Mother Sofia's First Chapter Talk: Motherhood and the Mystery of Obedience

Dom Damian’s words to us during the election process were few but weighty.  What struck me most was what he had to say about the abbot as father/the abbess as mother.  He said: “I think we can say that monks are to their abbot as Christ is to his Father.  Monks are the abbot’s ‘sons’ in relation to his being their ‘father’, because he is believed to hold the place of Christ in the monastic community.  Christ and the Father are one.”
 
I find this to be a wonderful scriptural deepening of we have from St Benedict about the abbot as the representative of Christ, and as father to the monks.  How can the abbot be both Christ and father? –Because Christ and the Father are one. 
 
The relationship between Christ and his Father is expressed for us in the gospels and nowhere more beautifully than in the Gospel of John.  It is a relationship of absolute trust and confident expectation of care.  Christ offers us entry into this relationship with the Father when he teaches us to pray to “Our Father,” and expresses this desire more explicitly in his prayer “that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us (Jn 17:21).  It is the Christ within each of us who draws us deeper into relationship with the Father, though obedience to an abbess – an obedience marked by trust and confident expectation of care.
 
Christ, one with his Father, lives out his Father’s all-merciful nurturing care in relationship with his disciples: “He loved his own in the world and he loved them to the end (Jn 13:1).  The abbess is called to allow Christ free reign to live out his life as the Son of the Father in and through her life and ministry to the community – a ministry of merciful nurturing care.
 
This is a high ideal – too high, perhaps, to be practical.  If we are incapable of wrapping our minds around the mystery of the Trinity – that the love between Father and Son is so great as to be a person in his own right, whom we call the Holy Spirit – then how can it serve as a model for us in our daily lives?  Who are we to image the Trinitarian God?  Well, actually, despite all indications to the contrary, it seems that we were made for this.  A glance at our Cistercian tradition confirms that conviction about our creation in the image and likeness of God undergirds the whole monastic endeavor.  This tradition of ours certainly takes seriously the reality of the human condition – the unlikeness which has become our lot as a result of the fall – but it refuses to accept that this is the last word.  The last word is not weakness, failure, woundedness, sin, but God in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.  We are in fact living a graced reality.  The question is: can we recognize and receive this grace?  Can we accept the gift that is offered?  In the words of the poet, Rainer Rilke:
“I want to mirror your immensity.
I want never to be too weak or too old
to bear the heavy lurching image of you.”
 
When Dom Damian spoke to us, he paraphrased himself by adding: “the abbot/abbess is father, mother, parent.”  I found this remark boldly traditional, but I will admit to having experienced an inner squirm.  Our human experience is so problematic in this area, and there seem to be so many opportunities for distortion.  The language of Father-Mother-Parent is rooted in our most primitive human experience – that of infancy and childhood.  None of us emerges from our early life without wounds.  This is a big part of how original sin has its way in us .  Even the holiest things, and perhaps especially they, can be corrupted beyond recognition.  Our experience of human parenthood has not lived up to the Divine archetype.  And so we are wounded, we are broken, especially in the areas of authority and obedience which flow from this relationship.  Can we, can I, relate to another human being as Father-Mother-Parent without somehow regressing to an earlier stage of development?  In other words, do I have to be a child in order to acknowledge a father or mother?
 
Events of our recent past and present conspire to cast further shadows on the trustworthiness of human authority and spiritual fatherhood.  You don’t need me to tell you that the crisis of sexual abuse in the Church represents an enormous failure and scandal.  And it all feeds into the terrible temptation of our time to reject the good, the true, the beautiful and the unifying because we suspect that it is a hoax, a cover for unspeakable evil.  Too many things have failed us and we can’t take any more.  It’s Eden all over again!  The serpent knew how to sow seeds of suspicion in the minds of Adam and Eve.  A breakdown in trust leads to disobedience and thereafter to cynicism and despair.  The stakes are high!
 
“Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart.  This is advice from a father who loves you; welcome it, and faithfully put it into practice.  The labor of obedience will bring you back to him from whom you had drifted through the sloth of disobedience” (RB Prol. 1-2).

What Benedict is calling for here is faith: faith in sonship and fatherhood, faith in obedience and authority as a road to restoration of true relationship.  This faith is not naivety, or the suppression of reason (“If I turn off my brain, then I can believe that the abbess represents Christ”), though perhaps these can coincide in the complexity of our human situation.  It is a matter of making a responsible choice to trust in God’s work in the human situation and to cooperate with it.  I believe we are on a journey of discovery with regard to what obedience means, what the motherhood of the abbess means.  And I am very aware that many of you are decades ahead of me in this journey.  For myself at this moment, I feel that I have been given an enormous gift labeled “Mother” – carefully wrapped and inviting, but not yet understood.
 
At the ceremony of installation on Thursday, each one of us had the opportunity to renew our commitment to obedience as a road back to the Father.  I could see in your faces as you approached me to renew your promises that you were moved by this, and I was too.  What was most special to me was the opportunity to speak the words “eternal life” to each one of you.  Afterwards I was thinking that I was the only one who didn’t get the chance to renew my commitment in this way.  And then I realized that it wasn’t true – I had my chance too, though a little differently.  The abbess has the option of making a profession of faith after she is confirmed.  The paper I was given contained the Nicene Creed.  As I read over it – words I have spoken in public countless times in my life, though not always with full awareness, I will admit – I realized as if for the first time that I have a fierce and passionate belief in each one of these truths of our faith:

I believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible.
I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,…
I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.

Here is my vow and my promise.  Here is the foundation of my life.  Here is all faith, all hope, all love.  Here is the wave of grace that draws us into transforming relationships of mutual trust and care, all the way home to the Father.