Freedom In Service

Peasant Times-Dispatch Issue 32

May 20, 2025

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I was expecting to be free, but God has his own plans.

- St. Teresa of Calcutta, also known as Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa

This is Mother Teresa’s inaugural inclusion in Season Three of the Peasant Times-Dispatch. This quote was taken by a book of “Quotable Wisdom” from the saint, and this quote particularly comes with a note: These are “Mother Teresa’s words when her sisters persuaded her to withdraw her resignation, 1990”. Mother Teresa spent decades serving and ministering to the poor throughout her extraordinary life, and this quote speaks to her attitude of service.

Obedience

I have always struggled with Obedience. I was the only son in my family, the middle child between an older and younger sister. Many chores fell to me in my childhood, most of which I bore cheerlessly. I spent a lot of time aggrieved by some sense of injustice, real or imagined. Why should I do some chore when my sisters or my parents did not also do some equivalent chore? Whether or not this was a legitimate complaint doesn’t really matter—for my purposes here, the defect lay in obedience.

Obedience is a hard virtue as adults also. Sometimes things don’t go our way, some law is passed, some corporate policy enacted. And we feel this law, policy, ordinance, or edict is somehow unjust. Whether our grievance is real or imagined, the thing we are struggling with is obedience.

Obedience is a difficult virtue because we have a fully developed and lively intellect, we are capable of using our rational minds and often come to different conclusions than those to whom our care is entrusted. So to be told to go east when our rational mind tells us to go west is extremely purgative. Sometimes this presents itself as discomfort, and sometimes this presents itself as rebellion. It takes extraordinary patience to receive such an instruction with a serene disposition and, in the spirit of obedience, simply go where commanded.

Freedom Is Obedience

There is something liberating about being under the direction of a loving caretaker. The Church has this structure, family has this structure, society has this structure, monastic orders have this structure. It removes many things from our concern, especially in our capacity as peasants. “Is it my responsibility? No? I surrender it to God” is an attitude which brings much peace, and has brought much peace to me personally. And sometimes that same obedience requires us to do something we may not like—like young Scoot had to do various chores.

But ultimately obedience makes the work as sweet as the serenity, and that leaves us free to know and love God without the confounding anxieties and tumults of the world—those anxieties and tumults the worry of which it is the office only of those to whom we are entrusted.

When many people discuss freedom, they think perhaps in terms of removing the superiors, putting all people on equal footing. But this is contrary to nature, to family, to society—and leads to hardship and heartache.

Obedience then is the virtue which leads us to freedom. It is an easy yoke, and a light burden.