Rod Dreher's Blog, page 508

The Story Of Your Life

Emily Esfahani Smith has a book coming out next month: The Power of Meaning: Crafting A Life That Matters.  Smith — a wonderful, engaging writer — writes about the ways that all of us search for meaning. She says meaning rests on four pillars:

Belonging: We all need to find our tribe and forge relationships in which we feel understood, recognized, and valued—to know we matter to others.



Purpose: We all need a far-reaching goal that motivates us, serves as the organizing principle of our lives, and drives us to make a contribution to the world.



Storytelling: We are all storytellers, taking our disparate experiences and assembling them into a coherent narrative that allows us to make sense of ourselves and the world.

Transcendence: During a transcendent or mystical experience, we feel we have risen above the everyday world and are connected to something vast and meaningful.

I’m particularly interested in the storytelling part. One of the most surprising findings in my Benedict Option research was social anthropologist Paul Connerton’s belief that storytelling is essential to a tribe or other social grouping preserving itself, and its cultural memory. See my earlier post for much more detail on that point.  Connerton contends that if a people’s “sacred story” is to be retained in its collective memory, then it must be told ritually, in particular ways. I adapted that insight to my Benedict Option chapter on Worship.

In the Storytelling chapter of her book, Esfahani Smith says that psychologists observe people telling two particular kinds of stories to make sense of their suffering: redemption stories, and contamination stories.

The moral of every redemption story is, “Despite all these terrible things happening, good came out of it, and I was able to move on, strengthened.” The moral of every contamination story is, “And after all that, nothing was ever the same again.”

In her book, Esfahani Smith, who holds a Master’s Degree in applied positive psychology from Penn, quotes a psychologist saying that

mental illness is often the result of a person’s inability to tell a good story about his or her life. Either the story is incoherent, or inadequate, or it’s a “life story gone awry.” The psychotherapist’s job is to work with patients to rewrite their stories in a more positive way. Through editing and interpreting his story with his therapist, the patient comes to realize, among other things, that he is in control of his life and that some meaning can be gleaned from whatever hardship he has endured. As a result, his mental health improves. A review of the scientific literature finds that this form of therapy is as effective as antidepressants or cognitive behavioral therapy.

That really struck me, because I lived through it myself, and documented all of it in How Dante Can Save Your Life. I previously thought that the redemption story I had to tell was about how my sister’s death, and the way she faced it, healed something in me and made it possible for me to return to our hometown. Ruthie kept saying as she battled cancer not to despair, because if she didn’t make it, God would bring good out of it somehow. Well, for me, that was a good, a gift for which I gave her thanks, and tried to repay in some way by writing a book-length tribute to her. Every time somebody writes to say how that book, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, changed their life in a good way, I send that on to my mom (and to my dad, while he was alive), as testimony to the truth of Ruthie’s confidence that good would come out of her suffering.

But what I thought was a redemption story turned into a contamination story after I finished that book. It turned out that coming home, I had to face down some fierce dragons that I had not realized were there. As longtime readers know, I fell into a deep depression, one that also made me physically ill. What brought me out of it was my therapist, my priest, and reading Dante’s Divine Comedy.

It’s a story familiar to you longtime readers, and I won’t bore you with it again. I’m thinking about it, though, as a personal example of the truth Esfahani Smith writes about here. The same set of facts can produce a redemption story or a contamination story. The goal my therapist and my priest set for me (though not formally) was to step back from the story and try to see what God was trying to show me through the unfolding of the plot.

For me, the spell was so powerful that it took entering fully into another man’s story, Dante Alighieri’s, to break its hold on me. The Divine Comedy is a work of fiction that came out of its author’s own suffering. It is a redemption story without peer. What the poet does is show how his ultimate redemption required him to sojourn through Hell (Inferno) for a time — Hell being a place where he had to confront without fear or dissembling his own sins and failings, so that he could repent of them. Purgatorio, part two of the book, showed how he, with God’s help and the help of others, rebuilt his life and gained moral and spiritual strength. Paradiso, part three, shows the completion of his journey, which is to say, Dante’s story.

And, like a Hero, he is charged with going back and telling the world what he saw on his journey.

I am certain that the only way I could have turned my contamination story into a redemption story is through Dante’s story, through which the poet did the same thing for himself. In my case, the contamination story did, in fact, become a redemption story, and it ended with me spending the last eight days of my father’s life at his bedside, caring for him as he died. He died with me holding his hand. Not everything had been put right between us, but on a deeper level, everything had been put right within me, and between God and me. And I knew that none of this redemption would have happened without the events that turned my story into a contamination story.

Christianity teaches us that all contamination stories can become redemption stories if we want them to be. The worst contamination story of all — God himself in the form of a man, innocent but condemned to torture and death — became the best possible redemption story, with Jesus Christ’s resurrection making it possible for all of us to overcome death.

In Dante’s Inferno, every one of the damned is stuck on themselves and their own suffering. They got there because in life, they insisted on placing themselves and their own desires first. They themselves were the point of their own story, which ended with eternal contamination. Those who sought the will of God, and who were willing to accept suffering and unite it in some way to the story of Jesus Christ, found redemption in eternity. There’s a marvelous scene in Dante’s Purgatorio when the pilgrim gets to the terrace upon which the Gluttons are purged of their tendency to sin. He is shocked to see his old friend Forese Donati there in a crowd of emaciated souls singing hymns of praise to God. How can you be so obviously miserable, but so filled with joy? Dante asks Forese, who answers:

“All these people who weep while they are singing

followed their appetites beyond all measure,

and here regain, in thirst and hunger, holiness.

 

“The fragrance coming from the fruit

and from the water sprinkled on green boughs

kindles our craving to eat and drink,

 

“and not once only, circling in this space,

is our pain renewed.

I speak of pain but should say solace,

 

“for the same desire leads us to the trees

that led Christ to utter Eli with such bliss

when with the blood from His own veins He made us free.”

And there it is. Had these souls been suffering from starvation in Hell, their story would have been a contamination story. But because they belonged to Christ, they experienced their story as a temporary condition designed to purge them of selfishness and unite them even closer to God. The point the poet Dante wants to make is the same as Emily Esfahani Smith speaks of: that we have free will, and with it, the ability to interpret the facts of our own lives and put them into a coherent narrative. Dante called his great 14,000-line poem a “comedy” not because it’s humorous, but because unlike a tragedy, it has a happy ending. Everything that went wrong in Dante’s life to deliver him to the dark wood, where there was no light or meaning, and where he was confused and trapped, served as the means through which God brought him to repentance, to ultimately to salvation. A key line in the entire poem is the testimony of Piccarda Donati, in heaven, who tells the pilgrim Dante not to try to make too much sense of how and why God does things, but only to trust in His love and the hope that gives us, because “In His will is our peace.”

It’s hard. It can be very, very hard. Most every day I have something come up that challenges me. Our story is not finished until we die. The temptation to surrender redemption and fall into the self-pity of a contamination story is always present. The goal of Christianity is not simply to bring us to eternal salvation, but to begin to heal us in this life. For most of us, at some level, this means learning how to tell our own stories according to the master plot, which is a comedy, which is redeeming, which is a happy ending, despite all appearances.

If you can grasp why the martyr’s crown was so prized by the early Church, you will have grasped the essence of what it means for a true Christian to tell the story of her life. And, as the French Catholic writer Léon Bloy said, the only true tragedy in life is not to have been a saint — that is, in a sense, the opportunity to use the authorship God gives each of us over our own lives, and to have written a redemptive ending.

I’m going to be away from the keys most of today. Headed right now to get a rental car to replace the one damaged in the car accident, and then going to see the sports medicine doc about the pain in my neck and back. If you have any stories to share, especially about how you turned a contamination story into a redemption story, please do. Make yourself anonymous if you feel the need to. I’ll approve comments as I can.

The book is The Power of Meaning by Emily Esfahani Smith. She offers clear, compelling, and above all useful advice for how to live with meaning and purpose. One more thing from Dante: at the very end of the Commedia, when he gets to the end of time, before the throne of God, he sees all the things that ever happened gathered together into a big book, a story ordered

by love into a single volume bound,

the pages scattered through the universe

UPDATE: I should make clear that Emily Esfahani Smith’s book is a book about applied psychology, not religion — though religious people like me will approach it from that way.

The Neo-Reactionary Ben Op

Reader Raskolnik sees a radical side to the Benedict Option:

One point I’ve heard repeatedly from the nationalist right is that “conservatism” failed to actually conserve anything. And looking at the contours of Western social history from 1950 to 2020, it’s hard to disagree.

The brutal reality is that “standing athwart history yelling stop” accomplishes, and has accomplished, absolutely nothing. The reason is that this formulation of the conservative project accepts the fundamental premises of progressivism, that history is a thing with a telos, and that this telos is only intelligible in terms of utopian political discourse (as opposed to, say, the Second Coming of Christ). As such, so-called “conservatism” is fundamentally progressive, as it contains within itself the seeds of the progressive political project.

I think this is nowhere more visible than in the de facto collusion between those who would tear apart the fabric of the natural family for ideological reasons (same sex “marriage” etc.) and those who would do so for economic ones, worshipping the free market at the altar of Moloch. Trump’s election illustrates that the new operative political dichotomy is in fact between the extremely trendy rightthinkers in control of Hollywood and the academy, who are “fiscally conservative and socially liberal”–the de facto position of the institutional Republican Party at least since 2000 and arguably much longer–on the one hand, and the irredeemable deplorables who are socially conservative and fiscally liberal on the other. Again, the truth of the matter is that Conservatism, Inc. not only (perhaps even deliberately) failed to conserve the natural family or religious liberty or the sanctity of human life or pretty much anything else; it did so precisely because it was ideologically aligned with global capital on one side and the cultural commissars of the sexual revolution on the other. This was not an accident, it was baked into the Buckley/Kristol cake.

This is why I think that if Western civilization has a future, this future can only be secured through a (neo)reactionary stance that not only fails to give even a single inch to the ideology of the so-called ‘enlightenment,’ but fiercely and actively opposes it. It is quite simply not enough to give in to the idea of history as Progress, and only quibble about the rate of this so-called ‘progress.’ Under these circumstances, the ratcheting effect will only accelerate, as it has over the past half-century+. The only solution is to eradicate the modernist paradigm, root and branch. Which is why the Benedict Option is our only hope.

I had not really thought of the Benedict Option as a neoreactionary project, mostly because I know little about neoreaction. What I do know — and this is something I speak to in the book — is that the logic of the Enlightenment has deposited us on this far shore. Liberal democracy is a fruit of the Enlightenment, but we are discovering that it cannot produce within people the sentiments it needs to sustain itself. This, I believe, is what Adams meant when he wrote that the US Constitution is fit only for a “moral and religious” people. Without religion, the passions of men will tear through the Constitution like a whale through a net, he wrote.

Anyway, the Ben Op definitely sees in the Enlightenment the seeds of the dissolution of religious belief.

The Benedict Option’s prime goal is to build resilient communities of traditional Christian faith that can stand in opposition to the post-Christian progressive ethos, and sustain themselves across generations. Apropos of Raskolnik’s comment, I spoke to a reporter earlier this week about the Ben Op, and told him that while the Indiana RFRA and Obergefell were the immediate catalysts for this idea spreading, we would absolutely need the Benedict Option even if Republicans had been in power for years and years, and even if same-sex marriage didn’t exist. Philip Rieff in 1966 and Alasdair MacIntyre in 1981 saw exactly where we were and where we were going. The Republican Party may not be as eager to get there as the Democrats are, but they’re both taking us in the same direction.

I invite readers who know more about neoreaction than I do (which, again, is next to nothing) to comment on how the Benedict Option fits into it conceptually. Note well that I will not be approving comments that merely want to express anger or disgust with neoreaction. I’m trying to learn something here. I know this much: as the Benedict Option is a Christian movement, it must have nothing to do with racism and anti-Semitism. Not all neoreactionaries are racists or anti-Semites, but those who are will receive hospitality in any “monastery” I’m a part of in spite of their views, which I strongly believe must be unwelcome.

View From Your Table

Frisco, Texas

Memories Pizza: Where The Trump Revolution Began?

A reader in Chicago sends this video clip in which the notorious Milo Yiannopoulos takes his crew to visit Memories Pizza and interviews the owners about their experience last year. You’ll remember Memories Pizza as the small-town Indiana pizza shop whose Evangelical Christian owners were more or less set up by an Indiana TV reporter, amid the Indiana RFRA debacle, who asked them if they would cater a gay wedding. They said no, an answer which, upon broadcast, brought down a hateful national mob on their heads. They closed the business for a few days, and considered never opening again. They got death threats. I wrote about it all here at the time, saying:

This may not be the America the gay rights movement and its allies, especially in the media, wanted. But this is the America they have created. And it’s just starting.

I don’t know that I ever would have recommended watching a Milo video, but this one is genuinely informative, even moving. The interview with owners Kevin O’Connor and his daughter Crystal doesn’t start until the nine-minute mark, so fast-forward. They are gentle, kind, normal, small-town people. This interview really amplifies the horror of what the Social Justice Warrior mob did to them. It’s a relief to see that their business still thrives.

Milo points out in the interview that the O’Connors have no problem serving gay clientele — they served him, after all. He also says in the interview that he believes the liberal mob descending on their heads is one of the events that shocked a lot of Americans into voting for Donald Trump. Trump was not a candidate at that point, of course; what he means is that seeing what the left can and will do to the little guy, all in the name of #LoveWins™, helped radicalize a lot of middle-American people towards Trump.

It’s an impossible claim to prove, but I think Milo is onto something. If you’ve been reading me for a while, you know that I’ve been talking about the Benedict Option for at least a decade. It has never really taken off. After the Indiana RFRA event, of which Memories Pizza was a key part, interest in the Benedict Option really took off. That was the catalyst for a lot of conservative Christians. I noted this in the manuscript for The Benedict Option, but I had not thought about all that being a catalyst (not the catalyst, but a catalyst) for the Trump campaign until Milo said so. I did note in my manuscript that the refusal of the GOP to stand firm in the face of Big Business pressure was revealing. Perhaps this too, at some level, worked to Trump’s advantage, signaling to conservative Christians at the grassroots level that whatever his many sins and failings, Trump was not a guy who was going to be intimidated by political correctness.

Interesting theory, anyway.

Conservative Professor Confesses All

Mike Spivey, a reader and commenter on this blog, chairs the mathematics department at the University of Puget Sound, a highly progressive campus in the Pacific Northwest. Following the Trump election, he was dragooned invited to serve as the voice of conservatism on a faculty panel — this, even though he considers himself a moderate. He didn’t vote for Trump, but for Gary Johnson. Still, he is one of the most conservative people on that campus.

He writes about the experience in Inside Higher Ed. He decided to be open and honest with the audience. Here’s Spivey quoting his own remarks to the student audience that night:

“As I watched the election returns roll in last night, though, I was surprised to discover that I also felt kind of excited, maybe even elated. And so why is that?

“I grew up in a small town in north Louisiana in the 1980s: a world that is Southern, rural, conservative and Christian. I’m second-generation college: my grandparents worked at jobs like coal miner, gas station attendant, department-store clerk, farmer, beautician. For most of my adult life I’ve been an academic, though, and for the past 11 years, I’ve worked at a very progressive liberal arts college in one of the most progressive parts of the country. That has given me a sort of double vision or cultural whiplash at times.

“Hillary Clinton called my people ‘deplorable.’ She said we were ‘irredeemable.’ Our current president, who I think sees the world similarly, said that my people are bitter clingers who hold on to guns and religion because we don’t have anything else worthwhile in our lives. Why would I want to support someone

Mike Spivey

like that? Someone who talks that way about my people is not going to do a good job representing me. I’m glad she lost. I’ve got some concerns about Trump, but I’m glad Hillary Clinton lost.

“To understand this election, you have to understand that to be white working class means that you have almost no power. Not economic. Not cultural. Neither do you have the power that comes from moral authority, unlike most other victimized groups.

“To a large degree, Trump represents the revolt of the white working class. The revolt is partly economic. The cultural aspect is that they’re tired of being, in their minds, looked down on and condescended to by the people who run the country.

“I’ll hypothesize that, in some respects, the more Trump is mocked for his hair, his language, his racism, his sexism, his bigotry, the more the white working class says, ‘That’s how I’ve been treated, too. Trump is like me. Trump is one of us.'”

Spivey continues:

I wasn’t sure what to expect from my campus after saying this, in an emotionally charged room with hundreds of people. But it represented the culmination of something that had been building in me for years.

Building in him? How come? In his college, Spivey has:

… repeatedly found myself in situations where someone makes assumptions about everyone in the room, assumptions that I don’t share. The culprit has always been my Southernness, or my small-town background, or my Christian faith, or my lack of progressivism.

I remember the awkward silence that briefly followed when one of my students asked me outside of class whether I am religious, and I told him I am a Christian. I remember the snide comment about Texas at a faculty workshop. I remember a colleague’s casual dismissal of Fox News and the people who watch it. My mother watches Fox News. She’s one of most giving and selfless people I know — someone who dropped everything to do disaster relief work in south Louisiana in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Yes. Yes! I know so many people like that. More:

I remember others’ stories, too. I remember the two conservative students who vented in my office for half an hour, thankful that somebody was willing to listen to them. I remember the conservative colleague who told me that he’s tired of being a target and so he just keeps his head down now. I remember the alumnus who told me that he would never have dared to be out as a Christian on our campus because then he wouldn’t have had any friends.

Every institution has a culture and a set of shared norms, and an academic institution is no different. Those sacred values don’t come from the institution’s mission statement but arise from the shared set of beliefs held by the people who are part of it. A newcomer to a college may not ever be able to articulate that college’s norms, but he internalizes them every time an idea is praised with no countervailing opinion expressed. She internalizes them every time a group is criticized, and no one comes to that group’s defense. Over time the in ideas and out groups become part of the assumptions that people make. You don’t even think about them anymore. They’re like the oxygen in the air.

Where does that place you when you don’t share many of those norms? Sometimes you find yourself bewildered. On the literal level, the discussion is about Donald Trump or Barack Obama or George W. Bush or racism or transgender rights or environmental policy. But really the conversation is often about sacred values. [Emphasis mine — RD] When you don’t share the group norms, you feel shut out of the conversation because its very framing assumes the group norms. People don’t listen to the stories you use to explain your views because your stories are tied up with your norms — not theirs — and they don’t have a good mental place to connect them to. As a result, your stories get explained away.

This is so, so important. It’s Jonathan Haidt 101. I am certain that the reason our national media are so bad at interpreting conservatives and nationalists is because they live inside a tight bubble defined by their own sacred values, and cannot recognize that decent people might not hold them. As Haidt has repeatedly pointed out from his own research, conservatives understand liberals better than liberals understand conservatives. Dr. R.B.A. DiMuccio explains Haidt’s finding:

These foundations help us categorize people based on their most essential moral beliefs. Those who tend to see morality mostly through the prisms of Care/Harm and Fairness/Cheating are “liberal.” If your moral compass tends more toward Authority/Subversion and Sanctity/Degradation, you are “conservative.” Simple enough.

But Haidt’s second major discovery is far more consequential:  the concept of “the conservative advantage.” Based on painstaking cross-cultural social-psychological experimentation, Haidt establishes that the moral foundations of liberals and conservatives are not just different, they are dramatically unequal. The liberal moral matrix rests essentially entirely on the left-most foundations; the conservative moral foundation—though slanted to the right—rests upon all six.

This is a stunning finding with enormous implications. The first is that conservatives can relate to the moral thinking of liberals, but the converse is not true at all. Haidt, who is liberal himself, elegantly explains how and why conservatives will view liberals as merely misguided while liberals tend to view conservatives as incomprehensible, insane, immoral, etc.

Another implication is that liberal prescriptions tend to be incredibly single-minded as compared to those of conservatives. Haidt uses the metaphor of a bee hive to illustrate. A liberal [N.B. Haidt now identifies as a moderate — RD], finding a bee in the hive suffering from injustice, is motivated more or less exclusively by the desire to get justice for the bee. A conservative, being partially driven by the Care/Harm foundation, also desires to alleviate the injustice, but tries to find a solution that also contemplates the survival of the hive itself.

To restate the problem: because the moral matrix for liberals is all but entirely bounded by Care/Harm and Fairness/Cheating considerations, people whose moral foundations are more complex than that are seen by liberals to be immoral. In turn, the moral reasoning of conservatives appear to many liberals as exercises in rationalizing immorality. To admit that conservatives have a point is to compromise with evil.

Back to Mike Spivey:

You can always try to go deeper, of course. However, trying to get the group to look hard at its assumptions and then trying to explain why you don’t share them is difficult and exhausting. And even when you do have the energy, it’s easy to transgress some norm that you didn’t see and then face an unexpected blast directed at you. That makes you want to engage even less.

Besides, there are much easier options. You can become cynical. You can become angry. You can start hating the group. You can nurture your pain and envision yourself as a beleaguered minority. You can start throwing rhetorical explosives, which sure feels good — at first. You can find another group. I’ve been tempted by most of these possible actions and have committed several of them.

The story that I’m telling here is about me at a progressive liberal arts college and slowly identifying more over time as conservative. It could also be the story of the white working class at the national level. And that brings me back to Trump and the post election panel.

Read the whole thing to find out why, to his great surprise, Spivey left the panel feeling hopeful.

 

Nationalism Vs. Conservatism

The election of 2016 was a triumph for the right wing, but not necessarily for conservatism, Mark Movsesian says. Excerpts:

Still, taken together, the political events of 2016 reflect an important common theme: the resurgence of nationalism across the West. Although other factors are also involved and nationalism’s revival has not been complete—in Austria this past weekend, mainstream parties worked together to defeat decisively a nationalist candidate for president—throughout this year, nationalist resistance to global liberalism turned out to be the most influential force in Western politics.

To be sure, traditional conservatism played a role in these developments—but only an indirect one. Although the Right, broadly defined, achieved victories in the United States and Europe, what we think of as “movement conservatism” did not. In Britain, the leaders of the Conservatives opposed Brexit; in America, many conservatives opposed Trump. In France, the Republican Party has worked hard to distance itself from the National Front, which it views as an embarrassment. In Italy, the Five Star Movement declares itself non-aligned and draws votes from both the Left and the Right.

Nor did Christian conservatism triumph in 2016. True, the majority of British Christians wanted their country out of the European Union and the majority of American Christians voted for Trump (the members of some denominations by wide margins). But both the Brexit campaign and the American election downplayed religious themes. Trump did not make Christian values a centerpiece of his agenda. Many Christians who supported him did so from a fear of what a Hillary Clinton administration would mean for their religious freedom rather than a belief that Trump shared their values. In France, the National Front’s Marine Le Pen strongly supports secularism. For an express appeal to Catholic values, one must turn instead to the Republican Party’s candidate, François Fillon.

In short, although traditional conservatism has been on the winning side in recent political contests, it has been a junior partner in a larger project: the revival of nationalism.

Movsesian goes on to define nationalism, and to say that it can take beneficial or malign forms. It’s easy to see why people in the Rust Belt and elsewhere who have suffered from globalism would go for someone like Trump, but Movsesian points out that a lot of higher income folks who have no real economic incentive to vote Trump did so. He’s not sure that the Trump vote here, and the rise of nationalist parties in other Western countries, means that voters are rejecting liberalism: “they may just want a liberalism tied to a coherent national community.

Liberalism is not simply an abstract set of propositions; it is a tradition embedded in a particular political culture. Ultimately, it depends on a shared identity beyond markets and human rights, on a cultural and social unity that transcends cheaper prices and due process of law. A global liberalism divorced from local communities is a pale substitute for the deeper sources of belonging to which people naturally turn when they face a crisis. That, more than anything else, is the key political lesson of 2016.

Read the whole thing. Is it possible for liberalism to reform itself by drawing nationalist limits around itself? If so, how? Can it do so and still be liberalism?

And: if nationalism defeated the standard conservatism this year, what does that say about how conservatism is changing? Alasdair MacIntyre famously said that in the West, there are three kinds of liberalism: liberal liberalism, conservative liberalism, and radical liberalism. Western politics simply is classical liberalism. So, will we see the parties of the right turning away from the pro-business, free trade gospel, and instead pursuing trade policies ordered by what is good for the nation, as distinct from the interests of the nation’s businesses? What does this have to say about politics and cultural issues? Never, ever forget that Trump got the overwhelming amount of the religious conservative vote, but he did not run on social and religious conservative themes. The unrelenting hostility of the Democratic Party to religious conservatives drove many into Trump’s arms.

Thoughts?

 

Benedict Option & The Spirit Of Pilgrimage

I’ve always said that I intend The Benedict Option book to be more of a catalyst for critical discussion than a manual to settle disputes. I was talking to a journalist about the Benedict Option project yesterday, and told him that there is no formula in the book, because the Ben Op is going to look somewhat different on the local level, owing to people’s religious traditions and their local circumstances.

For example, the Ben Op looks different for the Catholics living it out in the countryside near Clear Creek Abbey in rural eastern Oklahoma than it does for the Catholics of Hyattsville, Md., living it out in their neighborhood and parish classical school, St. Jerome’s. Yet the goal of both is to live out traditional, orthodox Catholicism together. This, of course, is true for Protestants and Orthodox Christians too. As you may recall, Julie and I reluctantly left our home in Starhill, in the country about 45 minutes north of Baton Rouge, to move to BR to be much closer to our parish church and the classical school our kids had started to attend. In other words, we came to the city for Benedict Option reasons.

Anyway, I’m really grateful to the Jesuit father Patrick Gilger for advancing the conversation about the Benedict Option in the pages of America. This is exactly the kind of talks I hope the book inspires among churches and small communities around the country. Father Gilger begins by referring to a Commonweal essay that progressive Catholic Gerald Schlabach wrote critical of the Benedict Option, and to my response. Father Gilger:

[Dreher’s] counter-argument is built around another key Benedictine concept: discipline. While Mr. Schlabach thinks that belonging to a religious community “is the ultimate goal of the Christian life,” Mr. Dreher argues that it is not belonging, but holiness that ought to remain the goal. The accompanying problem, then, is knowing when the community to which one currently belongs “no longer promotes holiness, but something else.” And the challenge consists in knowing when the “gap between holiness and what is taught and practiced [has grown] so great that one has to break communion.”

It is a fair point that Mr. Dreher makes. Essential even. We absolutely must talk about the gaps between teaching and practice that exist in our ecclesial communities. But there are two things, two priorities, that I want to add to the conversation.

Here is the first: We do have to talk about discipline, but we also have to talk about how disciplines are received and incorporated into a life. In my own, it took me real time—a couple of years even—after having entered the Society of Jesus to learn how to not let resistance or critique be my first reaction to church teaching. Those years were filled with dozens of conversations with a dedicated spiritual director, hundreds of liturgies, scores of hours learning to be quiet before the Lord. They were filled with practices, with dozens of them that, gentle warmths that they were, slowly melted away my resistance to being taught—a resistance that could well have hardened into a cold cynicism. It was only after years of learning to inhabit these practices of assent that I learned to ask myself: Am I willing to let myself be taught? Am I willing to inhabit a discipline of assent?

This is so true, and so important. On the day I was chrismated into the Orthodox Church, a fellow convert of many years told my wife and me that it would take us ten years to learn how to be Orthodox. That made no sense to me at all. Ten years on, it makes perfect sense, and for the reason that Father Gilger raises in the passage above. You don’t learn what it means to be a Christian by study alone. You learn by practice, or to be precise, practices that form the heart. These practices, as readers of my book will learn from my interviews with the Norcia monks, often have to be ascetic in nature — meaning that they will be hard. But they’re hard in the same way training the body is hard: they build up spiritual endurance, and make achieving spiritual excellence (that is, holiness) easier.

At first you submit to these disciplines out of obedience. Then, once you’ve been doing them for a while, they start to make sense to you. You see changes within yourself that couldn’t have happened any other way. You may recognize why these disciplines have been part of the Christian tradition for so long: because they work. For our Protestant friends, let me make clear that it’s not about earning your way to heaven, not at all. It is about submitting your entire self — Soul, Mind, and Body — the authority of Jesus Christ. The formative practices of which Father Gilger and the monks speak are not meritorious in and of themselves. They only have merit insofar as they break down our own selfish tendencies, which make it harder for us to receive God’s freely given grace. It is about teaching ourselves to want to be taught.

You can “take the Benedict Option” in the sense of moving to a certain place, or to a certain parish church, or putting your kids in a certain school, but none of it will make much difference if you don’t bolster your orthodoxy (right belief) with orthopraxy (right practices).

Father Gilger highlights what he calls the weakest part of my response, in which I anonymously cite the e-mail of one of my readers. Father Gilger sets it up like this:

In this story, the author [of the e-mail] details the lack of discipline in her/his parish—the slow leaking away of the communal practices that sustained a sense of identity. “After Mass,” the author concludes, “the older people hang around and shake hands with the pastor. Everyone else drives away. I know only a small handful of my fellow parishioners, and I hesitate to bring any of this up with them. It doesn’t seem worth it.”

Mr. Dreher cites this story a prime example of the kind of person he sees himself serving in proposing the Benedict Option. And—let me be clear—there are real needs here, and those needs require a pastoral response.  But for me what is so revelatory about this story is the closing line: “I hesitate to bring any of this up with them.”

To which Father Gilger has a good response, which is basically this: How are you going to be able to live out the Benedict Option when you can’t even bring yourself to talk to people at coffee hour at church? He says:

If we think the Benedict Option is going to be easier or more elegant than the messy reality of modern parish life, we have not yet seen it clearly.

He’s right about that, at least from what I’ve seen in my travels and research. There is no such place as utopia. The advantage of a Ben Op community is that it avoids the situation Father Gilger raises in this memorable line:  “There are no conversations to be had with those who refuse the discipline of speaking the same language.” Someone once told me that before the late 1960s and 1970s, the divisions between conservative and liberal Catholics were such that they shared the same moral and conceptual language with which to talk about the Church and its people.

Today that’s gone. Even when they use the same words, they aren’t always talking about the same thing. Small-o orthodox Catholics consider themselves bound by tradition, doctrine, and canon law. Progressives generally do not. What real conversations are there to be had with those who refuse the discipline of that common language? I couldn’t possibly count the number of conversations I’ve had over the years with Catholics who profess that whatever they believe is just as Catholic as what anybody other Catholic believes, and that there’s not a thing wrong with that, because of the primacy of their consciences.

A parish community in which everything is up for grabs is not one likely to form strong Catholics (or other Christians). It’s like trying to undertake a pilgrimage with people who think they’ve already arrived, or at least that there’s no particular goal for this journey, other than to make our aimless wanderings in the desert as comfortable as we can, ignoring the wisdom on how to complete a successful journey left behind by those who have made it before, because hey, why should we let other people tell us where to go and how to get there?

You will find it very hard to be a pilgrim in a community of people satisfied with being nothing more than tourists. And you will find it very hard to be a pilgrim by yourself. You need a community of fellow pilgrims, not tourists.

Thoughts? Read Father Gilger’s entire piece, which, again, I thank him for.

SJW Vs. NFL Star

Ricardo Lockette, a former player with the Seattle Seahawks, went to give an inspirational talk to a Seattle-area high school. I bet he doesn’t make that mistake again. Excerpts:

Intending to be motivational, former Seahawk Ricardo Lockette angered a group of Garfield High School students at an assembly Tuesday with remarks urging men to stand up for women.

The speech, part of the school’s push to promote leadership among student athletes, caused a group to stand up and attempt a walkout after what some called sexist remarks by the former professional athlete.

“He was pretty much saying that women need men in their lives to be successful,” said Julia Olson, a junior volleyball player in the audience who protested his remarks.

That response followed the former receiver’s asking the students how they expect their dads to respond to someone harassing their mothers, emphasizing that the male figures should speak up. Olson then challenged Lockette, saying, “Why can’t women stand up for themselves?”

Some in the crowd cheered her rebuttal. Lockette said he respected her leadership, and then he responded with what he said he would tell relatives:

“Even though you can handle your own, but as men — men stand up; men take the challenge; men take the lead; men take the head,” Lockette told the crowd, according to audio obtained by KOMO News.

More:

[Julia Olson] added the comments contradicted what she was learning in classes. “I didn’t feel comfortable staying. I didn’t want to listen to really anything else that was going to be said.”

Lockette continued speaking after the walkout, saying the goal of the appearance was to instill confidence and motivation. Reached by phone Tuesday evening, he said overall the speech “went great,” and by the end, “we agreed at what we’re saying.”

“We all need each other,” said Lockette, who retired from the NFL in May after suffering a life-threatening neck injury during a game last November in Dallas. “At the end of the day, it was all about helping each other.”

Read the whole thing.

Said Surly Temple, the (liberal) Seattle reader who sent me this story:

This makes me SO angry! I hope you are moved to blog about it.  The Seattle Seahawks  make a genuine effort to be positive leaders in the community.  This retired player took his own time to visit a HIGH SCHOOL and speak to the students.

Do you think the students listened respectfully to him–an African American professional athlete who has conducted himself with grace and courage in the face of a devastating injury that almost ended his life and did end his career?  Kids usually do respond positively to pro athletes. You do think they were respectful of this honored guest? Well, you’d be wrong.

You can agree or disagree with his remarks, but these students were incapable of hearing an argument and then evaluating it and being civil if they disagreed with his position.

Money quote to a female student who challenged him, from Mr. Lockette, the vile sexist:

“It’s totally great to be confident, but you can’t do everything by yourself. If this room, if this school, was totally all women … what would you do? You can’t run, run your world with just women; it’s impossible — it’s impossible. Just like if it was all men,” he said, “we wouldn’t be able to do it. We need each other.”

“We need each other.”  Fighting words apparently.

You can hear the audio of the speech here. Lockette is graceful under fire.

A couple of area radio hosts parsed the words of this professional football player, and found that he is devoid of Ciceronian eloquence and severely lacks feminist wokeness. They suggest that he have others read his remarks before going to talk to high school students again. Because saying that men have an obligation to treat women well and defend them is monstrous.

Those radio talkers are nitwits and Julia Olson is a spoiled brat. That young Social Justice Warrior is going to go to college, and complain incessantly about sexism and the need for safe spaces, and make a total nuisance of herself in the process of getting a useless women’s studies degree, which will teach her little more than how to be offended.

The day is going to come when Julia Olson wishes she had a strong, self-sacrificing husband who lived by the code that Ricardo Lockette spoke of in that assembly. You watch.

Poop Talk With Pope Francis

The in-no-way-like-Donald-Trump Pope Francis let fly with a memorable line today. From a press report:

Writing fake news and stories about scandals is like being sexually aroused by excrement, Pope Francis has said.

And since people tend towards coprophagia, or eating faeces, then the media should avoid spreading it, he said in an attack on the spread of disinformation.

Francis apologised for his use of precise psychological terms that describe when people are aroused by excrement.

He told the Belgian Catholic weekly Tertio that spreading fake news is “probably the greatest damage that the media can do”. To use their platforms to do so, rather than to educate the public, is a sin, he said.

“I think the media have to be very clear, very transparent, and not fall into – no offence intended – the sickness of coprophilia, that is, always wanting to cover scandals, covering nasty things, even if they are true,” he said in the interview.

“And since people have a tendency towards the sickness of coprophagia, a lot of damage can be done.”

The Vicar of Christ, ladies and gentlemen.

I know I’m the sort of person Francis would call “rigid,” but I think we could all stand a bit more rigidity from this guy.  Whoever thought they would live to see the day when the Roman pontiff gave an interview in which he raised the subject eating poo for sexual pleasure?

Bleg On Behalf Of Journalists

Hey readers, I’ve had two conversations this week with two national journalists asking me to put them in touch with folks for two different stories:

1. Are you a member of a family that is split harshly over politics? The Trump-Clinton election, I mean. If so, what is that like? How have you and your family handled it?

2. Were you raised in an authoritarian religion or religious environment, and because of that, you lost your faith, or changed to a different church or form of that religion?

I’m asking this on behalf of two different reporters for two different national news organizations. If you fit either description and are willing to talk about it on the record with a reporter, please indicate so in your comment on this thread — and make sure to leave an e-mail address I will send to the reporter. You are under no obligation to participate if the reporter contacts you.