The Shaking of the Tree

I often think that the ‘Non serviam’ of Lucifer – that mysterious preference of his own will to the will of God, so terrible in its effect on the created universe – is more regularly misinterpreted than any other event in the history of things.

If adolescents disobey their parents, if the building workers carry through a successful strike in defiance of the Government, if artists exhibit a critical spirit and produce works that offend our sense of decorum, it is only too easy to shake the head and attribute to those who disturb the settled order a Satanic intention based on pride.

I think such a view is generally quite mistaken. Obedience is indeed the fence that shelters all other virtues. All the saints praise it and exhibit it in their lives; and it can only reach its full flowering within the Visible Church, where spiritual authority has been given by God to men.

I saw my parents before their reception into the Church accepting withpage 731 docility the instruction of a priest half their age – it was a holy paradox, and a lovely thing to see – in the order of nature, where age gives authority and precedence, he owed and offered them a deep respect as his elders; but in the supernatural order established by God, he was their Father and they knew it and followed him. Where this docility is lacking the Church is damaged, faith grows weak, and many evils flourish. Yet there is another sense in which disobedience may be essential for a right mental balance and for spiritual growth.

We recognise the Satanic disobedience as a deep monstrosity and the type of all sin to follow because of the Person against whom it was directed. The meaning of virtue is an ordered love of God; and this love implies the intention of absolute obedience. By obeying God a creature obeys also the deepest laws of his own being; by disobeying Him one frustrates and fragments one’s own life. Only the very innocent doubt this. Every drunk or divorcee is well aware of it, whether or not they give the knowledge a conscious expression.

But the demand for absolute obedience – I except the case of those in religious Orders – is a most perilous and doubtful thing among creatures. When Abraham’s faith was tested, and God demanded that he should kill his son, Isaac – then he obeyed in blind trust, and in the event Isaac was delivered. But if a human father ordered his son to kill another person, the son would be justified in refusing, on the ground that he considered it contrary to the will of God.

I can think of a less extreme illustration in my own life. When I determined to leave the Church of England and become a Catholic, I was obliged to disobey my spiritual guides within that church and set aside whatever docility I had shown them in the past. No angel descended with a scroll declaring in letters of fire the precise will of God for Jimmy Baxter. It was a doubtful and difficult occasion, full of pain for myself and others, where old ties were broken and new ones had yet to be formed. There was more than mere human respect involved; I had every reason to consider my Anglican mentors as my moral and mental superiors, and the intellectual side of it was thorny, because to many Anglicans the Church of England seems already wholly Catholic. To put it very bluntly, I had to use my own sense of smell. Certainly Our Lady took my hand in hers and led me forward through the dark; and for that I praise her now and hope to praise her for ever in Heaven. It was a case where the deepest obedience was to disobey.

Such experiences are formative. I see them as a kind of spiritual coming of age, when God leads a man beyond the shelter of the tribal fences and reveals His holy will to the human heart.

But – you may say – no such problems are likely to occur in the Visible Church; for there human and Divine authority are mercifully the same. I cannot wholly agree. In any Catholic community there are two greatpage 732 authorities present – the variable authority of the tribe expressing itself in conventions and customs and habits of thought, and the absolute authority of Mother Church which has in fact its clearly definable limits.

One sees the two authorities functioning through the person of any parish priest. As a priest, he is Father Flanagan, Our Lord’s representative in the celebration of Mass, in the confession box, in the administering of the Sacraments at many times and in many places, and also – though here he may happen to be fallible – as the interpreter of the mind of the Church for his particular flock. To Father Flanagan we kneel with a confident docility, even if our knees creak in cold weather. But there is also Tom Flanagan, the tribal elder, who believes that the Beatle haircut is deeply offensive to God, and who much prefers a book on the All Blacks to the ambiguities of Graham Greene. We will pay him a proper human respect – but we do not have to share his prejudices.

This is the point where difficulties are inclined to crop up. For the good man may not himself have distinguished clearly between his priestly and his tribal authority; and not all the laity are tactful in the way they express disagreement. The fur and feathers may fly. And sometimes a young person may cease to receive the Sacraments on account of a gross mistake – an assumption that rebellion against tribal authority is rebellion against the Church. One needs to be very clear-headed on this matter.

There is commonly a time of crisis in late adolescence and another at the beginning of middle age. In the first the girl or lad has more or less outgrown the need for the kind of authority that parents exercise over younger children – there must be some moment when filial obedience can rightly be replaced by respectful disagreement, when the tribal authority ceases to be binding, but exactly when is usually the bone of contention. Sally thinks wrongly that it has arrived when she is just thirteen; and Sally’s mother equally wrongly thinks it has not arrived when her daughter wants to leave home at eighteen and take a job in Auckland. And when Sally packs her bag in a huff, the mother may begin to enter her second period of crisis, and question the value of a world in which children are ungrateful and people must grow old in pain.

I believe that the existence of the two authorities is in fact providential – since it allows both for necessary obedience and for legitimate rebellion. But the period of rebellion is a time when the tree is shaken and some fruit falls to the ground.

I can only speculate about the spiritual growth of those who come from Catholic homes, for I did not come from one myself – but it seems to me that a Catholic child is likely to accept the Faith on trust – he believes because disbelief would be absurdly contrary to the world he knows – the warm and vigorous world of the tribe. God for him is certainly the God of my fathers, but, lacking some special illumination, not in the same degree, my God, thepage 733 God to whom he has made a wholly free act of recognition and surrender.

The time comes perhaps when he leaves a Catholic college and goes to varsity – and the lecturers there, who have no great interest in Our Lord and place no credence in the Church’s authority, seem smarter and more down to earth – or wiser and more up to date – than Brother Smith and Father Hogan. And so the tree is shaken; and with luck – or rather, God’s grace freely accepted – this Catholic lad comes to see that Church and tribe are not one and the same thing, and for the first time freely and consciously surrenders to the Bride of Christ, the Mystical Body. He has disobeyed the tribe in order to be free to obey God.

And his sister Sally has met a most charming, gentle and handsome divorced man in Auckland – and she too has her conflict between natural and supernatural love, and perhaps for the first time in her life freely chooses the latter – if she had not disobeyed the tribe, the tree would not have been shaken. The unshaken tree (in my opinion) is inclined to turn to dead wood.

Yet I would like to see the danger of real or apparent loss of faith lessened by a clear perception among both clergy and laity of the differences between obedience to God and obedience to the tribe, and between the two authorities – the one infallible, the other highly fallible; the one fixed, the other variable; the one God’s gift, the other the gift of man.

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