, nepotism, and ethnically insensitive NFL teams. 

Despite clear abuses of authority in our culture, Austin's thesis is that, paradoxically, submission to authority frees us to be more free. The modern desire for a manager rather than a leader is symptomatic of what Austin sees as "leaders' who stand for nothing except fair process"--harnessing the energies of their subordinates rather than actively leading them. This lack of understanding of true leadership signals a "cultural impoverishment that we have a lack of a notion of authorities who have something to convey to us, have a place to lead us toward, authorities, that is, who embody a sense of what the human good is and who exist to help us flourish in it." In reaction to bad authority (coupled with the human desire for complete autonomy), we have rejected all formative authority and exalted the individual. But true authority rightly exercised leads us to a more human and more excellent existence, unleashing potentials that will remain forever latent outside of submission to authority.

Austin's final encouragement in the introduction is that Christian believers must of necessity embrace paradox. Our faith is shot full of paradox of which freedom through submission is perhaps one of the least vexing. We believe in the incarnation where the God-man came to earth to grow as a child and teach and heal and die and rise. But the church has forever maintained that Christ's dual position of fully God and fully man is not a contradiction but a paradox. Something, while outside of the bounds of our full understanding, we still can recognize as true. 

The modern mind has little room for paradox.I just taught my juniors Donne's great poem "Batter My Heart Three-Person'd God." They bristle, as they ought, at Donne's final request in the poem that he cannot be "chaste" unless he is "ravish[ed]" by God. But Donne is not literally asking God to overpower him sexually, but expressing the paradox that our moral purity depends on God's overpowering our weak desires with fulfillment beyond imagination. The lines prior to the shocking conclusion are just as paradoxical (though less incendiary): "But I, except you enthrall me, never shall be free." There it is. Freedom through enthrallment. Freedom through imprisonment to the will of God. Freedom through submission to be who we were made to be and thus be truly free.

(I plan on blogging more in detail through this book as I go. In my faltering manuscript on obedience and Paradise Lost the philosophical underpinning provided by Austin will be invaluable. And, while the index isn't overly-detailed, it doesn't seem that he covers Milton as an authority on this matter.) 

Empowerment Through Submission

Is there an idea more paradoxical (not to mention inimical) to modern culture than the title of this post: that we are empowered through our submission. Submission is a four-letter word in our culture. 

And not without reason. Wives have been told for far too long to submit to boorish and oppressive husbands. The word seems to be a cudgel with which to put some desired people group (usually women and children) into their place. 

But as (rightfully) distrustful as we are of the idea of submission I find this paradox to be exactly true. In fact, obedience is an idea perhaps more than any other that has occupied my mind for some time now. The reasons for this are twofold: 1) teaching Paradise Lost and the story of "man's first disobedience"; and 2) raising strong willed children. Actually, let's add a third reason: being a disobedient rascal myself, by nature.

I don't want to get into these reasons here exactly. I am working on a book-length unfolding of the idea of disobedience and obedience/submission in Paradise Lost and hope to save some thoughts for that thing which no one will ever read.* But the key idea of that poem is this idea: we are most happy and most able to enjoy our individuality to the degree that we obey God and submit to his commands for our lives.

Crawford comes at this through a slightly different angle in his amazing and should-be-read-by-everyone book The World Beyond Your Head. But this post title is derived directly from a section of his book. He begins with an example from the world of musical instruction:

"Consider another example: the process of becoming a musician. This necessarily involves learning to play a particular instrument, subjecting one's fingers to the discipline of frets or keys. The musician's power of expression is founded upon a prior obedience. To what? To her teacher, perhaps, but this isn't the main thing--there is such a thing as the self-taught musician. Her obedience rather is to the mechanical realities of her instrument, which in turn answer to certain natural necessities of music than can be expressed mathematically. . . These facts do not arise from the human will, and there is no altering them. The education of the musician sheds light on the basic character of human agency, namely that it arises only within concrete limits."

This example is highly instructive. If to be an individual means that we are to be unfettered from others' influence and forms and traditions and free to chart our own paths then we will become shitty musicians and architects and graphic designers and teachers. To be excellent at anything requires submission to the "concrete limits" Crawford locates in every practice. Before a musician becomes unique and plays with the forms she first learned, she must learn those forms. She must submit herself to the knowledge accumulated in the vast realm of prior experience. Creation is not ex nihilo, but grounded in the accretion of cultures that have gifted us a practice.

Here we see the paradox of empowerment through submission fleshed out. To be a great whatever, we must first become a good whatever and this only happens through submission. The applications to religious instruction and education more generally are vast. This is why I will never understand the flipped classroom or this idea that teaching by rote (at younger ages) and tradition is somehow limiting. Guess what: that six year old doesn't know a thing. Submitting himself to concrete limits is the only avenue to excellence. We ignore, or more accurately continue to ignore, that reality to our peril as a culture.

*Except my mom and my wife. . . and maybe the occasional ingratiating student.