This means that the world — which finds its restoration and fulfillment in the Church — is the bride of God and that in sin this fundamental relationship has been broken, distorted. And it is in Mary — the Woman, the Virgin, the Mother — in her response to God, that the Church has its living and personal beginning. This response is total obedience in love; not obedience and love, but the wholeness of the one as the totality of the other. Obedience, taken in itself, is not a “virtue”; it is blind submission, and there is no light in blindness.
Only love for God, the absolute object of all love, frees obedience from blindness and makes it the joyful acceptance of that alone which is worthy of being accepted. But love without obedience to God is “the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (1 Jn. 2 : 16), it is the love claimed by Don Juan, which ultimately destroys him. Only obedience to God, the only Lord of Creation, gives love its true direction, makes it fully love.
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From Fr. Al. Schmemann’s, For the Life of the World.
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