Discipline and tenacity are not always incompatible with freedom and flourishing. This is understood by Will McLean, the protagonist in Pat Conroy’s novel The Lords of Discipline.[1] Will is a cadet at the Carolina Military Institute in Charleston, South Carolina, a thinly veiled pseudonym for The Citadel. It’s not the likely choice of a school for him, but he attends the Institute to honor a promise made to his father on his deathbed. While Will is a vocal critic of the Institute’s draconian culture, he also seems to possess a tacit respect for the values of discipline and integrity upheld by that same institution.
Will McLean isn’t a typical cadet. His shoes are never polished. He detests the unnecessary hazing rituals at the Institute. And he doesn’t subscribe to the explicit racism that is a toxic presence on campus. Will finds himself at odds with the Institute’s President, the primary lord of discipline and a military general who is known for his past cruelty on the battlefield, as well as his current ruthlessness in making a tough military institute even tougher. This general idolizes toughness in and of itself. He has a vision of America as weak and flabby, and the Institute is a mechanism for changing that.
But Will McLean reveals a depth of character not found in many of the other cadets. On the surface, he seems to flaunt the Institute’s standards. But at a deeper level, he is perhaps the most honorable of all, refusing to be party to a culture of hatred and prejudice even as he sticks with the system. Will is able to stay in the game with people who behave and think differently than he does. If the Institute lets him down, he will not let it down. It’s as if he believes there is something greater than the dysfunctional environment he sees on the surface. His personal discipline is borne out of a trust in perseverance, a trust that he is made stronger in maintaining his own values despite the odds.
While the other cadets seem to prize discipline for the clarity it gives to their confused lives, Will is disciplined in challenging the status quo, maintaining an openness of mind, and not giving up when things get rough. There’s great integrity in a willingness to question an established system while remaining a part of it, hoping and believing that it can be better. For Will McLean, it’s as if he can see beyond the restrictive present into a future that bears more possibilities than he can imagine.
There’s something of this spirit of perseverance and discipline in Abraham. Although he hasn’t yet been renamed by God in today’s reading, let’s just call him Abraham for simplicity’s sake. Abraham is remarkably tenacious. By this point in the story, he has left his home in Ur of the Chaldees, uprooting his family and moving to the land of Canaan based on nothing more than a call from God and a promise that God will make a great family of his descendants. Abraham is keeping his end of the deal with God.
When we encounter Abraham in today’s lesson, it’s the third time God has promised a family for him. But still, Abraham has no biological child. Abraham has endured a sojourn in Egypt and gone into battle to rescue his nephew Lot from captivity. He has been on the go constantly, all to follow God’s command. And yet, by chapter 15, Abraham has no biological son.
Abraham is no pushover, though, and he demonstrates this precisely because he questions God’s failure to give him a son. He assumes that a slave will be his heir. He hasn’t given up on God; he’s just reformulated what the realization of God’s plan will look like. Indeed, it will not be until chapter 21 that Abraham’s wife, Sarah, will conceive. And they produce a child when Sarah is in her nineties and Abraham is 100.
To understand Abraham’s integrity more clearly, we need to take him off a simplistic pedestal. For centuries, since St. Paul and the Letter to the Hebrews extolled Abraham as the prime exemplar of faith, we have been tempted to imagine Abraham as a guileless, simple man who easily comes to his faith. But this only undercuts the depth of his faith. Abraham’s faith is realized most potently in his ability to trust in God despite the appearance that God isn’t honoring his end of the deal. Abraham is not some long-suffering puppet that God manipulates for a secret purpose. Abraham sticks with God and stays with God, patiently persevering with a rugged hope that there’s something he doesn’t yet understand.
The God and Creator of all is not some lord of discipline who demands Abraham’s patience, or our patience, out of an arbitrary cruelty. He doesn’t string us along because he revels in our submission. What we see in Abraham’s relationship with God is the confluence of two visions and two kinds of time. Abraham lives, as we do, with earthly, fallible dreams of what God will and can do for us. Abraham, like we often do, attempts to control God’s plan for him, assuming that his heir must be his slave since he and Sarah seem incapable of procreation and God has taken his slow, sweet time in honoring his promise.
But Abraham must come to understand what we often fail to understand, too. God’s vision exceeds all that we can desire or imagine. Its infinite possibilities explode the finite constraints of our human minds. And God’s eternity is simply his nature, his way of being creative, loving, and merciful, while those of us who toil on earth imagine that God is just stringing us along as some twisted lord of discipline.
And so, when Abraham’s impatience and finite vision rub up against God’s patience and infinite vision, God leads Abraham outside and shows him the sky. Try to count the stars in the night sky, God says. Try to imagine a universe and a way of being infinitely larger than your human mind can comprehend. Try to imagine how a patient, disciplined life can lead to flourishing and freedom. And above all, trust that I will honor my promise. I always have, and I always will.
God doesn’t honor his promise because Abraham is faithful. God has always intended to keep his promises. And God deems Abraham faithful because Abraham stays in the game and questions a God who is big enough to handle those questions. This is where discipline, perseverance, and integrity rise to the fore.
What a far cry Abraham’s persistence is from our low-commitment culture, where it’s acceptable to give up when we don’t feel like doing something anymore or when things aren’t going our way or when we don’t understand something. How easily we throw in the towel when confronted with an intractable problem or confounding mystery. How natural it is to be deeply committed at the beginning and then fall away as things get tough. But this is not the way of Abraham.
Discipline has fallen out of favor, because we understand it to be something negative. In our minds, we picture the lords of discipline of Pat Conroy’s novel, those cruel dictators and teachers demanding submission because of their own insecurity or need for power. And this dislike of discipline and good habits has infected our spiritual lives. We have come to think of spiritual discipline as just one more guilt mechanism wielded by the great Lord of Discipline in the sky.
But we have forgotten the virtues of sticking with things, of trusting in the promises of God, even when the world seems to be falling apart or the Church seems to be dying or we can’t explain the pain and sorrow that haunt us. The integrity of the Christian life comes not from trusting in easy promises or certainties but in patiently navigating through times of confusion.
In Conroy’s novel, the merciless general who heads up the military institute gives an impassioned speech to welcome new cadets and their families to the institute. He lauds strictness and discipline as tools to uphold American might and strength. He explains how breaking down all the cadets will turn them into true men. Then, he walks off the stage to enthusiastic cheers.
But Will McLean can see through it all. He knows those hasty acclamations are offered by hundreds of cadets who won’t survive even the first rigorous week at the institute, much less the whole year. But he is the real man of honor, the one who ostensibly defies customs, questions the system and nevertheless sticks with it through thick and thin. He is the one who has the integrity, openness, and moral virtue to see past the system’s limitations and encourage it towards something better.
There’s very little virtue in sticking with a God who offers us clarity at every turn. But when we can forge a path through our questions and doubts, trusting that God has something larger for us in store, we begin to see something of the path charted by our Lord. He was the one who agonized in the garden on the eve of his death, weeping tears of blood, until he was finally able to say perfectly what only we can desire to say: not my will but yours be done.
So, go outside and count the stars if you can. Trust in a God whose vision far surpasses ours. And through thick and thin, stay with the God who is not the Lord of discipline but the Lord of love.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
August 10, 2025
[1] Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline (New York: Dial Press Trade Paperbacks, 1980, reprint 2002)