Rod Dreher's Blog, page 620

Flood & Fatherhood

Father Matthew and the flooded Bayou Sara

Today is the Feast of Theophany in Old Calendar Orthodox churches. That means it’s the day we celebrate the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan. After the liturgy, traditionally the congregation goes to a nearby body of water, prays more, and the priest ceremonially tosses a cross into the deep. We usually go to the Mississippi River bank, but this year, everything is in flood, so the river came to us. We gathered at the water’s edge, at the bottom of what folks here call Catholic Hill. The water you see is Bayou Sara in flood, as well as the Mississippi; when the flood waters rise around here, the bayou and the river merge into one.

Theophany has particular meaning for me. From How Dante Can Save Your Life:

In the Orthodox Christian tradition, Theophany – from the Greek, meaning “appearance of God” – is the feast day commemorating the day that Jesus Christ was baptized in the river Jordan. When Jesus emerged from the water, the heavens opened and the Holy Spirit descended like a dove, alighting on the Christ. The voice of the Father said, “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.”

Our little flock gathered at the mission on a cold Sunday morning — January 19, in fact — to celebrate the liturgy. Father Athanasius, an old friend of Father Matthew’s, was visiting from the Northwest, and gave the sermon. He dwelled for some time on the blessing God the Father spoke over his Son. I could have listened to that kind of talk all day.



This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased. Here, in the middle of the journey of our life, for the first time ever, I was able to hear those words in church and believe that God meant them for me too.

I don’t know when, exactly, in my healing process this change came over me. I had finished Paradiso over the Christmas break, but there had been no aha moment. I just noticed one day, a couple of weeks into the new year, that I felt pretty good. No chronic fatigue. No daily naps. Nothing. It was gone.

The night before Theophany, I mentioned to Julie that for the first time since arriving home, I felt at home. Settled. Stable. Healed. Free. Nothing had changed externally; the change was all within. But I saw the world with new eyes now.

Yes, the Epstein-Barr virus remains in my body, and always will, and in periods of stress—which crop up every now and then—it takes me back down temporarily. But nothing like before. The change has been profound.

When Father Athanasius spoke of Jesus rising out of the river, I felt as though I had come not only out of a dark wood but also out of some turbulent waters, into a new life. After he finished his sermon, I thought, Today is the day that I finally came home. Theophany is the day I finally turned outside of myself and let God the Father embrace me and welcome me into his household.

Here was a very nice Theophany gift: an extremely kind review of How Dante from the noted Catholic writer and apologist Karl Keating. Excerpt:

It used to be that nearly everyone read parts of The Divine Comedy in school—at least passages from the Inferno, often accompanied by Gustave Doré’s illustrations. In recent decades Dante has been dropped from the curriculum in most places (so has Shakespeare; so have many others), and today many people seem wary of picking up a book—particularly a book of poetry—written in the Middle Ages. What could such a book possible have to say to me?

Everything, really.

Wordsworth famously wrote that the Virgin Mary is “our tainted nature’s solitary boast.” Let me make an analogy: The Divine Comedy is our civilization’s solitary literary boast. There is more sense (and sensibility) in it than in anything other than Scripture itself. There is healing in it because there is healing in seeing ourselves as we really are.

Rod Dreher remains in St. Francisville. He was able to be reconciled with his father before the latter’s recent death, and the gulf between him and his sister’s children has been narrowed. He overcame physical and spiritual ailments that quite literally imperiled his health, and he found a sense of peace that had eluded him most of his life. After God, he gives Dante credit for this, because Dante led him back to God. Will Dante also lead him back to Dante’s Church? Who’s to say?

Flipping through my copy of How Dante Can Save Your Life, I see that I have penciled in double vertical marks along many paragraphs: my sign for things that are worth going back to, again and again. In not a few places I have found helps of the sort that I otherwise have found only in top spiritual writers. The book is that good.

Read the whole review. Thank you, Karl, for your kind words. Though I am firmly and gratefully rooted in Orthodoxy now, I receive the wish that I return to Catholicism in the generous spirit with which it is offered.

Nation First, Conservatism Second

If you read nothing else today, make it this brilliant column by Michael Brendan Dougherty, who says the late far-right nationalist writer Sam Francis wrote the script for Donald Trump’s campaign 20 years ago, for Pat Buchanan, but Buchanan was too much a Republican Party man to follow it. Excerpts:

To simplify Francis’ theory: There are a number of Americans who are losers from a process of economic globalization that enriches a transnational global elite. These Middle Americans see jobs disappearing to Asia and increased competition from immigrants. Most of them feel threatened by cultural liberalism, at least the type that sees Middle Americans as loathsome white bigots. But they are also threatened by conservatives who would take away their Medicare, hand their Social Security earnings to fund-managers in Connecticut, and cut off their unemployment too.

More, about how globalism and the free-market economics promoted by the GOP really has devastated the people Francis talks about:

The political left treats this as a made-up problem, a scapegoating by Applebee’s-eating, megachurch rubes who think they are losing their “jerbs.” Remember, Republicans and Democrats have still been getting elected all this time.

But the response of the predominantly-white class that Francis was writing about has mostly been one of personal despair. And thus we see them dying in middle age of drug overdose, alcoholism, or obesity at rates that far outpace those of even poorer blacks and Hispanics. Their rate of suicide is sky high too. Living in Washington D.C., however, with an endless two decade real-estate boom, and a free-lunch economy paid for by special interests, most of the people in the conservative movement hardly know that some Americans think America needs to be made great again.

And:

What so frightens the conservative movement about Trump’s success is that he reveals just how thin the support for their ideas really is. His campaign is a rebuke to their institutions. It says the Republican Party doesn’t need all these think tanks, all this supposed policy expertise. It says look at these people calling themselves libertarians and conservatives, the ones in tassel-loafers and bow ties. Have they made you more free? Have their endless policy papers and studies and books conserved anything for you? These people are worthless. They are defunct. You don’t need them, and you’re better off without them.

And the most frightening thing of all — as Francis’ advice shows — is that the underlying trend has been around for at least 20 years, just waiting for the right man to come along and take advantage.

Read the whole thing. You won’t see the GOP race the same way again.

You should also look at Sam Francis’s original 1996 essay in Chronicles. Trump may not get the nomination, and if he does, he may not become the next president. But in light of Francis’s column, it’s hard to see how Republican politics ever really return to normal after Trump.

Gardeners, Knights, And the Benedict Option

One of the reasons one goes to the Eighth Day Institute Symposium in Wichita is to meet people like James Lewis III. He’s a Catholic high school teacher and small farmer who, along with his wife and their five children, plants on a five-acre plot in suburban Wichita. James gave a talk at the Symposium called “Gardener & Knight: The Benedict Option with the Great Commission.” It was about how we should stage a strategic retreat from the culture for the sake of being able to serve the people in it.

Folks, it was a great talk. I wish everyone skeptical of the Benedict Option could have heard Lewis’s presentation. What he and his family are doing with their farm is a model of the Benedict Option.

“We’re living at the end of the Republic, but it’s not the worst thing,” he began. “We have options. One of them is the Benedict Option.”

He said that a key mark of the Ben Op is self-restraint. Self-restraint (a fancier word is “asceticism”) is required if we are to order our lives rightly, by the will of God instead of our own. Lewis recalled Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard commencement address, where the great Soviet dissident spoke of the spiritual and moral dying of the West, paralyzed by lack of voluntary self-restraint.

A knight, he says, exemplifies courage, self-restraint, and perseverance in service of a higher end. This makes the knight a “witness” to the world. To be a true knight, he said, you have to be willing to be unusual. Even something as simple as having no TV in the house is enough to make you stand out as a freak in today’s world.

“People will ask, ‘How do you live that way? You ask back, ‘Well, how do you live that way?’ We live in different worlds.”

When Lewis and his wife got married, they thought of moving out to the west side of Wichita (“Catholic Disneyland,” he called it), but decided to move instead to the other side of town. He taught in an east side Catholic school, so he could be closer to work. Besides, there were a lot fewer Catholics in that area, and the Lewises felt a calling to befriend and to serve them.

They have ended up making a lot of friends simply by having a sign that reads, “Eggs for sale,” he said. That is, having a small suburban farm that sells fresh meat, eggs, and produce to the neighbors has built connections that they would never have made had they moved into a place where more people shared their values.

The best story Lewis told was about the time he decided he needed to expand his amateur agrarian operation to include sheep. Knowing nothing about livestock auctions, he showed up one day at a sheep auction where most of the farmers were Amish. They saw he wasn’t one of them, and moved away from him. The only man present who helped him was a Good Samaritan named Mohammad, an Iraqi Muslim immigrant. Mohammad showed him how the auction worked, and stood up for him when he made a mistake and could have been taken advantage of.

He and Mohammad have little in common besides sheep, but they have become friends. Sometimes they even talk religion. And through raising sheep, he’s come to know others in the “sheep community,” even some fallen-away Christians. Lewis said his family doesn’t make friends for the sake of proselytizing, but neither do they hide who they are.

He told a story about some neighborhood kids whom he caught chasing his sheep. When they were caught, Lewis and the children’s father decided on a punishment for them. Lewis asked them what they thought was fair. The kids offered to pull weeds on his farm. So they spent the day doing just that, and stayed for dinner. Before the meal, the family prayed. The neighbor kids had never done that, and were suddenly very curious about how everyone knew to say the words together.

It was the start of something.

Lewis talked about a neighbor who hasn’t been to church in 30 years. But they’ve become friends, and help each other out on their small farms. One day the neighbor, who has 12 TVs in his house, asked, “James, how do you have such a happy life?”

Lewis told him it has to do with what he values (or rather, Who he values), and how he uses his time to live out those values. These are the kinds of conversations that come up from simply living out an agrarian life and being open to neighbors.

“The farm is a witness,” Lewis said. “I want to use it to order all things to God.”

Lewis told a story about a man he met at a bus stop one day, a man who described himself as a former “meth lord.” The man had been to prison for his crimes, and spoke of what he had done in somber, dramatic tones. As they talked, he ended up sobbing, talking about how a Protestant pastor had helped him turn his life around.

“I made the body less like the image of God,” Meth Lord told Lewis. “It was hard for people to know God when they were on my potions. I was the opposite of a doctor, who uses potions to heal the body.”

Lewis said that comment taught him a lesson about how we all move through life. We either take what we have and fashion it to bring people closer to God, or to move them away from Him. There is no middle ground. Everything we do has a theological meaning.

Lewis told another story about how selling vegetables at the farmer’s market brought him into contact with one of his former high school students, a young woman who was in a very bad place, selling her body to feed the child she had by a man she was no longer with. He spoke to her, offered to help her get out of that life. Over and over, being out in the world gives him a chance to be Christ for people who need the Gospel.

So, I asked Lewis, I see how well you do going out into the world. Tell us what practices you follow in your family to keep the domestic monastery well-ordered.

First, he said, there’s a life of prayer. There’s daily mass, and he and his wife each take a separate hour to go to adore the Blessed Sacrament. They are Benedictine Oblates who read Scripture together with kids, and alone.

Second, they fast from television, and work hard to curate the media (online and otherwise) their kids are exposed to. They filter out a lot of negative things. The kids don’t have freedom to explore the Internet. They have a list of pre-approved sites their kids can explore, but if the kids need to go beyond those for homework, Lewis is sitting by their side as they do.

Third, they have a deep regular spiritual relationship with the monks at a Benedictine abbey (“If you don’t have a relationship with a monastery, you are practicing spiritual contraception”), as well as a strong relationship with solid friends who do share their religious faith.

Fourth, they follow Cardinal Newman’s maxim: “A gentleman is merciful to the absurd.” This means that they treat all people who come to them “as persons first,” not their ideologies.

“My wife, when she first met me, and even now, and my professors at Benedictine and at the University of Dallas, were merciful with me,” Lewis says. “How can I not be with others?”

Lewis approaches people in the spirit that Pope Benedict XVI approaches books. He reads all kinds of authors, carefully considering what they have to say, and why, without ever accepting anything evil.

Lewis talks to everybody he meets in a natural, friendly way — this is easy to imagine, because he’s a gregarious guy, easy to talk to — and seeks to share the goods of his life with them. Those goods are material and spiritual — that is, they include his Christian faith.  He says he is always honest about his faith, but never pushy. He regards sharing his family’s spiritual and material goods as a form of “solidarity” with his neighbors. All his neighbors, not just the Catholic ones.

It’s a compelling vision, and quite a contrast to the Amish who saw a young farmer struggling at the livestock auction to understand where he was and what he was supposed to do there, and walked away because he was not like them. Not everyone who takes up the Benedict Option will be a suburban farmer, of course, but I hold the Chestertonian spirit in which James Lewis lives out his Benedict Option vocation as a model. It will be a great pleasure to tell you more about him and his family in the Benedict Option book.

And you know, this is why it’s important to go to events like the Eighth Day Symposium. As I heard several times in Wichita over the weekend, people like us, we need to find each other. I’m telling you, that little bookstore on the prairie is midwifing a community whose bonds stretch beyond the boundaries of central Kansas.

via EighthDayBooks.com

Trump, Cruz, And Evangelical ‘Vanity’

I’ve been trying to find the most interesting thing somebody said about Donald Trump’s pathetic pandering to conservative Evangelicals at Liberty University today, and it turns out the best piece was written by Matthew Lee Anderson a few days ago. In it, Anderson — himself a conservative Evangelical — lets his co-religionists have it for supporting Trump or Cruz. Excerpts:

By all appearances, then, the Religious Right is as alive as it has ever have been. But this time, the grievances that animate them have flowered into an overt anti-politics, a willingness to trade the responsibilities of governance for the therapeutic cleansing of disruptive chaos.Trump and Cruz are dominating evangelicals—and Cruz has provided evangelicals what Trump has popularized, except in a (slightly) more respectable form. The life of the Religious Right is that of the undead: Theirs is not the politics of hope grounded in a vision of a common good for all people, but a nihilistic cynicism animated by resentment and anxiety. And therein lies a tale.

Anderson points out that by and large, the Evangelical leadership has not backed Trump, but the laity has chosen otherwise — because Trump has a lot in common with Evangelical religiosity, especially of the prosperity gospel type. More:

The inherent appeal of being a ‘winner’ is not far from the hope of being set free from all one’s earthly troubles. Trump flouts the Bible these days like Big Dan Teague, in part because the kind of commercialized religiosity they represent is not far from the center of the evangelical ethos. “It’s all about the money, boys!” Or in this case, the votes.

Evangelicals who are more discerning may find themselves attracted to Ted Cruz, says Anderson. They shouldn’t be, because he promises nothing more than “Trumpism with a veneer of respectability.” More:

Indeed, no religious arena has been immune to Cruz’s political ambitions. He announced his campaign at Liberty University, which bills itself as the world’s largest Christian university, and indelicately placed his own political hopes in the hands of the conservative evangelical community. “Imagine,” he bluntly put it, “millions of people of faith all across America coming out to the polls and voting our values,” before turning his family into a political prop to demonstrate his social conservative bona fides. On the day of an important Iowa social conservative event, the Presidential Family Forum, Cruz not-so-subtly announced the formation of a “Prayer Team.” Direct contact with the Almighty about all matters Cruz comes with strings, though: Team Cruz will require your name and address, please. “The prayers of [middle-class, registered Republicans] availeth [many votes].” So the Bible says somewhere, I think. Most perniciously, Cruz managed to turn an event about the persecution of Christians in the Middle East into a news story about himself, proving in the most abhorrent of ways that absolutely nothing is sacred when everything is political.

Cruz’s unsavory use of the religious life for his own advancement, however, is the playbook that the Religious Right has written for itself, creating a vicious cycle that identifies the evangelical world with such shameless politicking. Attempt to carve out a path respects the church’s independence, avoid subordinating the Christian life to political ambitions, and many conservative evangelicals will simply tune out. Pandering is the litmus test for politically conservative religious ‘authenticity.’ Evangelical pastors and laypeople who are more careful in their theological politics are understandably invisible to the media in political seasons—which rewards the Religious Right with the attention they crave, and is instrumental to their ongoing power.

Read the whole thing. It’s very, very good. Anderson says Evangelicals have made their own mess by tying their fortunes so closely for so long to the success of Republican politicians. He further says that Evangelicals voting for Trump or Cruz because they’re going to shake things up would be “an apocalyptic, anti-political judgment that our political order is beyond repair.”

That makes me queasy, because I am tempted to think it might be true. Erick Erickson is not a Trump supporter, but he praises Trump’s candidacy for doing a few good things. I don’t agree with all of Erickson’s list, but I do agree with this one:

First, he exposed the consultant class of the GOP as profiteering charlatans. They have been unable to come up with a strategy to stop Donald Trump, build up the establishment candidates, or do anything other than make a mint off losing candidates. Trump’s campaign is, compared to the consultant class in D.C., an island of misfit toys and those misfit toys are kicking the GOP’s a*s.

This brings me pleasure, but a pleasure that makes me uneasy, because it is not at all clear that the dissolution of the Republican Party as we have known it for two generations will bring something better. Note well that you will never see me in this space endorse a political candidate. We are not allowed to do so by terms of TAC’s non-profit status. Nothing I write or link to here should be interpreted as an endorsement of any candidate. Yet I can say quite honestly to you that I don’t have a candidate in 2016. Haven’t had one for long time now. Don’t expect to for many years to come. All politics that really matter, I think, involve establishing local forms of community that can hold it together and help others to thrive in the time of unraveling now upon us.

The Road to Room 314

The New York Post writes about a new book out by Ed Boland, a wealthy gay white man who decided to leave his lucrative career in mid-life and go teach some of the neediest high school kids in the city.

It did not go well for Ed Boland.

The Post’s Maureen Callahan writes of the book:

There’s nothing dry or academic here. It’s tragedy and farce, an economic and societal indictment of a system that seems broken beyond repair.

The book is certain to be controversial. There’s something dilettante-ish, if not cynical, about a well-off, middle-aged white man stepping ever so briefly into this maelstrom of poverty, abuse, homelessness and violence and emerging with a book deal.

What Boland has to share, however, makes his motives irrelevant.

She goes on:

Boland opens the book with a typical morning in freshman history class.

A teenage girl named Chantay sits on top of her desk, thong peeking out of her pants, leading a ringside gossip session. Work sheets have been distributed and ignored.

“Chantay, sit in your seat and get to work — now!” Boland says.

A calculator goes flying across the room, smashing into the blackboard. Two boys begin physically fighting over a computer. Two girls share an iPod, singing along. Another girl is immersed in a book called “Thug Life 2.”

Chantay is the one who aggravates Boland the most. If he can get control of her, he thinks, he can get control of the class.

“Chantay,” he says, louder, “sit down immediately, or there will be serious consequences.”

The classroom freezes. Then, as Boland writes, “she laughed and cocked her head up at the ceiling. Then she slid her hand down the outside of her jeans to her upper thigh, formed a long cylinder between her thumb and forefinger, and shook it . . . She looked me right in the eye and screamed, ‘SUCK MY F–KIN’ D–K, MISTER.’ ”

It was Boland’s first week.

It got much worse:

Two weeks in and Boland was crying in the bathroom. Kids were tossing $110 textbooks out the window. They overturned desks and stormed out of classrooms. There were seventh-grade girls with tattoos and T-shirts that read, “I’m Not Easy But We Can Negotiate.” Their self-care toggled in the extreme, from girls who gave themselves pedicures in class to kids who went days without showering.

Kameron was in a league of his own. “I was genuinely afraid of him from the minute I set eyes on him,” Boland writes. After threatening to blow up the school, Kameron was suspended for a few months, and not long after his return, a hammer and a double switchblade fell out of his pockets.

The principal gave up. Kameron was expelled.

“Oh, they getting real tough around here now,” one student said. “Three hundred strikes, you out.”

He talks about the handful of good kids he was trying to help. One smart girl was desperate for her classmates to stay ignorant of her intelligence. The kids started calling her a prostitute. They got punished for that. Turned out she really was turning tricks. And then there was Nee-cole, a girl whose mother was too poor to care for her. Nee-cole’s mom was still involved in her life, and came to school once to meet with her teacher. Boland says:

She went on to explain that she had to put Nee-cole in foster care. “I love my child beyond words and am still very involved with her life,” Charlotte said. “Her education is my priority.”

After that meeting, Nee-cole’s life at school was never the same.

“Nee-cole’s mother is a HOBO,” the other kids would say. “Did you get a look at her? Mama look like a homeless clown.”

Boland came to actively loathe most of the student body. He ­resented “their poverty, their ­ignorance, their arrogance. ­Everything I was hoping, at first, to change.”

His colleagues gave him pep talks, reminded him to contextualize this behavior: These kids had no parents, or abusive, neglectful ones. Most lived in extreme poverty. School was all they had, and it was their only hope.

A lifelong liberal, Boland began to feel uncomfortable with his thinking. “We can’t just explain away someone’s horrible behavior because they have had a tough ­upbringing,” he argued back. “It doesn’t do them — or us — any good.

Read the whole thing. The book is called The Battle For Room 314. According to Callahan, Ed Boland emerged from this ordeal with no real answers for how to fix it. But knowing that there are no easy answers is the beginning of wisdom.

Things Ed Boland says happened to him in that majority-minority NYC public school I have heard from teachers in other majority-minority public schools. It is a painful thing to have to face, so as a society, we don’t face it. This is what happens when the family collapses.

This is absolutely NOT a reason for whites or Asians to feel triumphalist. The forces that have undone the black family in America are making real progress with whites too. What used to be the crisis of the black family is now the crisis of the family. The Economist says that the birth rate of children outside of wedlock is soaring all over. More:

Britain is nearly there; America not far behind; France passed the milestone in 2007. As couples wait longer to marry, and fewer eventually do, the number of countries where more births are out of wedlock than in it has risen to more than 20. Rates across the OECD group of 34 mostly rich countries vary hugely, from 2% in Japan to 70% in Chile. But overall the average is 39%—more than five times what it was in 1970.

Policymakers wish they could change the trend. Unmarried parents are more likely to split up. Their children learn less in school and are more likely to be unhealthy or behave badly. It is hard to say how much of this difference is due to marriage itself, however, because unmarried parents differ a great deal from married ones. They are poorer, less well-educated and more likely to be teenagers, for example.

But efforts to persuade people who otherwise would not marry to do so have generally failed. Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, says that a plethora of policies in America, from tweaking incentives in the benefits system to teaching couples how to be better domestic partners, have had little or no effect on marriage rates. Better, she says, help women to avoid unplanned pregnancies and delay childbearing at least until they finish school and are in a solid relationship, whether married or not.

There are no policy fixes for this. The destruction of traditional marriage and family, and the concomitant rise of expressive individualism as the summum bonum of public life, will lead us all eventually to Room 314.

UPDATE: Reader Matthew comments:

Now, imagine on top of all of that, that the state decides to tell a teacher in the same school with the same students who does not have a prior lucrative career to fall back on because this is their career, that their pay will be student performance-outcome based as well as your evaluations for whether you even get to keep your only job that supports your entire family. And it’s now the educators falt for not having or using the right in vogue teaching methods to apparently reach those students and make that school another Phillips Exeter. I’m not a fan of unions, but every time I hear conservatives go on and on about how unions are keeping schools from making real change I just laugh. There are teachers unions in the really nice suburban schools too that everyone wants to send there kids to and you never hear about how they are the problem. Bad teachers exist, but there is no way that schools like the one described would suddenly change if you could somehow fire every bad teacher who is supposedly being protected by the unions. You just end up with a lot of 23 year old teach for America students looking to pad there resume with a few years of teaching in an inner city and then they go on to grad school or become administrators and the classroom teacher conveyor belt just keeps churning. I’ve seen lots of these kids in public and charter schools. They are praised for putting in 15 hour days and being so committed, but no one ever mentions that this lasts for 3-4 years max, during which time they are single and 20 some years old. We all could keep that schedule in our 20s. But do you get really good long term teachers in there 30s and 40s with ties to the community and the students family’s doing this?

Norcia’s Citadel of Remebrance

Did you see the Benedictine Monks of Norcia on CBS Sunday Morning yesterday? These are the guys I’m going to spend a week with next month, and who are going to be a key part of the Benedict Option book! I had no idea that their recording of their Gregorian chanting had his No. 1 on the Billboard classical charts. See here to learn more about that particular monastery. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if you are an unmarried Catholic man and sense that you may have a monastic calling, go to Norcia and meet these monks. They are traditional, they are relatively young, and they are so joyful. You might have a life there with them.

Now, there are Benedictine monasteries everywhere, so why did I pick these monks to focus on for my book? Aside from the fact that their monastery exists over the birthplace of St. Benedict and his sister St. Scholastica in the fifth century, I chose it because these men returned to the monastery nearly two centuries after Napoleon closed it, and made it live again. Half of them are Americans, meaning they had no deep cultural affinity for monasticism. They discovered the depth and beauty of serving God as monks, and converted.

“I wanted something different and something more, and that’s what drew me to the monastery,” says Father Cassian Folsom, the prior.

You might remember that I visited the monastery in 2014. It’s like stepping into timelessness. I’ve had the same experience at Orthodox monasteries. Father Cassian tells CBS why, in his view, so many people love Gregorian chants:

“It shows that there’s something in the music that attracts people across a huge spectrum. That something, I think, is a desire for what people today call spirituality, for something more than the everyday lives they lead. … It takes them out of themselves, I think, because of its beauty and its ethereal quality.”

Something more than the everyday. And not only that, but if you enter into the monastic way of thinking and praying, even as a layman, it takes you back in history to the roots of Christianity. Once you’ve seen that, you can’t unsee it, and it’s hard to be satisfied with the trivial and the ephemeral. These monks of Norcia are cultural revolutionaries, and they don’t even know it.

Why do I say that? Because their monastery is both a fortress and a lighthouse of memory and witness. Pascal-Emanuel Gobry laments the Great Forgetting in the West today.  Excerpt:

I’m not writing all of this for the stubborn pleasure of being a curmudgeon and yelling at the kids. A civilization, a culture, is a very complex machinery made up of ideas. Our life is sustained and shaped by institutions, such as liberal democracy, the welfare state, capitalism, the common law, human rights, and the scientific method. These institutions are a piece of technology, whose raw material is concepts and ideas. Like any other technology, it becomes harder and harder to use, and eventually breaks down, if we can’t use it. We are in danger of becoming like the people on the planet in Star Trek whose every need is met by a super-smart computer their ancestors built, but who have become lazy and forgetful over the generations, so that once it breaks down they are completely powerless to fix it, much less live in any functional way. And if we expect these institutions to keep delivering the bounties they have delivered us even if we don’t understand how they work and how to work them, we are engaging in little more than a cargo cult.

Contemporary culture, strangely, tells us that every era and culture was so shaped by its own culture and history that it had terrible blinders and could not understand things. Our material wealth and technological success has made us so arrogant that we believe we don’t have anything to learn from people who didn’t have iPads or universal suffrage, even though the reality is that the only way we have these things is because our ancestors learned from their ancestors to bequeath to us the institutions — that is, the ideas-in-action — that make all these things possible and worthwhile.

So, this is, like, actually a big deal, man. Maybe people should, like, start reading, like, books or something. Just a thought.

Read what I’ve written about the Benedict Option and cultural memory here and here. Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, has counseled:

Dostoevsky famously said: “If there’s no God, then everything is permitted.” It’s a view the west might consider more often. Dostoevsky’s not saying that if there’s no God then no one’s watching us and we can do what we like. He’s really asking: what’s the rationale for living this way and not otherwise? If there’s no God, then there’s no shape to our lives. Our behaviour needs to be in tune with something. If there’s no divine tune, how do you know where to go, what to do? To believe in God is not a business of rewards, but an ability to make sense of things.

The monks of Norcia, by serving God, help make cosmos out of chaos. They know something important that many of us do not. Hilary White lives in Norcia as a laywoman and worships with them. She says:

As I was tramping down the hill this morning to join in on Br. Gregory’s big day, I totted it up: 20 years in Victoria, population about 125,000 in the ‘70s; 11 long, miserable damp and grey years among the miserable, damp and grey-minded hipsters of Vancouver, population about 2 million; 4 rather jolly years in Halifax Nova Scotia and the obligatory-for-Canadians 5 years in Toronto. 40 years in cities, all together. 40 years in which I unconsciously absorbed the modern urban message; sneak through life as anonymously as you can, be noticed by no one, attach yourself to no one, expect nothing from anyone, be a part of nothing and don’t get too attached because no one is going to stick around – everyone around you is transient and you are ultimately on your own. Cities do not exist to create community. I’m not sure what they are for in a positive sense, but I know from long experience that they provide an ideal place to hide for people who fear commitment and accountability. It’s a way of life I’ve had my fill of.

A few months ago, the monks released their album of Gregorian chant, and we attended a little gathering in the city hall. Afterwards we were making small talk, and Fr. Benedict introduced me to some of the Nursini notables as “Ilaria, una nuova Nursina.” A while ago, a friend was visiting from the US. She likes Norcia very much and comes regularly, and has been doing so for a lot longer than I have. We were sitting under the awning at the enoteca (wine bar) having a drink and spots a chap she knew who came over to greet us. As she tried to introduce me, Marco said, winking at me slightly, “Oh, everyone knows Hilary. She’s part of the community.” I admit, I nearly cried.

That’s a Benedict Option, for sure. White writes elsewhere about young Catholics discovering the value of tradition. Excerpt:

With this great Catholic liturgical patrimony being revived in some few pockets around the world, Jessica Kidwell’s story is more common than one might imagine. Gregory di Pippo, the editor of the New Liturgical Movement website, told me that the Church’s treasure house of art, music, and spiritual patrimony is being discovered more and more by younger people with no “baggage” about the pre-conciliar Church.

“History, philosophy, theology, even fiction,” he said, can lead to the discovery “that the Catholic Faith, its content and practice did not spring into being a half-century ago, and in fact used to involve something nobler than spaceship-esque church buildings, more rigorous than coloring-book catechetics, more demanding than two days of fasting a year, more beautiful than polyester and velcro vestments, more godly than politics, and more true than moral or cultural relativism.”

People are still looking for the Summum Bonum, the Greatest Good, di Pippo added. “It’s not just an issue of an aesthetic preference. It’s far more serious than that.”

Jessica Kidwell said that once she discovered the beauty and transcendence of the traditional Mass and Divine Office, quite different from the pared-down and modernized English language revisions of the 1960s, she was “hooked.”

She counts herself lucky to be born in a time well after the great tearing-down in the Church of her parents’ generation. In the 1970s and 80s, thousands of nuns abandoned their convents as the religious orders “modernized” according to the trends that burst onto the scene after Vatican II and in response to the secular “social revolution.”

“My generation’s mothers and fathers,” Kidwell said, “were discerning their vocations in an environment wherein the religious life was largely either dead, or a mockery of the evangelical counsels.

“By the grace of God, there are more options out there now for sincere young Catholics who want to give their lives to God in religious vows.”

And, I think, more options out there for sincere young Christians who want to live more traditionally, and not mire themselves in the Church of What’s Happening Now. For sincere young Christians who believe the deep past has more to teach us than the day before yesterday.

Hate Whitey Month

Portland Community College, a public college that serves 90,000 students calls itself the largest secondary education institution in Oregon, is staging a “Whiteness History Month” plainly designed to convince white students to despise themselves and their culture. That’s not how the PCC website puts it, of course:

 

Whiteness History Month: Context, Consequences and Change is a multidisciplinary, district-wide, educational project examining race and racism through an exploration of the construction of whiteness, its origins and heritage. Scheduled for the month of April 2016, the project seeks to inspire innovative and practical solutions to community issues and social problems that stem from racism.

More:

Whiteness History Month Project, unlike heritage months, is not a celebratory endeavor, it is an effort to change our campus climate.

The Project seeks to challenge the master narrative of race and racism through an exploration of the social construction of whiteness.

Challenging the master narrative of traditional curriculum is a strategy within higher education that promotes multicultural education and equity.

These people truly put the “PC” in “PCC”. According to the college’s demographics page, two-thirds of its students are white. Most of them are older than age 25. It’s hard to say for sure, but I’m betting the school’s student population is chiefly white and working class — who, as we all know from our progressive catechism, are the Worst People In The World.

Victor Tan Chen, writing in The Atlantic, may be in need of re-education at Portland Community College. From his piece, which pivots from the startling study by Anne Case and Angus Deaton showing that white working class people are dying at extraordinarily high rates, usually from drugs, alcoholism, or suicide. VTC continues:

Any explanation of the ominous trends in the Case and Deaton study is, at the moment, speculative. More research is needed, as social scientists like to say, and there are numerous caveats. For example, while the disappearance of high-paying jobs for those with little education is a large part of the overall story of a shrinking middle class, it can’t wholly account for the uptick of mortality identified in the Case and Deaton study. After all, other countries have not seen similar hikes in deaths, even though manufacturing and (to a lesser extent) unionmembership have crumbled abroad as well.

Likewise, the groups that have been affected most viciously by these market trends in the U.S., African Americans and Latinos, have not suffered the dramatic increases in death by suicide or substance abuse that whites have. It may be that changes in the economy have affected these workers in different ways. For instance, whites are more likely to be employed in the declining manufacturing sector than African Americans or Hispanics—and for that matter, they’re morelikely to live in the rural communities devastated by this most recent, post-NAFTA era of deindustrialization. Furthermore, whites are less likely to be union members than African Americans (though not Asians or Hispanics).

Yet there is clearly more to the despair of the working class than empty wallets and purses. Patches of the social fabric that once supported them, in good times and bad, have frayed. When asked in national surveys about the people with whom they discussed “important matters” in the past six months, those with just a high-school education or less are likelier to say no one (this percentage has risen over the years for college graduates, too). This trend is troubling, given that social isolation is linked to depression and, in turn, suicide and substance abuse.

One form of social support that many in the working class are going without is marriage. I’m reminded of another worker I interviewed, a jobless 54-year-old white woman who used to work at a Ford plant. Her husband left her, she says, when the paychecks stopped coming. “Jesus Christ,” she told him once. “I didn’t think that our relationship was based on the amount of money that I brought in.” Unable to pay her mortgage, she lost her home and had to move in, as she puts it, with a “man friend.” She is depressed, unable to sleep at night, and constantly worried about falling into poverty. “I’m a loser,” she says.

Yet the progressives at Portland Community College are making it their business to educate people from this demographic in their own guilt and vileness.

These nitwit progressives have no idea, no idea at all, what kind of demons they are calling up. If our economy were to collapse, America would start to look something like the old Yugoslavia in its fracturing. Middle-class progressives at places like Portland Community College will have a lot to answer for. This is a time in which they could do a lot of good promoting community solidarity, especially among those of all races who are being left behind by this economy. But they won’t, because waging racist culture war is too important to them.

(Via Campus Reform.)

UPDATE: Reader Mr. Pickwick writes:

Yikes! I have two (white) sons at PCC. They don’t have any patience for that kind of politically correct stuff (they’re too busy studying and working), and say that the same attitude is shared by most of their classmates. In fact, they weren’t even aware of “whiteness history month.”

A month ago, I discussed with my youngest son the upheaval that was happening on certain college campuses over racial issues (demonstrations, occupations, intimidation, demands, etc.). He said nothing of the kind was happening at PCC. Although there were a few profs and students who mouthed PC slogans, there was no disruption of the educational process. No demonstrations or such. As my youngest son said “Dad, most PCC students are taking a full course load PLUS working at least one job, with long commutes. We just don’t have any time for that other stuff….”

So my take is this: yes, the “whiteness” event is kooky and to be criticized. But don’t write off this school on that account. My sons are getting excellent educations, at an unbeatable price. One is in the EMT/Paramedic program, and the other is getting his AA and then transferring to a four-year university in pursuit of a liberal arts degree in the humanities (in fact, he’s almost certainly going to end up getting an MA or even a Ph.D.). PCC has been a godsend.

Up until four years ago, we lived a block from PCC, and on my commute home from work I rode the bus with PCC students every day. Generally speaking, they were a very impressive bunch of kids: serious, focused, working hard at their studies. I often talked with them about their classes and career goals.

Oh, I’m not surprised about the student body. I wish, though, someone would speak out against this racialist garbage. It would be interesting to see what the student body did with the knowledge that the administration of their college thinks they need to be re-educated to understand why they are bad because of the color of their skin.

Wichita’s World of Wonders

Erin Doom, left, director of the Eighth Day Institute, and Kevin Brown (Photo by Rod Dreher)

Well, that was something else. I got in last night from a long weekend in Wichita, Kansas, at the Eighth Day Institute‘s annual symposium. This is my second year, and once again, it was a terrific time. One of the small but intense pleasures I take in going to it is watching newcomers discover Eighth Day Books, the bookstore that sponsors the event. It’s a wonderland, and a joy to watch others wandering around its stacks, eyes filled with wonder, looking for all the world as if they had just come through an enchanted wardrobe. If you missed The New York Times‘s profile of the store and its happy genius, Warren Farha, take a look. Excerpt:

Then he opened his bookstore, which he named Eighth Day after a term early Christians, like Augustine, used to refer metaphorically to the new order, timelessness or eternity.

“All I knew was the kind of books I wanted to be in it,” Mr. Farha said. “And I knew retail, because I had waited on people since I was 10 years old. But I started from scratch.”

… The basement is given over to a well-curated children’s section. His favorite books include “Gilead,” by Marilynne Robinson; “Jayber Crow,” by Wendell Berry, and the three-volume saga “Kristin Lavransdatter,” bySigrid Undset, a Norwegian who won the 1928 Nobel Prize for Literature.

“It’s like putting together my best constellation of books,” Mr. Farha said of his inventory. “I worry from time to time if the bookstore is just a collection of my tastes. I hope it’s bigger than that.”

Mr. Farha, who with his second wife had a third child, has no plans to retire. When he does, none of his three children will take over. They have no interest. “It’s O.K.,” he said. “They’re all beautiful kids, and I wouldn’t change a thing about them.”

I wondered if he considered the store a form of evangelism. “Is it a Christian mission?” I asked.

He thought for a while. Eventually, he decided.

“It’s not a mission,” he said. “I just think by definition, if you have books that articulate truth, that it’s going to be a de facto Christian mission, because I don’t think you can separate different truths from each other. They’re all connected.”

Indeed they are. I think I can speak for many other folks from outside of Wichita who come to the symposium when I say that the Christian community there, at which Eighth Day Books is the core, has something really extraordinary going on. You go to the Symposium and you meet young people from the area, and you hear them talking about this or that Christian thing they’re involved in locally — a community that they’re building — and you may well be filled with amazement and admiration. These folks — Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox — all know each other and like each other and help each other. It’s so … vital there.

Warren is Orthodox, as is Erin Doom, the Institute’s director, but the Eighth Day community is robustly ecumenical. Their idea is to bring together small-o orthodox Christians, in a C.S. Lewis “Mere Christianity” spirit. I probably met more Catholics and Protestants who move in the Eighth Day circles than I did Orthodox. I asked someone, can’t remember who, this weekend how they managed to achieve that kind of fellowship among people with strong theological convictions and commitments, often exclusive of the others’ beliefs. The person said it’s because they share a Christian love of each other, and a love for truth — and that requires tolerance. These folks make it seem effortless. They’re just so happy to have discovered each other, and to be in the presence of others who take the faith, the tradition, and ideas seriously, that fellowship follows.

I was at a party at The Ladder, the Christian speakeasy run by EDI, on Saturday night, after the symposium ended. Looking around the room, I imagined that if C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien — two men who, along with G.K. Chesterton, are probably the unofficial patron saints of this fellowship — were standing among us, they would heartily approve. You go to Wichita, you see what these folks are able to accomplish together, and you think, “I want to do that where I live.” That’s what I think, anyway — and I know for a fact that I’m not the only one.

See the guy on the right in the photo above? That’s Kevin Brown, a reader of this blog who lives in Cleveland. He read about the Eighth Day Institute on this blog, went to the About Us page of the EDI’s site, and wanted to come see for himself, so he could start something like it in his town. He was especially interested in the Hall of Men, a twice-monthly gathering at The Ladder in which guys

aren’t afraid to put on our theological boxing gloves to spar for a minute, and to take them off for a shared pint the next. If you haven’t seen a Catholic listen to the life story of John Wesley; if you haven’t watched a Protestant learn about Evagrius of Pontus; and if you haven’t seen Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant men sit around a table together and talk theology until midnight . . . then you need to come to the Hall of Men.

(EDI has recently launched a parallel monthly event for women, the Sisters of Sophia.)

Kevin liked what he saw, and hopes to get something like it going in Cleveland. Me, I’d love to do the same in St. Francisville, or at least Baton Rouge. This is a Benedict Option kind of thing: building small-o orthodox Christian community. It started in Wichita, but it shouldn’t stay only in Wichita.

There’s always something going on at the Institute, but the next big event is the Inklings Festival, set for mid-July. The great Ralph C. Wood is going to speak there. If you go, the biggest challenge you will have is leaving enough space in your luggage for all the books you will buy. I purchased three on the first night, and thought I was done … but I bought five more before it was all over. You see books at Eighth Day that you didn’t know you needed, but you have to have. I read most of On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology, a terrific little book by the late French Orthodox theologian Olivier Clément on the flights home last night, and marked it all up, because it’s deeply helpful to my Ben Op project. Alas, it’s not available on the Eighth Day Books website (but you should look at the site anyway; they do lots of mail order), but that’s the kind of discovery you make when you make a pilgrimage to the store and lose yourself in the stacks. I would be surprised if there’s any other bookstore in the country where you could discover a book like that sitting like a gemstone in a setting, ready for plucking. Happiest place in America, if you ask me.

Oh, and here’s Catholic theologian and Okie raconteur Bo Bonner, holding forth at The Ladder. Because it’s just not Wichita without the Bo Bonner Experience:

UPDATE: Erin Doom comments:

Thanks for joining us in Wichita, Rod. And thanks for your kind words about our humble endeavor. For all of those interested in starting a Hall of Men or a Sisters of Sophia, Eighth Day Institute is developing a Consortium for Cultural Renewal. One of its two primary objectives is to help other cities open local chapters. If you’re interested, visit Eighth Day Institute’s webpage and email me (Director Doom) so I can put your name on the list.

He e-mails to add:

People who weren’t able to make it to the event this past weekend can hear the lectures if they become members of the Institute, which they can do through the website.

Your Show Of Shows, 1975

No, I can’t even either.

Lots of serious and inspiring stuff to come from the conference in Wichita. Stay tuned…

God And Architecture

Here’s an extraordinary essay by the architect professor Christopher Alexander, author of the well-known book A Pattern Language.  In the piece, Alexander talks about how his work over the decades, studying which architectural patterns produce buildings that please us. Here is how it begins, audaciously:

It has taken me almost fifty years to understand fully that there is a necessary connection between God and architecture, and that this connection is, in part, empirically verifiable. Further, I have come to the view that the sacredness of the physical world—and the potential of the physical world for sacredness—provides a powerful and surprising path towards understanding the existence of God, whatever God may be, as a necessary part of the reality of the universe. If we approach certain empirical questions about architecture in a proper manner, we will come to see God.

Only in the last twenty years has my understanding of this connection taken a definite form, and it continues to develop every day. It has led me to experience explicit visions of God, and to understand, in some very small measure, what kind of entity God may be. It has also given me a way of talking about the divine in concrete, physical terms that everybody can understand.

There can be little doubt that the idea of God, as brought forth from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has ­slowly become tired . . . to such an extent that it has difficulty fitting into everyday twenty-first-century discourse. As it stands, it is almost embarrassing to many people, in many walks of life. The question is: Can we find a way to mobilize, afresh, the force of what was once called God, as a way of helping us to recreate the beauty of the Earth?

The view put forth here does not leave our contemporary, physical view of the universe untouched. Indeed, it hints at a conception which must utterly transform our conception of ourselves and our place in the universe. It shows us, in a new fashion, a glimpse of a beauty and majesty in the smallest details of human existence.

All this comes from the work of paying attention to the Earth, its land and rocks and trees, its buildings, the people and ants and birds and creatures all together, and the blades of grass. It comes from realizing that the task of making and remaking the Earth—that which we sometimes call architecture—is at the core of any commonsense understanding of the divine.

He explains how successful architecture discloses something about both human nature and the divine nature:

All this has a unique ability to point to the reality of God. In theory, other disciplines such as ethics might seem to have more claim to illuminate discussion of God. But the tangible substance of architecture, the fact that in good architecture, every tiny piece is (by ­definition) suffused with God, either more or less, gives the concept of God a meaning essentially translated from the beauty of what may be seen in such a place, and so ­allows it to disclose God with unique clarity. ­Successful architecture ultimately leads us to see God and to know God. If we pay attention to the beauty of those places that are suffused with God in each part, then we can conceive of God in a down-to-earth way. This ­follows from an awareness in our hearts, and from our ­active effort to make things that help make the Earth ­beautiful.

This is not a pastiche of pseudo-religious phrasing. In technical language, it is the structure-preserving or wholeness-extending transformation (described in The Nature of Order and capable of being precisely defined) that shows us how to modify a given place in such a way as to give it more life. When applied repeatedly, this kind of transformation is what brings life to the Earth, in any place.

Earth—our physical Earth and its inhabitants—sand, water, rocks, birds, animals, and trees—this is the garden in which we live. We must choose to be gardeners. We must choose to make the garden beautiful. Understanding this will give us intellectual insight into the nature of God, and also give us faith in God as something immense yet also as something modest, something which lies under the surface of all matter, and which comes to life and shines forth when we treat the garden properly.

The most urgent, and I think the most inspiring, way we can think about our buildings is to recognize that each small action we take in placing a step, or planting a flower, or shaping a front door of a building is a form of worship—an action in which we give ourselves up, and lay what we have in our hearts at the door of that fiery furnace within all things, which we may call God.

He adds:

Taking architecture seriously leads us to the ­proper treatment of tiny details, to an ­understanding of the unfolding whole, and to an understanding—mystical in part—of the entity that underpins that wholeness. The path of architecture thus leads inexorably towards a renewed understanding of God.

Read the whole thing. 

What he’s talking about here is sacramentalism, and how the divine, transcendent order is expressed (or fails to be expressed) in the creations of man. He’s talking about structures that lead to wholeness and integration, both in individuals and communities — and this inevitably means existing in harmony with God.

Matter matters. Having just read this, I am wondering to what extent we can apply his insights to the architecture of Christian worship. Which forms are better at doing what worship is supposed to do? For Christians, worship should not merely expressive, but is also formative in that it should lead us to experience God, and something of His nature and being, so that we can become more like Him. Expressions of the same pattern may change across eras and places, but the basic forms should manifest, right?

Thoughts?

I’m off in a moment to the Eighth Day Institute symposium, and will be out of touch all day. I’ll approve comments when I can. Vigen Guroian speaks this morning about sacramentality and gardening. I’ll be leading a discussion about sacramentality in Laurus later this morning. If you’re in or around Wichita, come on over!