A place where children are happy, joyful, and obedient; young people chaste and cheerful; adults responsible and dignified. A place where everyone loves everyone, no one goes bald or gets sick, and everything is just fine.

You see the same thing in art, especially in the landscapes of the 18th and 19th centuries. You see it in the lush, green meadows, peaceful cattle, and happy peasants. You see it in the lofty mountains, dignified and solid, and in the people dancing happily in the common.

So, where is this paradise? Some of us see it in our childhood, in a time when we remember ourselves as happy and everything as being fine. We were safe and secure in the care of mom and dad, and our brothers and sisters weren’t too much of a problem. We hadn’t started school yet.

We’re on a life-long search to find our way back to paradise. If only they would stop that which irritates us so much… if we could just get this job… if we could only rearrange things somehow.

The human heart longs for paradise. This is right, somehow. We were cast out; we lost it.

There’s a painting by Masaccio depicting Adam and Eve being expelled from the garden. They are coming out naked, Eve with her hands over her face.

I see her saying to herself, "I’ve lost every hope I ever had for happiness. It’s gone forever!" She is in total despair.

At her side is Adam, bent over. I hear him saying, "I did it to myself! How could I have been so stupid!"

How did we get cast out of paradise? How did we get into this desert? Where in the world is the road back?

We tend to see two roads.

One of them is according to our own will, trying to make it ourselves according to various theological and political ideologies that try to rearrange human society so that we can set up paradise again.

Marxism is a classic example, but it wasn’t the first. The attempt goes back through history, to the Roman Empire. Even the Catholic Middle Ages, attempting to rule society by the norms of the Gospel, tried to organize human society in such a way as to create the paradise that was lost. It didn’t work.

The other road is the way of obedience.

Leon Bloy said that obedience is the theological term for the lost paradise. If I understand him correctly, he means that when I enter into obedience, I’ve recovered the essence of paradise. Maybe the garden isn’t quite as nice, and my associates aren’t as charming as Eve was, but I’ve come back to it in essence.

Now, I’m going to ask a question, and you have to answer it honestly—at the level of your gut, not your head. (You know how we all have one thing in our heads and another actually working in our lives). How do you see obedience? How do you understand it?

Do you see it as the submission of a portion of your autonomy, your right over yourself, to some authority in order to get a reward? Do you see it like having a job: do what the boss tells you, and get promoted? Obey God, and he repays you by taking you to heaven?

Or do you see it this way: God has poured forth all of creation out of the richness of his own Being, in order that he might bring it back to himself, penetrate it with his own presence, glorify it.

The peak of that creation is the free person, who can enter into God’s plan consciously, knowing what he is doing, freely entering it out of love. Love, by definition, is free.

Obedience then is our embracing of this wonderful plan of God to transform us and the whole universe, freely doing our part to bring it about.

Which view of obedience is operating in you? It makes a lot of difference.

If it’s the first, you want to keep your autonomy as much as possible. You give in where you have to, but you are going to draw lines.

If it’s the second, you want to give yourself away to get into this wonderful thing that’s happening. You want to throw yourself into it, move with it, forget your own plan, forget trying to save anything for yourself.

Adam and Eve failed that test. Israel in the desert failed it, too. But Jesus passed it—in the desert face to face with Satan, and also on Golgotha. His self-surrender to the Father’s plan was total. And so, he opened the way back to paradise.

Obedience is the penance of all penances, the asceticism of all asceticisms. Temptations are always there: to take back our autonomy, our control over our own lives. They are always there, confronting us. Our overcoming them is the road from the barrenness of the desert to the place of life where the water of life flows.

If we look at it thoroughly—theologically—we don’t really return to paradise. Instead, we go to the future, to the goal. We move towards the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem, coming down from heaven like a bride adorned for her husband.

This is God’s dwelling among men, where God lives in our midst. His presence and the presence of the Lamb are the light that fills our spirits, minds, hearts, and lives—transfiguring everything, giving us new eyes to see.

We are planted by the river of the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing in the midst of the city, drawing the "paradise life" from the Holy Spirit, who is the river flowing from the throne of God.

This is where the whole universe is moving. This is the plan of God. We are invited to take our place in that plan, to help bring it about.

Our pattern is Mary. She utterly surrendered to God’s will. Born in a little village in a remote, backward province of the Roman Empire, she surrendered to the angel’s message, to the role she was invited to assume.

Giving up whatever plans she might have had for her own life, any glory she might have had even within her village, she surrendered herself and her life to all the implications of this new role (most of which she probably didn’t know at the beginning); surrendering herself for God to do whatever he wished through her.

She wasn’t erased from existence as a result of her surrender, was she? She’s not just a nobody now. She is at the peak of the Father’s plan to transform the world. And she is still the channel for this lavish outpouring of the transforming Spirit on all of creation.

—From Restoration, March 2000.