“Is obedience so much better than love, Mother?”
“What hast thou to do with love, save the love of God and the blessed Mother and the holy saints? The very word savoureth of the world. All the love thou givest to the creature is love taken from God.”
“Is love, then, a thing that can be measured and cut in lengths, Mother? The more you tend a plant, the better it flourishes. If I am to love none save God, will not my heart dry and wither, so that I shall not be able to love Him? Sometimes I think it is doing so.”
“You think!” she said. “What right have you to think? Leave your superiors to think for you; and you, cultivate holy obedience, as you ought. All the heresies and schisms that ever vexed the Church have arisen from men setting themselves up to think when they should simply have obeyed.”
“But, Mother, forgive me! I cannot help thinking.”
“That shows how far you are from perfection, Sister. A religious who aims at perfection should never allow herself to think, except only how she can best obey. Beware of pride and presumption, the instant you allow yourself to depart from the perfection of obedience.”
“But, Mother, that is the perfection of a thing. And I am a woman.”
“Sister Annora, you are reasoning, when your duty is to obey.”
If holy obedience means to obey without thinking, I am afraid I shall never be perfect in it! I do not know how people manage to compress themselves into stones like that.
I tried Mother Gaillarde next, since I had only found an icicle clad in Mother Ada’s habit. I was afraid of her, I confess, for I knew she would bite: and she did so. I begged yet harder, for I had heard that Mother Alianora was worse. Was I not even to see her before she died?