The disciplines of the Christian life include prayer, Bible study,
journaling, meditation, praise, confession, forgiveness, silence, solitude, Sabbath, tithing, simplicity, celebration, and giving
thanks . No one can perform all the spiritual exercises
perfectly, any more than anyone can perform every physical exercise perfectly.
But we do what we can, expressing in our bodies the worship in our hearts.
For a discipline to change us, it cannot be something we do
only occasionally. It must become a
regular habit. Habits effectively
transform us through our commitment to do them over and over. Over time, they make us into better,
healthier, and more loving people.
The depth of our relationship with God is mostly determined
not by how we think about Him or feel about him, but from out willingness to
submit to him by developing godly habit, or exercises. These habits have the
power to bring us closer to Him in ways that thinking and feeling do not. By practicing these habits regularly, they become
a means of grace.
A beautiful illustration of this is found in the 2009 film The Way. Martin
Sheen plays a man whose son died while walking the Way of St. James--a
five-hundred-mile pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in
Spain. Though the father is not religious, he decides to honor his son by
finishing the walk, carrying his son’s ashes as a way of honoring his memory. Along the way, he meets other dubious
pilgrims--a failed writer looking for inspiration, a man trying to lose weight,
and a woman recovering from the emotional trauma. To complete the route, they
must stop at every altar along the way. At first, these stops seem trivial to
most of them. But as they progress, they
get caught up in the sacred rituals and together they begin to encounter God.
The act of walking, praying, and worshiping at the sacred sites become a means
of grace.
Such a pilgrimage may seem strange to those raised in
Protestant traditions. We tend to look at the rituals of live as “vain
repetitions,” but for those who have fully entered into the experience of them,
they understand the significance. Our
bodies must worship as our minds and hearts worship. Action often comes before belief. We learn to say our prayers before we
understand their meaning. We go to church before we understand the sermon. The
habits of faith can precede our understanding.
These habits remain, when our doubts cloud our minds and depression
clouds our hearts. Habits serve as a final reminder to us of God, when all our
reason and emotions fail. They are
signposts left in their lives to point us back to faith.
The first inner action faith requires of us is the act of
submission.
The first meaning of the word “worship” is “to bow the knee.”
It is an act of surrender in stillness before the presence of God. When a dog is being trained the first command
the animal learns is “Sit.” Sitting for
a dog means coming to a place of stillness, where it awaits orders. Submission is a place of stillness before
God, where we learn to await His orders.
This is especially hard for those of us who have been raised
in the Western values of action and equality. We want to be out doing something. We hate the idea of sitting still almost as
much as we had the idea of submitting to things we cannot understand. We want
results and answers, not silence and stillness.
But if we are to follow God, we must learn to listen to His voice, and
wait in silence before him.
Submission is yielding our wills to a person, principle,
or truth without question, complaint or manipulation.
Christ submitted to His Father. Paul submitted not only to God, but to the
earthly authorities that God placed over him, including the Roman government and
priestly leadership of Israel. He said, “Follow my example, as I follow
Christ.”[1]
In order to grow in submission, we must develop the virtues
of submission namely respect, obedience, and humility.
Respect means
having a healthy fear. I do not hate
snakes, but I respect their power enough to stay out of their way. Proverbs reminds us that the “fear of the
Lord is the beginning of knowledge.” (Proverbs 1:7) we cannot know God unless we understand His
power. Fear of God is a good thing. God has great power for good or for ill. If
I come against Him, that power will be against me. But if I am for Him, that power
will break anything that tries to stand in His way. Once I have a healthy fear of Him, I do not
have to fear anything else.
Obedience is the habit of doing what our master
wishes. This habit is never developed
just to God, though. In order to develop
a habit of submission we must also learn to submit to those whom God has placed
over us.
St. Benedict wrote that submission to others is a necessity
step in learning submission to God.He
taught his monks a twelve-fold path to humility:
1.
“That
we have the fear of God before our eyes
at all times.”
2.
“That
we desire to do God’s will
above our own.”
3.
“That
we submit our individual wills to our Superiors in obedience.”
4.
“That,
we accept hard and distasteful duties when commanded with patience and even
temper, and not grow weary or give up.”
5.
“That
we do not hide from our Superiors our evil thoughts, but humbly confess them.”
6.
“That
we be content, even with the meanest and worst of everything.”
7.
“We
not only say but believe that we are among the most unworthy.
8.
“We
do nothing except what we are charged to do.
9.
“We
keep silence unless asked to speak.
10.
“We
do not engage in frivolous conduct.
11.
“We
speak gently--listening, not shouting.
One of the clearest
examples of the benefits of obedience in the Bible is in Genesis 22, when God
told Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac to Him on Mount Moriah. God did not rescind this order intil Abraham
demonstrate his willingness to carry it out.
Few of us will ever face the kind of test like Abrahams, ,
but sooner or later, we will all face the blind faith test. We will be asked to follow, even when it makes
no sense. That is when we discover if
our obedience is real or a sham.
Humility is more than just
self-deprecation or self-abasement, but being willing to submit our thoughts,
attitudes, feelings and actions to another.
It has nothing to do with the way we think about ourselves, but
everything to do with the way we view others.
It is laying aside our lives to another as a living sacrifice to God. To be humble is to realize that the ultimate
judge of all we do and are is God. We do not take the measure of ourselves. God
is our ultimate judge.
True
submission is rooted in desire. It is a voluntary act of a free person, not
the groveling of a slave. We take
pleasure in the pleasure in surrender. To live without submitting to anyone is
not freedom but slavery to self. The
“free” soul is not free at all, but caught between worlds, trying to satisfy
spirit and flesh, the world and God.
We
learn submission through practicing the inner spiritual disciplines. These include solitude, Sabbath, fasting, and giving,
They have no other purpose than to cause us to obey.
Who am I? is the central question of self-based
spirituality. Christianity and other
God-based forms of faith begin with a different question whose am I? Who owns us? Who controls us? Who
delights us, and we in them? Submission
is the purest form of love, not taking away out individuality but making us
willing to lay aside our selfhood for the benefit of another. It is a purposeful emptying of self so that the
will of another may fill us. This is
what God calls upon us to do, when we seek to know His submission.
[1] 1 Corinthians 11:1
[2] St. Benedict
(2011-04-30). The Rule of St. Benedict (Kindle Locations 428-429). PlanetMonk Books. Kindle Edition.
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