The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

When a community begins to build together, they don’t just create new stuff; they create new norms. They make a contribution to the community, and over time that contribution becomes the thing everybody is expected to do. For example, my friend Rod Dreher had a sister named Ruthie who lived in a small town in Louisiana. Ruthie was a teacher, one of those people who radiate an inner light. Tragically, she died of cancer at forty. More than one thousand people came to her funeral. Ruthie loved to go barefoot, so the pallbearers, from the local fire department, where her husband worked, carried her casket to the grave barefoot. Ruthie always thought the dead of her town should be remembered on Christmas, so she created a tradition. Every Christmas Eve she would go to the town cemetery to put a lit candle on each gravestone. Ruthie happened to die just before Christmas, and as the family was sitting around on that Christmas Eve, Rod asked his mother if she would like to do what Ruthie used to do—to light a candle on each gravestone. His mother replied that maybe in other years that would be good, but this year it was just too tough. That evening Rod’s parents attended mass and drove home, early evening, by the cemetery. They looked over and gasped. There were hundreds of lights. Somebody else had put a candle on every gravestone. That’s how community works. Somebody starts something. A new tradition is established. Other people step in and carry it on.