Senior School Presentation Night, 2006

Principal’s Address

Graham Leo

“Obey your parents!”

“Obey your teachers!”

“Obey the traffic rules!”

Obedience is a negative word in our society. Talk about making children obey their parents and you will stir up the talkback radio listeners. We send our dogs to obedience school, but we encourage our children to be independent.

I've lost count of the number of people who have told me that they expect their children to make up their own minds on important issues like having sex before marriage, taking drugs or alcohol, and whether or not to believe in God. But who insist they learn to swim.

Tell a group of students that you expect obedience and they will raise a chorus of claims about their right to an opinion and how it is a free country and so on.

The marriage ceremony used to contain a vow to “love, honour and obey”, but that has long gone the way of the dodo. I attended a wedding ceremony a few weeks ago. The minister announced that the young couple would not be using the traditional vows. He had encouraged them to write their own, he declared with brash confidence, because that would be of much greater value than words that had been written two hundred years ago.

A couple of young people, barely into their twenties and with almost no experience of life, let alone marriage, were encouraged, by a man who ought to have known better, to write their own words to seal one of the most endangered relationships in today’s society.

Statistically, their marriage has more than a one in three chance of failing and it would hardly be helped by two young people making vows which went something like this:

“I love you deeply. You are my best friend. I love your nature and your smile, and I will always love you because you make me laugh and make me feel happy when I am with you.”

It was dreamily romantic, and everyone felt nice, and a couple of people cried.

But I made more significant promises recently when I hired a rental car.

I was very angry with the minister who I think failed these young people, in letting them think that marriage could be dependent on feeling happy or liking each other.

Where was the commitment to faithfulness in sickness or in health? Where was the promise to stay true even if their world collapsed all around them because of poverty, job loss or serious accident? Not to mention an attractive work colleague.

Is obedience all about living in slavery to someone else’s will?

Obedience comes from the Latin word meaning “to hear”. True obedience has to do with truly hearing another person.

When a parent tells a child to do something, the child first wants to be deaf to the parent’s instruction. That is a natural reaction if the child is busy playing, or feeling tired. But by teaching a child to be obedient in packing up his toys, we actually teach the child to ‘hear’ the parent in a totality of being, that goes far beyond just a slavish following of orders.

This may be a new concept for you: Obedience is responsive listening.

Marriage is based on this concept. We tossed aside the ancient marriage vow of being obedient, because we thought we had grown out of it. If I were to get married today, I would include a vow to obedience in both the woman’s and the man’s vows.

What we would be saying is that we would listen deeply to the other person in our heart, and in our soul, and hear their deep cry for peace and harmony and togetherness. Out of this will grow the genuine, true love that is rarely present when a couple of young people decide to marry.

Dr Michael Carr-Gregg is a well-known Australian psychologist. What you may not know is that he writes as the Agony Uncle for Girlfriend magazine. He says: “… hundreds of 11 to 14 year old girls write each month of the anguish they feel following the dissolution of their families. Their letters are awash with a mixture of apprehension and confusion about their future and the changing relationships that surround them.”

You see, obedience is a two way street. Not only have children to be obedient to their parents, but parents have to be obedient to their children. Each one must listen deeply to the silent cry of the other; to hear the other deeply, and respond to the other at their point of need.

There was a report published a year or so ago in the United States, by a group of academic, medical and scientific scholars from major universities, for the Commission on Children at Risk.

This report expressed deep concern at what it identified as the failing standards of mental health of young children and teenagers. It argued that as human beings we are (in its own term) ‘hardwired to connect’. It said that as human beings, we need ‘close connections to other people and deep connections to moral and spiritual meaning’.

None of this is unexpected for anyone who has the slightest connection with Christianity. We were created by a personal God, who made us in his own image. We are made to connect with each other and with him.

The Commission refers to “authoritative communities” as being essential for the development of ‘connected people’. Authoritative communities are safe, secure, and supportive environments. They can form enduring relationships; they can develop positive moral and spiritual perspectives on life.

This is the kind of connectedness that our children increasingly lack. Families and schools must be authoritative communities.

Dr Carr-Gregg, again, writes: “In contrast to the young people of the Middle Ages who knew they had an immortal soul enclosed in the shell of a mortal body… our children are stripped of community, tradition and shared meaning. Many of our young people are spiritual anorexics, empty selves that are fundamentally a disappointment. And nature abhors a vacuum, so they … fill the void with consumer products, celebrity news and never-ending quests for physical perfection.”

We started talking about obedience, and we have come around to community.

The Latin word personare from which we get our word ‘person’, means “sounding through”. The discipline of listening to each other in community makes us truly persons; that is, people who are sounding through to each other, who are obedient to each other, who are responsively listening to each other. Community is obedience practised together.

Jesus came to us as the person of God, who sounded through to the human race. His incarnation, (remember Emmanuel: God with us?) was God’s communication to us. He was obedient to the Father and to his mission. He enabled the Father-child relationship which defines Christianity.

Dr Margo is a research fellow from the Institute for Public Policy Research in Britain, studying the behaviour of youth culture. She recently said:

“Adults in Britain tend to have a pub and bar culture that means spending much of their leisure time with other adults, whereas counties such as France, Italy and Spain find it more comfortable to have different age groups socialising together.”

She believes that Australian youths are not that different from the trends she is observing in the UK. She noted from her research:

‘In both countries there is not enough interaction between adults and teenagers so teenagers were left to learn their social skills from each other, a child-raising system that had more in common with William Golding’s Lord of the Flies than with a properly functioning society.’

“Our Family” has become “MySpace”.

Bishop Peter Jensen, in the ABC Boyer Lectures of 2005, reminded us that we have to ask whether ‘our older generations have lost the art of transmitting community, tradition and shared meaning’.

Ask about your own family life: have your older teenagers spent more time at activities that were either isolated (mobile phone or online discourse with peers, for example), in the company of a narrow age group of peers, watching television or listening to music that relates to only a narrow band of interests, playing sport with peers?

How much time has been spent in your own family life with the whole family together, playing games, talking, driving in the car with all electronic media turned off? Do your children spend time with grandparents or older people if you have no grandparents here?

Our churches often segregate youth and family and older person activities, as though neither group had anything to say to each other. We send children out of church into Kids Church as though we could not possibly share worship as parents and children together.

It is in the Christian community that we can most effectively be responsive listeners, obedient to each other. This is because the heart of Christian life is to be obedient – to be a responsive listener – to God. We often get the impression that Christianity is all about not doing certain things. Only after we really learn to know God, do we discover that not doing things has very little to do with Christian faith.

Obedience to God involves ‘sounding through’ as truly free persons to each other, regardless of age or culture or background. It is our goal to develop the Emmanuel community as a place where people can know God and know each other, can meet with him and each other, can be truly obedient to one another, without artificial boundaries between this or that group.

Love that derives from obedience to God liberates us from the relational fragility of merely being in love or being good friends. These are not sufficient foundations in themselves to guarantee the stability of marriage, or the certainty of care and kindness to each other for life.

In our marriages, in our families, in the life that our Year 12s will lead as they leave us, that all students will lead in the classroom, the playground and the sports field, we need a love that deeply respects the other and listens to them, being obedient to each other’s needs and desires.

We need to meet the deep cries of each other’s hearts in all these, and we will establish an authoritative community (at school or in our families) only as we seek to hear the voice of God over and through all the noise of the world around us.

This is our high and holy calling. This is what we were made for. This is how we will find peace.

When we see teenagers willingly unplugging their earpieces, when adults and children willingly turn off their mobile phones and televisions, when fathers and mothers come home from work in time to eat together with the children, in order to hear each other in mutual obedience, we will know that the Kingdom of God is come amongst us.

Emmanuel: God with us. He can only come amongst us when we are prepared to hear him first, and others second. As we allow the person of God to sound through to us, we will then be empowered to sound through to others and to live in the mutual obedience – the responsive listening – of an authoritative community.

Such a community will know the peace of God.