The Sin of Obedience
by
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A person who explores unknown territories, climbs mountains, kayaks or participates in any other survival sport awaits a glow afterwards, one that ratifies the effort expended and the dangers undertaken.
So it is with surviving a prep school or college, but even more a seminary. The final goal, the one that is eminently rewarding, is graduation and ultimately ordination, but along the way there are also chest-expanding plateaus for those who persist. The senior year in the high school was such a hiatus for Mike and his classmates. The fact that he had encountered a possible detour in the summer before reaching his senior year added to the relief and satisfaction of getting there.
That potential stumble on his pathway was, unbelievably, a girl. Her name was Millie Moran. She was two years older than he and was also going to be a high school senior. Millie and her family had moved into the parish only recently and therefore she had not gone to grade school with him.
How real was this moment of flirtation and infatuation? That was a difficult question, one that Mike could not begin to answer.
The novitiate, he had been told, would be a test. It would be a time when the Dominican Order and its representatives would demand that he prove himself and his vocation. Indeed, some older members of the community believed him too smart, too young, too immature, too proud and too much of a goody-goody to be one of them. They would just as well that he went away. He was not the only aspirant about whom they had ever felt that wish. The others were gone.
“Obedience, rarely a weapon, is usually a shield,” one spiritual director had tried to tell him. “In the modern world, young people entering business or military life learn that, to survive, you have to do as you are told.”
For Mike, obeying was far more than the survival technique, the priest had suggested. He perceived it as a direct connection with God, more reliable than prayer, although he was armed with that too. Obedience was a compass that would enable him not to avoid those major direction-seeking decisions that tended to confuse him.
What a challenge obedience offered him! Call it a strategy, an art, a science. It was one he believed he might be able to learn better than anyone had in history.
“Give me regulations, even ones that are that are oppressive, and I will gladly obey the letter and the spirit of each one of them” he prayed. “Train me in the sacred 700-year-old Dominican rule of life and I will observe it inside out and live up to it as though it had been written it for me. Say that something cannot done and, with God’s help, your obedient servant will do it.”
“This prayer,” he finished. “Represents my mission, my calling.”
The difference between himself and an automaton or robot, he reassured himself, was his brain, which was aware of what he was doing. The similarity was that both did what they were told to do. His assent would be there, but it would have been given even before the command was formulated. It would be his, but it would be buried deep within. His superiors could see the puppet. The ultimate control, the Grand Puppeteer, would be God. He alone would know that the young novice’s will and power to a choose was still there.
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About the Book
The Sin of Obedience is one of the few works of fiction or non-fiction that looks profoundly and with deep personal reflection into the training of a Catholic priest. The novel, rich and accurate in detail, is the story of a young prodigy torn with between the rigid religious traditions and convictions of his mother and the more-humanity-oriented respect for freedom of his father.
Building on his own experiences, including being the subject of sexual abuse by a seminary teacher, the author unfolds a picture of religious life in which the cornerstones of celibacy and a vow of obedience have forced seminarians and priests to make difficult and often impossible decisions in their own personal lives. This well-crafted story enables the reader to go along with a young boy, seminarian and priest on his idealistic pursuit and mission and the consequences he has to face as a result.
About the Author
Kenan Heise--a playwright, poet and award-winning author--was a journalist with the Chicago Tribune for 34 years. For 11 years, he had been a Franciscan seminarian, seven of which he was a member of that religious order. His Aunt Ella Stories (Academy Chicago, 1985) won the Vicki Matson Award from the Friends of Literature and his book of poetry, Our Dinosaurs are Dying (Chicago Historical Bookworks, 1994), was praised by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks as, “Big, cleverly conversational, appealing, indeed contemporary and easy to read.”