Paraclesis

Values: Obedience — Adapting a Trail Life Lesson for Orthodox Spirituality

trails-lessons

Values: Obedience — Adapting a Trail Life Lesson for Orthodox Spirituality

Christ is in our midst!

For: Deacon, Leaders, All volunteers
Trail Life Context: Values Step 08 — adapting the official “Obedience Helps” into an Orthodox opening devotional
Time to prepare: 15-20 minutes

Earlier this year I sat down with the official Trail Life USA lesson Values Step 08: Obedience Helps and rewrote it as an Orthodox devotional. The result — To Obey Is Better Than Sacrifice — is one page (it spilled onto a second, but only because the Fathers had so much to say), built for a 15–20 minute meeting opening.

Here is what I changed, and why. I want to be clear about the posture from the start. The official lesson is a good document, written by serious Christians who clearly love boys and Scripture. Nothing here is a correction. These are humble suggestions — small tweaks that take Trail Life’s good instincts and set them on the theological ground the Church has always stood on. We don’t say “Trail Life is wrong.” We say, “There’s a theology beneath Trail Life’s good values, and it’s older, deeper, and Orthodox. Let me show you.”

As always: everything below is offered for your priest’s blessing, not his signature.

Two Documents, One Lesson

What we started with is a four-page lesson plan. It has a Purpose statement, five discussion questions, a Skills Progression for Fox, Hawk, and Mountain Lion patrols, a HELPS section (Goal → Lesson → Examples), activity ideas, games, and a Relevant Scriptures list. It’s thorough. It is, honestly, a small unit of Sunday-school curriculum: Simon Says, a cookie experiment called Flopped Cookies, verse cards to take home and tape to the bathroom mirror.

What we made is an opening devotional — the first fifteen minutes of a troop meeting, before the patrol work begins. It has a fixed format, the same in all seventeen devotionals of the series:

  1. An Opening question to hook the boys
  2. A Devotional teaching with one application line each for Fox, Hawk, and Mountain Lion
  3. A word From the Fathers, with a citation

That’s it. One page, one movement of the spirit.

Five Changes, Humbly Suggested

1. Number the commandments the way the Church numbers them

The official lesson tells Foxes to “Memorize the fifth Commandment” — Exodus 20:12, honoring father and mother. That’s the Reformed (Westminster) counting, which is what most American evangelical materials use: graven images gets its own commandment at #2, which shoves everything down by one.

The Church numbers from the Septuagint, the apostles’ Bible: “no other gods, no idols” stays together in the first, and the coveting commandment splits in two at the end. Under that count, honoring father and mother is the fourth commandment — which is exactly how the boys hear it read in church.

Humbly suggested: teach the Orthodox numbering, and note the difference for the men in the room so nobody thinks you’ve miscounted. The commandments themselves are the same ten. Only the counting differs. This is one of those small things that quietly trains boys to hear Scripture the way the Church has always pronounced it — and it spares them the jolt of hearing “fifth” at the meeting and “fourth” on Sunday.

2. From “learning to follow” to the burial of the will

The original lesson’s framing question is: “How does learning obedience help one be a better leader?” Its answer: almost all of history’s greatest leaders started by first becoming great followers. Obedience is presented as the first rung of a leadership ladder — learn to follow, then you’ll be fit to lead.

That’s true as far as it goes, and Trail Life (like all good youth formation) is right that a boy who can’t follow will never be worth following. But the Orthodox tradition takes obedience somewhere the ladder doesn’t go. We don’t obey in order to climb. We obey because self-will is the root of sin, and obedience is its medicine. This is why monks — grown men, saints, people far better than we are — take obedience as a way of life, not because their abbots are infallible, but because the will that says “my way” is precisely the will that fell and is precisely the will that needs healing.

St. John Climacus puts it in one line that a Mountain Lion can carry for the rest of his life: “Obedience is the burial place of the will and the resurrection of humility.”

Humbly suggested: keep Trail Life’s ladder — it’s a good civic truth — but put it on the deeper foundation. Obedience isn’t the entry requirement for leadership; it’s the training of the soul. A boy can be a leader someday without ever mastering this. He cannot be a saint without it.

3. Add the qualifier: obedience “in the Lord”

The original lesson leans hard on obedience-to-authority: “When we honor our parents, we are honoring God,” and five ways to show respect to those in charge. What it doesn’t say — and what an Orthodox Christian needs to hear — is the limit.

St. Paul writes, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord” (Eph 6:1). And St. John Chrysostom, commenting on that very phrase, is blunt: “if the father be a gentile or a heretic, we ought no longer to obey, because the command is not then, ‘in the Lord.’” No parent, no teacher, no king, no Trailmaster may command a boy to sin. Then — and only then — disobedience is the obedience.

Humbly suggested: give the boys both sides. Without the qualifier, obedience becomes blind submission, which isn’t Christian obedience at all — it’s just compliance. With the qualification, obedience becomes free: a chosen surrender to authority that has been weighed and found to stand “in the Lord.” Boys respect a line far more when they know where it is. And the quiet ones — the boys who are being asked to go along with things that trouble them — need to hear that the Church stands with them at that line.

4. From good manners to the sigh in the heart

The original offers “five ways we can show respect”: listen, look at the speaker, ask questions, say yes sir and no sir, say thank you and please. Fine advice. Mothers of Trailmen everywhere would approve.

But notice where it stops: on the outside. A boy can say “yes, sir” through gritted teeth and learn nothing but performance. So the rewrite moves the target one inch to the left, into the chest:

Obedience grumbled is half-disobedience; the Fathers prize the cheerful, instant “yes” — first-time obedience, like a well-drilled patrol.

The applications follow the same interior turn. Fox gets the practical one — when Mom or Dad calls, go right away, even mid-game; that’s training for sainthood — which is the original’s home-jobs example with the volume turned up. But Hawk gets the knife: obey without the sigh and the eye-roll; the sigh is where the will escapes. And Mountain Lion gets the real question: freely chosen obedience — to parents, to priest, to conscience — is strength, not weakness.

Humbly suggested: keep teaching the manners. But at the opening, aim at the will behind the manners. The manners are the fruit; the sigh is the root. You can fix a boy’s “yes, sir” in a week. The sigh takes a lifetime — which is exactly why it’s worth starting now.

5. From three Bible stories and four games to one story and the Fathers

The original lesson roams a little: Daniel in the lion’s den, Joshua’s forty years, Jonah and the fish, plus games and craft activities. All good. But a devotional that covers everything leaves no single thing impressed on the mind.

The rewrite picks up the one Scripture the official lesson itself puts in the Mountain Lion progression — “Learn the meaning of 1 Samuel 15:22” — and makes it the center of the whole piece. Saul keeps the best of the spoil in order to sacrifice it to God; disobeying in order to worship. Samuel’s answer has echoed ever since: “Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice.” One story, one sentence, one takeaway: God does not want our performances; He wants our wills. Partial obedience, dressed up as religion, is still disobedience.

Then comes the change I’d defend most vigorously: a From the Fathers section. The original lesson has no church fathers in it at all, this rewrite gives them the last word:

  • Climacus again, on obedience as burial of the will (Step 4 of The Ladder).
  • Chrysostom on the “in the Lord” guard.
  • And a small chorus on 1 Samuel 15:22 itself: Irenaeus of Lyons quoting it circa AD 180 as a prophecy of the New Covenant; Origen preaching it in his Leviticus homilies around 250; Gregory the Great — pre-schism, still read in Orthodox moral theology — distilling it: “In sacrifices another’s flesh is slain; in obedience, our own will.” Then the monastic stream: Climacus, Abba Dorotheos, Cassian.

Why bother with names and citations, when a paraphrase would fit more easily on one page? Three reasons. First, boys need to feel the weight of the years — that this isn’t Trail Life’s idea, or mine, but something the Church has taught from the beginning. Second, the citation lets a skeptical leader (or priest) go check the quote, which is the difference between devotion and hearsay. Third, it quietly answers the question every Orthodox family in a Protestant-founded program eventually asks: is any of this actually ours? Irenaeus reading Samuel in the second century affirms that it always was.

What We Kept

This rewrite is not a replacement of the official lesson; much of it is the official lesson, concentrated:

  • 1 Samuel 15:22 stays the spine — it was already in the Mountain Lion progression.
  • The Fox / Hawk / Mountain Lion progression stays, in three one-line applications instead of three pages of Goals and Lessons.
  • The practical, this-week application stays: chores done cheerfully, going the first time Mom calls. Orthodox spirituality is not an escape from obeying your parents; it is obeying your parents unto salvation.
  • Ephesians 6:1 stays — the original already cited it. We simply illuminated what it said.

The Finished Opening

For those who want to see the fullness of it, here’s how the devotional begins:

Ask: “Why do soldiers, pilots, and surgeons train to follow orders instantly?” (Because when it matters most, there’s no time to debate.) Then: “The Bible says obedience pleased God more than all the sacrifices in the temple. Today: why.”

And it ends, as every one of these devotionals does, with men who wrote long before Trail Life existed — handed over with their names and their books so anyone can go check them.

For Your Priest and Leadership

If your troop or church is working through the Trail Life values, here is the method in short, as this one lesson shows it:

  1. Take the official lesson as given. Don’t critique it in front of the boys.
  2. Ask where its good instinct bottoms out — in this case, obedience-as-technique — and go one level deeper, to where the Church teaches: the will, the heart, the Fathers.
  3. Cut scope, not conviction. The devotional does less than the lesson plan, on purpose.
  4. Add what the tradition has that the curriculum lacks: the sacramental life, the ascetic tradition, the witness of the saints — humbly, briefly, with citations.
  5. Keep what’s already true. Trail Life’s authors handed us 1 Samuel 15:22. We didn’t need to improve it; we needed to unpack it.

Not every lesson needed as much surgery as this one — and some, as I hope to write about when I can, carried more overtly Protestant assumptions that required a gentler but firmer subtraction. Obedience, by contrast, was mostly an addition: the bones were sound, and we simply put flesh on them.

Use this as a template, with your priest’s blessing. Each Trail Life value can be handled this way: take the good that’s already there, and show the Orthodox theological ground beneath it.

Coda

I, myself, might weave in Psalm 50 - I think it captures the character perfectly: For if thou hadst desired sacrifice I would have given it: Thou wilt not take pleasure in whole burnt offerings. Sacrifice to God is a broken spirit, a broken and humbled heart God will not despise.

That’s what I’ll be doing with the Navigators later in the meeting.

In Christ, Mark

Questions? Comments? How did this work in your troop? Share below.