The following day we discussed the opposite, bringing before the group all the advantages and benefits of this obedience which each one had drawn from his prayer and meditation. Each one in turn proposed the results of his prayerful reflection, sometimes by deducing impossible conclusions, sometimes simply by direct affirmation.
For example, one reduced the case to the absurd and impossible: “If our Company attempted to take care of practical matters without the sweet yoke of obedience, no one would have a specific responsibility, since one would leave the burden of such responsibilities to another, as we have often experienced.”
Similarly: “If this Company exists without obedience, it cannot long remain in being and continue. Yet, this is in conflict with our primary intention of perpetually preserving our Company in being. Consequently, since nothing preserves a company more than obedience, it seems necessary – especially for us who have vowed perpetual poverty and who live our lives in arduous and continual labors both spiritual and temporal, in which a company is less likely to continue in being.”
Another spoke affirmatively thus: “Obedience brings about constant actions of heroic virtue. For a man who lives under obedience is most prompt to carry out whatever is demanded of him, even if this be extremely hard or even if it leads to his being embarrassed and laughed at and to being a spectacle to the world – for example, if it were commanded me that I should go through the public streets naked or dressed in eccentric clothes (granted that this might never be commanded.) When a man is perfectly ready to do this, denying his own will and judgment, he is constantly practicing heroic virtue and increasing his merit.”
Similarly: “Nothing so lays low all pride and arrogance as does obedience. For pride puffs up and follows one’s own judgment and will, giving way to no one, striving for grandiose and spectacular projects beyond one’s powers. Now, obedience directly counters this, for it always follows the judgments and will of another, gives way to everyone, and is identified as much as possible with humility, which is the enemy of pride.”
And: “Although we have given ourselves over to all obedience both universal and particular to the supreme pontiff and pastor, nevertheless, he would not be able to take care of our particular and occasional needs, which are innumerable – now would it be fitting for him to do so if he could.”
And so after many day of thinking though the many pros and cons of our problem and examining the more serious and weighty arguments, while carrying out our usual exercises of prayer, meditation, and reflection, at last, with the help of the Lord, we arrived at our conclusion, not just by a majority but without even one dissenting: that it would be more expedient and even necessary to vow obedience to one of our companions in order that we might better and more exactly fulfill our principal desires or accomplishing the divine will in all things, and in order that the Company might be more surely preserved in being, and finally, that all individual matters that might occur, both spiritual and temporal, might be provided for properly.
Retaining the same method of discussion and procedure in all remaining questions, always proposing both sides, we continued in these and other deliberations for nearly three months from the middle of Lent through the feast of John the Baptist. On this day everything was terminated and concluded joyfully and in complete concord of spirit – not without having previously engaged in many vigils and prayers and labors of mind and body before we had deliberated and made our decision.
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