The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation

by Rod Dreher

If we are going to be for the world as Christ meant for us to be, we are going to have to spend more time away from the world, in deep prayer and substantial spiritual training—just as Jesus retreated to the desert to pray before ministering to the people. We cannot give the world what we do not have.

The genius of Saint Benedict is to find the presence of God in everyday life.”

maxims but a manual of practices through which believers can structure their lives around prayer, the Word of God, and the ever-deepening awareness that, as the saint says, “the divine presence is everywhere, and that ‘the eyes of the Lord are looking on the good and evil in every place’” (Proverbs 15:3). The Rule is for monastics, obviously, but its teachings are plain enough to be adapted by lay Christians for their own use. It provides

If you are going to put down spiritual roots, taught Benedict, you need to stay in one place long enough for them to go deep. The Rule requires monks to take a vow of “stability”—meaning that barring unusual circumstances, including being sent out as a missionary, the monk will remain for the rest of his life in the monastery where he took his vows.

Father Martin said that those who think stability is meant to hold you back, and to stifle personal and spiritual growth, are missing the hidden value in the commitment to stability. It anchors you and gives you the freedom that comes from not being subject to the wind, the waves, and the currents of daily life. It creates the ordered conditions in which the soul’s internal pilgrimage toward holiness becomes possible. Or as Father Martin put it, “Stability give us the time and the structure to go deep into who we are as sons of God.”

Community life, not a dreamy ideal, said Bonhoeffer, but an often difficult initiation into the “divine reality” that is the church. That is, the church exists as a brotherhood established by Christ, even if it doesn’t feel like it in a given moment. The martyred Lutheran pastor taught that struggles within the community are a gift of God’s grace, because they force its members to reckon with the reality of their kinship, despite their brokenness. A community that cannot face its faults and love each other through to healing is not truly Christian.

yes yes yes!!!!!

Fasting is a spiritual exercise whose purpose is to subject the body to the liberating yoke of Jesus. As Wendell Berry puts it, denying bodily desire for the sake of spiritual growth is “a refusal to allow the body to serve what is unworthy of it.”10

It is not feasible for most of us to abandon the Internet entirely. But at the very least we can impose on ourselves a discipline similar to the Benedictine monks, who, observing the Rule, strictly limit themselves to particular tasks during certain hours. We can also do more things with our hands. Put that way, it sounds almost childish, but there’s a serious point here. Technology enables us to treat interaction with the material world—people, places, things—as an abstraction. Getting our hands dirty, so to speak, with gardening, cooking, sewing, exercise, and the like, is a crucial way of restoring our sense of connection with the real world. So is doing things face to face with other people.