Paths of Obedience: Fairy Tales and the Monk's Way by Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B.

By being in tune with the whole the heart becomes whole. This wholeness, the goal of every path, is at stake in the testing of obedience.                  

[Cont. from page 2] ... Ties and tying, that is the key image of Snow White’s first trial.  The queen step-mother, disguised as an old peddler woman, calls out her wares: “Staylaces in all colors!”  Yes, they do come in all colors. The family ties that will ensnare Psyche in her troubles are only one kind of ties: It matters little by what kind a novice is entangled.  “Come,” says the old peddler woman, “let me lace your bodice properly for once.”  Before she knows it, Anima is all tied up with this or that.  And that is the end of her new life.  Like one dead, she lies on the ground.  Snow White had been warned, but to no avail.  Finding her now, the Seven who had been unable to save her by warning her save her by cutting her ties.  That’s far more painful: violent, almost, but this is the violence of love.  Nowhere does this brotherhood show their love more clearly than by cutting the ties at any cost (remember, those were brand new silken laces) and setting Anima free.  “Little by little she returned to life,” the story says. 

But temptation will come again.  Three times.  In the language of myth that means again and again. If the first temptation was entanglement, the second one is vanity. This means something more serious of course, than the innocent enjoyment of being good-looking.  What makes vanity serious is a morbid preoccupation with self one’s little ephemeral self, for that is lethal.      

In our fairy tale, the image for this vanity is an ornament, a comb.  The wicked queen barely needed to change her disguise.  The forgetfulness of novices is proverbial.  And yet, mindfulness is what the training of the monk is all about.  Well, that mindfulness does not come easily to Anima. “Go away,” says Snow White.  “I must not let anyone in.”  But when she eyes the comb, she is infatuated.  And when the peddler woman offers to make her pretty, she thinks no harm.  What the story literally says is that “Snow White thought of nothing” – not a flattering but an accurate description of Anima in her novitiate daze.  As soon as the poisoned comb touches her hair, the daze becomes a deathlike stupor.         

Again it is the acies fraterna – as St. Benedict calls the brotherhood that closes ranks when the spiritual struggle gets tough – that comes to Anima’s rescue.  Again the Seven Dwarfs find Snow White lying on the ground as if dead.  But they have not forgotten.  They immediately recognize that it was the stepmother’s doing, find the comb, and pull it out.  This second failure struck deeper than the first.  This time, cutting won’t do; the comb has to be extracted.  Vanity threatens monastic life closer to the core than external ties.         

But, in good fairy tale fashion, Snow White is given a third chance.  This time she does remember; but again she fails. This time she does not blunder into her failure, she is outright disobedient.  Like Eve, who “saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired,” Snow White “lusts after the apple,” the story tells us, and she takes and eats.  “This time the dwarfs will not be able to bring you back to life again,” the queen laughs, and she is right.         

The laces had remained on the outside; the comb was merely inserted in her hair, but she swallowed a bit of the apple.  Eating is a full engagement.  It is communion.  We become similar to the food we assimilate.  Psyche, in the end, will drink the goblet of ambrosia and become immortal. Snow White, here, shares the apple of hatred and dies. Her three trials came closer and closer to the core of her being, closer and closer to the essence of Anima’s monastic commitment.  The laces first: One is ensnared by ties, but they remain external. Next, the comb: Vanity is a morbid turning back on itself of a self that may, however, be in itself still healthy.  But disobedience is disintegration, death.  This would make no sense if obedience consisted merely in doing what one is told to do. But the obedient response to a specific call is merely an exercise.  It trains Anima in the skill of being attuned to the call of each moment.  Mastery of that skill is accomplished obedience. By being in tune with the whole the heart becomes whole. This wholeness, the goal of every path, is at stake in the testing of obedience.         

Through obedience, each thread on the cosmic loom finds its way into the great pattern as it emerges.  Through disobedience the threads get entangled.  Snow White’s silken cords of many colors hint at her entanglement. Psyche, in turn, gets tangled up in family ties.  When her invisible lover warns her against her sisters, she begins to miss them all the more keenly, and at length her tears prevail.  The wicked sisters are admitted and their envy is aroused by Psyche’s bliss.  Again her lover warns; Psyche must at least guard his secret from her sisters.  But when they come again they get her entangled in the web of her own lies, and on their third visit they pull the snare tight. At last she must admit that she has never seen her lover’s face and those two, her kin and yet her foes, persuade her that he is a monstrous serpent. They implore her by the bonds of blood and by the ties of birth that unite them to rid herself of that monster bridegroom.         

By now the real issue is clearly in focus: This is a test of faith.  Will Psyche trust her divine lover or her all too human kin?  “If the joys of your secret love still delight you, and you are content to lie in the embrace of a foul and venomous snake, at least we, your loving sisters, have done our duty.”         

“Those false she-wolves are weaving some deep plot of sin against you,” her lover had warned Psyche; “They will try to persuade you to want to know my face; but I have told you, if you see it once, you will see it no more.”  Psyche, in reply, had assured him of her faithfulness: “I seek no more to see your face; not even the dark of night can be a hindrance of my joy, for I hold you in my arms, light of my life.”  And yet, “she tossed to and fro” in a crisis of faith; “in the same body she hated the beast and loved the husband.”         

Like Snow White, Psyche forgot.  “She forgot all her husband’s warnings and all her own promises.”  At her sisters’ faithless counsel, Psyche lights the lantern and lifts the sharpened razor.  But there lies Love himself, fairest of gods!  “Even the flame of the lamp, when it beheld him, burned brighter for joy,” and “a drop of burning oil fell upon the god’s right shoulder.”  In seven syllables, the collapse of paradise is told: tacitus avolavit – he flew away without word.

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