What Obedience Means

 Madeleine Delbrel 

For us, the ordinary people of the streets, obedience means bending to the ways of our times whenever they are not harmful. It means wearing the same clothes as everyone else, taking on the same routines as everyone else, and speaking the same language as everyone else.

When we live with others, obedience also means we set aside our own tastes and leave things in the place others have put them. In this way, life becomes an epic film in slow motion. It does not make our head spin. It does not take our breath away.

Little by little, thread by thread, it eats away at the old man’s frame, which cannot be mended and must be made new from the ground up. When we thus become accustomed to giving up our will to so many tiny things, we will no longer find it hard, when the occasion presents itself, to do the will of our boss, our husband, or our parents.

And our hope is that death, too, will be easy. It will not be a big ordeal, but rather the outcome of small ordinary sufferings, to which we have given our assent as they passed, one after the other.

We, the Ordinary People of the Streets