Religion of the Heart by Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B.

The moment I accept responsibility for recognizing authority in my own heart, my religion comes of age.

[Cont. from page 1] ... The basic question is, “Where does your ultimate religious authority reside?”  And if your answer is, for example, “In the Bible,” then you have to ask yourself, “And who tells me that the Bible has authority for me?” For other people the ultimate authority resides in the Koran or in other sacred scriptures. Who gives the Bible authority over me? Is it not my own heart that freely (and authoritatively) recognizes authority and so validates it? If we continue questioning, we come to the insight that our ultimate religious authority resides within each one of us. I say it resides there. I’m not saying that each one of us is the ultimate religious authority. That would be nonsense. But my ultimate religious authority is also “within,” or else I could never recognize it “out there.” The heart “recognizes” authority in a threefold sense of the word. The intellect recognizes authority in the sense of identifying it as such. The will recognizes authority in the sense of acknowledging its claims. The emotions recognize authority in the sense of appreciating that it deserves to be honored. Only when intellect, will, and emotions, each play their part, is the recognition of authority wholehearted. The moment I accept responsibility for recognizing authority in my own heart, my religion comes of age. At that moment I pass from irresponsible religion to responsible religion. This passage has far-reaching consequences.

Now, I would like to point out some of these consequences in connection with two terms which in our Western tradition have been important for ethics:  love and obedience.

The biblical concept of love makes sense in light of our ultimate belonging. In our basic religious experience, we become aware that we belong to all. And we say, “yes,” to that belonging. Love in the biblical sense means that “yes,” including all its consequences. Unless we take love in that sense, we get entangled in contradictions. Think, for instance, of the command to love your neighbor. In the sense in which we normally speak of love, it implies at least preferential desire, if not passionate attraction. But can you really love your neighbor with preferential desire, let alone with passionate attraction: We’re talking about the neighbor that lives next door to you. It is impossible. Besides, can anybody command you to have preferential desire? Is attraction subject to any commands? It makes no sense whatsoever. But, that somebody says: You have experienced ultimate belonging; now say “yes” to that experience and draw the consequences — that makes perfectly good sense.

The Bible does not say: “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” It says:  “Love your neighbor as yourself.” That means, love your neighbor as (being) yourself.  In your true self you are one with your neighbor. And at the moment of your primordial religious experience, you know that this is true. Nobody has to tell you.  And so the commandment simply means, “Say yes to that experience and act accordingly.” But if you think that you have to “love your neighbor like you love yourself,” then you have to first imagine that you are somebody else. Then you have to love that somebody else who is really yourself, as you would love somebody else. And finally you have to try to love somebody else who is really somebody else the way you would love yourself if you were somebody else. It is an impossible act of mental acrobatics. In contrast, there is nothing more natural than the insight that your neighbor is yourself. You have experienced it; now act accordingly. It is in this sense that we can reroot ethics in religion.

Because obedience as virtue is a listening with the heart, training in obedience is not training in conformity. Its highest goal is not to produce puppets, but prophets.

I’d like to give you one other example: obedience. Obedience is often understood as doing what somebody else tells you to do. Well, there is some reason for that.  Obedience is often learned by doing, for a time and under very special circumstances, willingly, freely, what somebody else tells you to do. This is obedience as method. But that method has a goal:  obedience as virtue. And that is obedience in the full sense. Obedience as virtue in Jewish tradition, in Christian tradition, in other great religious traditions in the world, means far more than doing what somebody else tells you to do. It means, ultimately, listening with the heart. It is an intensive form of listening, the most intensive form of listening.  The opposite of obedience is irresponsibility. One who acts irresponsibly is not listening thoroughly and is, therefore, not giving the appropriate response.

An ethics that is not rooted in the religion of the heart will not think of obedience as wholehearted, responsible listening. Obedience will simply be equated with conformity to external commands. But our heart tells us that external conformity can be irresponsible at times. We are all too apt to conform to external pressure even though our heart tells us to stand up against it. Given an unjust command, non-conformity becomes the expression of a higher obedience. Civil disobedience is a case in point. Here, “disobedience” is true obedience, rooted in the heart.

Our society has a blind spot with regard to obedience. We think that human beings find it extremely hard to submit to external authority. The opposite is true.  We all have an inordinate tendency to yield to the demands of external authority, even in flagrant violation of our own hearts’ better judgment. I remind you of the experiments by Stanley Milgram at Yale University, tests that were repeated also in Europe, South Africa, and Australia. Milgram proved conclusively that over 60 percent of an average population will torture another human being with electric shocks until the victim lies unconscious, and for no other reason but the instructions by an authority figure — in this case a psychologist, the authority in our age — who quietly insists: “The experiment requires that you continue. You have no other choice, you must go on.” Our society is convinced that submission to authority is something that comes very hard to human beings. And we act accordingly. We train children from earliest youth on, to be submissive to authority, as if this were something one has to hammer into beings. We have a blind spot there, as I said. The fact is we are so prone to be submissive to authority, that all our efforts should go into teaching children to stand on their own feet against authority if necessary. Only if we bend backwards, may we hope to overcome our congenital bent to conform to external authority. The only valid gesture for authority under these circumstances is to constantly give back authority to the grassroots. The prime task for all who wield authority is to give back authority to those who are under it.

Because obedience as virtue is a listening with the heart, training in obedience is not training in conformity. Its highest goal is not to produce puppets, but prophets. For a long time religious traditions have known that the highest obedience is the obedience of the prophet. The prophet is one who learns so thoroughly to listen that he or she hears what to say, how to speak out, within the community, but against the trend of the community. It is necessary to speak out from within because if you speak out from the outside, you are not a prophet, you’re just an outside critic. You must be part of that community, but you must also speak out. Either of the two alone would be relatively easy. It would be easy to stay in, if you could shut up. Yet, the two have to come together: to stay in and to speak out. Where these two come together, they form the cross of the prophet.  The staying in forms the vertical beam, as it were, and the speaking out forms the horizontal one.   

In our innermost heart we can tap a source of power strong enough to counteract the forces that threaten this good green earth. And we need every bit of energy we can get to put it to work for the goals for which we stand here. What we can achieve is not the question. The great question is whether we will have the wisdom and courage to take the proper stance. The sincere effort to do so will give us the assurance, each one of us, that we have done what we can do. That is more important than thinking about survival. If we are too much concerned with survival, we are apt to get into the same groove in which those are who for the sake of survival, endanger the survival of us all. If instead we focus in our discussion on the rerooting of ethics in religion and of religion in our primal religiousness, it may help us clarify our stance in the face of the great peril we are confronting.

Originally published as “Religion of the Heart/Nuclear Stalemate” in NICM Journal (Vol. 8, #1, pp. 27-33).