Skip to main content

Tempo of Obedience

I have returned to reading some of Thomas Merton’s journals.  As you may know, Merton is one of my favorites.  He was a monk at a monastery in the middle of nowhere Kentucky.  Oddly enough, he was in a monastic tradition that valued and practiced significant silence.  He was a man of few words in the monastery and yet was a man of prolific words in writing! 

There are seven big volumes that make up the journals of Merton.  I find them fascinating.  It is both a pleasure and profound to read the thoughts of this monk as he lives his life in a situation very different than mine.  And yet, the themes of his life are amazingly similar to mine.  His life was a quest for meaning and purpose.  He desired deeply to learn to love.  He knew (sometimes only opaquely) that life only finally mattered if God somehow were involved in his life.  I share all theses themes. 

As I was reading along yesterday, I hit upon a great phrase that stopped me in my tracks.  The entry was December 22, 1964.  By now Merton is living in his own hermitage nearly a mile away from the monastery.  So he has vast amounts of time to himself and his reflections.  The context of the passage had to do with God’s will.  At that point Merton says that he wants “to learn slowly, patiently, the tempo of such obedience.”  

The tempo of obedience…I was arrested by that phrase.  It clearly struck a deep chord in me, but I was not sure why or how.  It was as if there was a profound truth in that phrase, but I would have been unable in the moment to say how it was true.  It was something upon which I needed to ponder.  It was like having an onion in my hand.  I need to peel back some layers to get at the kernel of truth for my own life. 

I am pretty sure the kernel of truth in Merton’s phrase is the notion of “obedience.”  It would be easy to suggest that was the key to the life and ministry of Jesus.  Perhaps in the deepest way possible, Jesus knew and incarnated the will of God into his life.  I suspect the plan is no different for any follower of Jesus.  And I also am confident that obedience is not just a Christian thing.  I would be sure Jews and Muslims have their own version of obedience. 

So the “onion” to be peeled here is the idea that obedience has “tempo.”  That is the novel idea for me.  Before hitting that phrase, I would have simply understood obedience to be obedience…a kind of straight-lined thing.  But when I ponder it, I begin to see that obedience does probably have a tempo.  The dictionary defines tempo as the rate of motion or activity.  So it makes sense that obedience has various rates of motion.  As I reflect on my own life, there are times of more intense obedience.   

Obviously, I have not been to the cross, as Jesus did.  But we all have our own lesser crosses along life’s way.  Those are the places where we can seek God’s will and endeavor to do it.  Our own crosses to bear often call for more intense obedient activity.  I remember one of those phases in my life back in the 1960s and my involvement in the peace movement as we all struggled with the Vietnam issue. 

Of course, there are other phases of life where the tempo of obedience seems fairly easy and constant.  It is obedience on cruise control.  We may be in a job we know God would have us do.  We may be in the spiritual grove and God’s will (and, hence, our obedience) is nothing more than continuing in that groove.  Nothing more is needed.  No special effort is demanded. 

No doubt, the real issue is being able to sense what the tempo of obedience should be and going with it.  The trick is to be sensitive to when the tempo begins to change and to alter our obedience to fit the changing tempo.  We all will experience changing tempos.  Inevitably we all will face a crisis or two. And major changes in our lives probably will change the tempo of obedience. 

I like this idea and will need to think more about it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I-Thou Relationships

Those of us who have read theology or, perhaps, those who are people of faith and are old enough might well recognize this title as a reminder of the late Jewish philosopher and theologian, Martin Buber.   I remember reading Buber’s book, I and Thou , when I was in college in the 1960s.   It was already a famous book by then.   I am not sure I fully understood it, but that would not be the last time I read it.   It has been a while since I looked at the book.             Buber came up in a conversation with a friend who asked if I had seen the recent article by David Brooks?   I had not seen it, but when I was told about it, I knew I would quickly locate and read that piece.   I very much like what Brooks decides to write about and what he contributes to societal conversation.   I wish more people read him and took him seriously.           ...
13 comments
Read more

Spiritual Commitment

I was reading along in a very nice little book and hit these lines about commitment.   The author, Mitch Albom, uses the voice of one of the main characters of his nonfiction book about faith to reflect on commitment.   The voice belongs to Albom’s old rabbi of the Jewish synagogue where he went until his college days.   The old rabbi, Albert Lewis, says “the word ‘commitment’ has lost its meaning.”    The rabbi continues in a way that surely would have many people saying, “Amen!”   About commitment he says, “I’m old enough when it used to be a positive.   A committed person was someone to be admired.   He was loyal and steady.   Now a commitment is something you avoid.   You don’t want to tie yourself down.”   I also think I am old enough to know that commitment was usually a positive word.   I can think of a range of situations in which commitment would have been seen to be positive.   For example, growing up was f...
20 comments
Read more

Inward Journey and Outward Pilgrimage

There are so many different ways to think about the spiritual life.   And of course, in our country there are so many different variations of religious experiences.   There are liberals and conservatives.   There are fundamentalists and Pentecostals.   Besides the dizzying variety of Christian traditions, there are many different non-Christian traditions.   There are the major traditions, such as Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and so on.   There are the slightly more obscure traditions, such as Sikhism, Jainism, etc.   And then there are more fringe groups and, even, pseudo-religions.   There are defining doctrines and religious practices.   Some of these are specific to a particular tradition or a few traditions, such as the koan , which is used in Zen Buddhism for example.   Other defining doctrines or practices are common across the religious board.   Something like meditation would be a good example.   Christians meditate;...
10 comments
Read more