By
Rod Dreher
Rod Dreher is another recent discovery whom I’m
somewhat surprised not to have encountered earlier – or if I did, the name
didn’t stick. I do a good bit – far too
much, if the truth be told – of what I call “net’surfing,” tending to
concentrate in the more conservative political and religious corners of the
Internet, but The American Conservative
is not a site that I make a point to visit unless I’m taken there by some link
that looks interesting. Nonetheless, given the subject matter which Dreher
tends to write about, I’d be surprised if one or more of those
interesting-looking links would not have taken me to something by him from time
to time. Nevertheless, I don’t recall his name impressing itself upon my
consciousness until just a couple of months ago. I was visiting with my mother,
and we were watching The World Over
on EWTN. That night, host Raymond Arroyo was interviewing guest Dreher,
specifically about his most recently published book, How Dante Can Save Your Life (which I am currently reading).
You can see the interview here on Youtube:
You can see the interview here on Youtube:
Briefly, Dreher told how, following the death of his
sister, Ruthie, to cancer, he had moved his family back to his home town of St.
Francisville, Louisiana, about thirty miles north of Baton Rouge. But his
return after years away had opened old emotional wounds which plunged him into
a deep depression that was wrecking his health. A random visit to the Baton
Rouge Barnes & Noble (I know it well!) where he picked up a copy of the
late medieval poem, The Divine Comedy,
had ended up being life-changing, for the better, as told in the latest book.
I was intrigued, especially by his contention that
Dante has much to teach us today (I am a medievalist, after all), and put the
book into my mental queue “to read” – but not right then. The fact that Dreher
is a fellow Louisianan added to the appeal, of course.
Another subject that Dreher discussed with Arroyo was
something called “The Benedict Option,” which is, briefly, Dreher’s belief that
traditional Christians have for all intents and purposes lost the war for the
soul of America, and have no real option now except to retreat from society
into voluntary sub- (counter-?) cultural enclaves to preserve our own identity
and what we can of traditional values while the world continues on its path toward
self-destruction, but from which we or our children can reemerge at some time
in the future to lead the rebuilding of a more Godly civilization – just like
St. Benedict and his monks did in the early Middle Ages as the decadent world
of late Roman antiquity collapsed around them, preserving some remnants of
civilization and its knowledge through “the Dark Ages” (I hate that term!)
until Europe was able to pick itself back up and reassimilate what the
Benedictines had maintained, giving birth to the glories of the High Middle
Ages. As a medievalist, as a Benedictine Oblate, as a traditionalist Catholic
increasingly appalled at the course our world is taking of late, I found
Dreher’s position immediately compelling, and “Benedict Option” became one of
those phrases that caught my eye from time to time over the next few weeks …
… And then exploded to prominence with last month’s
lamentable descent of the United States Supreme Court into judicial madness
with back-to-back decisions which flew in the face of the Constitution and even
reason itself. Quite possibly, I believe, we witnessed the death of American democracy
– or more accurately, we had the fact that it is dead rubbed in our noses by the
narrowest of margins among an out-of-control, unelected junta of “justices.” Which is off the subject of this post except
that the sudden resurgence of interest in the Benedict Option – both pro- and
anti- – that the rulings inspired brought Rod Dreher back to the forefront of
my attention.
Continuing briefly with reference to the Benedict
Option, that’s what I really wanted
to read by him in a systematic, comprehensive discussion. Unfortunately, no
such thing exists as yet. At this point “The Benedict Option” is an idea that
is taking shape in Rod Dreher’s mind. He is in the process of refining it,
figuring out for himself what exactly it means, how best it might be
implemented in the modern world, and so forth, which is one reason the term is flying
here and yonder around the Internet with abandon and not always – indeed,
seldom – meaning the same thing to different commentators. Indeed, a certain
inconsistency in Dreher’s own usage has been one of the criticisms leveled
against the very idea, by Catholic blogger John Zmirak (who, ironically enough,
also comes out of Louisiana State University, in his case during the early-mid
1990s when we were acquaintances through a number of mutual friends – Dreher
had been there in the late 1980s). I believe Zmirak’s rather vociferous (he
does not know how to be otherwise*) criticism of Dreher’s evolving vision of
the Benedict Option is both accurate and unfair. It’s accurate in that Dreher
himself seems not to envision it the same every time he uses the term – but
unfair because Dreher recognizes and openly admits that he is still figuring
out for himself what exactly it is. At this point in time, the best summary is
probably his recent essay at The American
Conservative, tellingly entitled, “Figuring Out the Benedict Option” (16
July 2005, LINK). In any case, he is doing so with
the intention of writing a book defining it, and I am greatly looking forward
to reading it, while not expecting to do so any time soon….
Lacking that, I went back to the book of which I had
heard him speak a few months ago, How
Dante Can Save Your Life, and at the same time, remembering his Louisiana
connection, I did a little more research on Rod Dreher. What I found was
personally interesting: He was born in the late 1960s in St. Francisville; he
attended high school here in my own town of Natchitoches at the Louisiana
School for Math, Science, and the Arts, a state-run school for gifted students
housed on the campus of my own University, Northwestern State University of
Louisiana. From there he returned to Baton Rouge to earn a degree in journalism
from LSU, then logged a career with various newspapers and conservative
journals and periodicals, turning increasingly to blogging and ultimately to
full-time writing. I also discovered a little more about his conversion from
Roman Catholicism to Eastern Orthodoxy, which had been briefly discussed in
that same interview – how it was catalyzed by a crushing sense of betrayal over
several years of reporting on the Church’s child sex abuse scandal, which
brought him to the point that he could no longer remain Catholic. While I
cannot agree with his solution to the heartbreak this engendered, I can well
understand it. I was interested to learn as well how he came under fire for
rightly identifying the underlying cause of the scandal in the presence of
homosexual priests throughout the Church’s hierarchy, even to the highest
levels, who for a long time have been more concerned with protecting child
molesters within their own ranks than with protecting the victims of such
molestation.
But I also figured out pretty quickly that just as it
was published earlier than the book on Dante,
a fuller and more cohesive view of what Dreher was going through when he was
brought so low before he discovered The
Divine Comedy in the summer of 2013 would require reading The Little Way of Ruthie Dreher. And so,
a couple of weeks ago I downloaded it on Kindle and added it to my
currently-reading virtual stack.
I immediately found myself immersed in a world with
which I am very well familiar – small-town Louisiana. The little community of
Starhill just a couple of miles south of St. Francisville, where Dreher and his
sister actually grew up, sounds very much like a south Louisiana counterpart to
my own north Louisiana home of Swartz, basically a small, sleepy,
unincorporated farming community that has no real boundaries because it is as
much a state of mind as a defined geographic location. Sure, “the big city”
south of Starhill – the state capital of Baton Rouge – is considerably larger
than Swartz’s “big city” of Monroe (by an order of magnitude!), but
conceptually what’s the difference? A little surprisingly to me, but even more
like my own background, it turned out the Drehers were Methodist before Rod
converted to Catholicism as a young adult; the Hares were Baptist, but again,
what’s the real difference? – I certainly thought there was more of one then than I realize there is now as a convert to Catholicism! Dreher
is only a few years my junior, so in that respect as well the world of his
childhood was very much like my own, being virtually completed before the
advent of what I consider to be the watershed of cultural change that were the
1980s. In short, I knew these people.
Dreher’s conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism
was just one thing that I quickly learned I had in common with him, and even
that had its striking parallels, not least that it came after rejection of the
faith of his childhood and a period when he strove to believe in nothing, but
found the spark of new faith being kindled in the magnificence of that monument
of medieval religious architecture, Chartres Cathedral in France. I do not
remember being bowled over by the sense of the divine as was he, but I have
always looked back to my 1979 high school trip to France and several days’
immersion in the remains of a very Catholic civilization as one of my own
turning points – and the first place we stopped after arriving in Paris was indeed
at Chartres [LINK]. But much more than that, I recognize a lot of my own youthful
bookishness and consequent social awkwardness and isolation in young Rod
Dreher. As in his case, I really did not fit well among my peers, or even
within my family, and I took refuge in books, in comic books, in TV, and the
like. As did he, I grew up in a loving home – but I was the odd man out. I have
a younger brother, not a sister, but as did Dreher’s sister, Ruthie, my brother
ended up being much more like our father than was I. And my father frankly did
not understand me; our interests were far too different. He hunted and fished;
I had no interest in either. My brother did, and shared much more in common
with our father throughout his life and still engages in the same hobbies that
they shared, even now a decade and more after Daddy’s passing – and yes, I did
and still do call him “Daddy” (as Rod Dreher does his father) (when challenged
on it as being a “childish” name for one’s father, my response has been and
continues to be, “If it’s good enough for J. R. Ewing to call Jock, it’s good
enough for me”). Again, make no mistake, there was not a lack of love between
my father and myself; there was simply a lack of common interests, maybe even of
comprehension, honestly going both ways. The same is true of myself and my
brother, and although he and I enjoy a good relationship now it’s never been a
really close relationship. Such was
exactly the relationship that Rod Dreher possessed with his father and his
sister – founded unquestionably in love but separated from them by a wall of
incomprehension. Yes, there is a lot in common between the Hares of Swartz,
Louisiana, and the Drehers of Starhill, Louisiana – plenty for me to connect
to.
But there are differences, most notably that my
sibling is alive and well. Thus far this review of The Little Way of Ruthie Leming has barely mentioned Ruthie Dreher
Leming, even once I turned from my personal contextualization of how I came to
read it to discussing the book itself. It’s been all about Rod Dreher – and
myself. In fact, the book is as much
an autobiography of Dreher as it is about his sister, her diagnosis and battle
with cancer, her death and its aftermath. Both threads are frankly and
sensitively told; have tissues handy as you read the ordeal that Ruthie endured
and how it affected those around her. But most of all this is a book about how
his sister's losing battle changed Dreher, engendering in him a reassessment of
his entire life and his core assumptions, and ultimately inspired him to return
to his roots, to attempt to go back home again.
Most crucially, Dreher witnessed how the entire
community of Starhill, indeed the greater local community of St. Francisville and
East Feliciana (the parish of which St. Francisville is the seat – in
Louisiana, what the other states call counties, we call parishes) came together
in support of his sister, her family, and her parents, as they all went through
the year-and-a-half battle together. He witnessed how the simple faith and
goodness of a sister with whom he had a mostly amicable but sometimes strained
and by no means close relationship drew people whom she had influenced, often
through her teaching, back from where they had moved sometimes hundreds of
miles away to be part of the support given to the Leming and Dreher families.
And he realized that such a deeply rooted network was quite simply unavailable
to him and his own wife and children, who were essentially rootless from
frequent moves over the course of his career. They had acquaintances, even
friends, in many places, but not the deep, abiding relationships formed over a
lifetime and even spanning generations. The lack of those resources can be,
however, devastating in a time of crisis such as confronted the Leming-Dreher
families in 2010-2011:
“Never would I
have imagined that I would spend the morning of my little sister’s forty-third
birthday in the graveyard, watching workmen heave her tombstone into place. But
nobody ever things about these things when they’re young. Nobody things about
limits, and how much we need each other. But if you live long enough, you see
suffering. It comes close to you. It shatters the illusion, so dear to us, of
self-sufficiency, of autonomy, of control. Look, a wife and mother, a good
woman in the prime of her life, dying from cancer. It doesn’t just happen to other people. It happens to your family.
What do you do then?
“The insurance
company, if you’re lucky enough to have insurance, pays your doctors and
pharmacists, but it will not cook for you when you are too sick to cook for
yourself and your kids. Nor will it clean your house, pick your kids up from
school, or take them shopping when you are too weak to get out of bed. A
bureaucrat from the state or the insurance company won’t come sit with you, and
pray with you, and tell you she loves you. It won’t be the government or your
insurer who allows you to die in peace, if it comes to that, because it can
assure you that your spouse and children will not be left behind to face the
world alone.
“Only your
family and your community can do that.
“Because of our
own mutual brokenness, the considerable affection Ruthie and I had for each
other did not penetrate either of our hearts as it ought to have done. But
through Abby, Tim, Laura, Big Show, John Bickman, the barefoot pallbearers, and
everyone else in the town who held our family close, and held us up when we
couldn’t stand on our own two feet, I was able to see the effect of Ruthie’s
love, given and returned, in steadfast acts of ordinary faith, hope, and charity.
The little way of Ruthie Leming is the plainest thing in the world, something
any of us could choose. And yet so few of us do. …
“I have wandered
in my own way for half my life, and have no regrets. That was my role for a
time. Now, though, I want to track, at my own pace and rhythm, the Little Way
of Ruthie Leming” (pp. 266-267/91%).
The simple faith and goodness of a small town in south
Louisiana, and the people who lived there, that he had turned his back on in
his youth, now called to him, and he answered, uprooting his wife and children
one last time – one trusts – to come home.
Incidentally, it was in that realization that at least
one aspect that must be part of the Benedict Option was born:
“Coming home to
the place where I grew up would not be easy, but if I was going to live more
like Ruthie, I was obliged to stick it out, come what may. In this my patron
saint, Benedict of Nursia, came to my aid. St. Benedict was a fifth-century
Italian monk who more or less founded monasticism in the West. In his famous
rule Benedict required his monks take a vow of what he called ‘stability.’ That
means that the monastery in which Benedictine monks profess their vows will in
most cases be their home for the rest of their lives. St. Benedict considered
the kinds of monks who moved from place to place all the time to be the worst
of all. They refused the discipline of place and community, and because of
that, they could never know humility. Without humility they could never be
happy.
“The implication
for me was clear: if I wanted to know the inner peace and happiness in
community that Ruthie had, I needed to practice a rule of stability. Accept the
limitations of a place, in humility, and the joys that can also be found there
may open themselves” (p. 224/77%).
But, to return to the necessity of family and
community in a time of crisis, I have had that impressed upon me once again
over just the past few days, with the sudden severe illness of a friend of
several years, a member of the Bible study group I lead on Monday nights. On the
Saturday just previous, after a headache mounting over several days the pain
was so intense as to cause nausea and – surprising to hear of from a big,
strapping, healthy man such as he is – a plea for his wife to take him to the
Emergency Room of the local hospital. There it was determined that he was
suffering from a brain aneurysm. He was immediately airlifted to Shreveport
where he underwent a procedure to alleviate the condition. He is still in
Intensive Care, and will be for several days, but is reportedly doing excellent
considering the seriousness of the situation.
I relate this story for a couple of reasons: First,
because it was Sunday morning, sitting up in the ICU waiting room with my wife
and his, that I finished reading The
Little Way of Ruthie Leming; Second, because, in that context, with a
friend’s – and by extension, my own – mortality very much on my mind, I did
some deep thinking about how we, my
wife and I, could find our own “Little Way of Ruthie Leming.” We were, of
course, up there to offer support to our friends – whom we have known for only
about seven or eight years. None of us are natives of the community in which we
now live: My wife and I grew up in separate towns at opposite ends of
Louisiana, then lived a half-dozen years in south Arkansas before a decade in
Baton Rouge and ultimately the past fifteen years here in Natchitoches; Our
friends, a few years older than us, moved here to Natchitoches from Ohio about
eight years ago, shortly before we met. My wife and I were not the only ones
making the hour-plus trek to Shreveport, either; and phone calls as well as
emails and Facebook messages were flooding in, assuring our friends of support,
love, and most importantly prayers. Partly it has to do with the fact that our
friends are genuinely good people, but I think also with the fact that she,
especially, has been heavily involved in our church and community in various
capacities from the moment they set foot in it. Both are important
considerations in assessing the astonishing outpouring of love, prayers, and
support, that came as word of his condition spread, but I want to focus on the
latter here. The sense of “community” that is key to the “Little Way” is
doubtless enhanced by ties of blood and years or generations of geographically-based
roots, but it can be based on other things as well, most obviously – as in this
case – in faith. Some time back I came upon an article arguing, if I recall
correctly, that when a total societal collapse comes (as seems more and more
inevitable), those people who are well-integrated in some kind of faith-based
community will stand the best chance of survival. As is often the case when I
come across these things in passing, I read it, find it interesting but move on
… and cannot find it again. Nonetheless, especially after what I witnessed this
past weekend, I think there is a lot of truth in the idea. And although I would
be the last to say that ties of blood are not crucial to the idea of “family” –
despite current misguided efforts to redefine that societal institution as a
corollary to the attempted redefinition of marriage – a sense of family need
not be limited to ties of blood. In one of her conversations with relatives in
Ohio, our friend assured them that she was not facing the situation alone
because some of her “Natchitoches family” were there along with her.
The point is that, even in today’s society where many
of us have been uprooted from our native communities to make new homes
sometimes far from where we began, and far from any others with whom we share a
relationship based in blood, the “Little Way of Ruthie Leming” is still there
to be found and followed. And that is a great comfort as I and my wife slowly
advance in years in a town that was neither of our home until fifteen years ago
but from which we have no intention of departing short of death – or, as in the
case of the Dreher and Leming families or my own friends this past weekend,
face the unknown possibility of a crisis that could strike tomorrow – I believe
we do have those who love us, will pray for us, and support us to carry us
through whatever comes.
Of course, there is a saying, “You can't go home
again,” and Dreher's story could well have ended, to be continued....
That's what I'm currently reading.
Thanks for your reading.
+ + +
* In the course of writing the later parts of this
post I found another by Zmirak which actually, in my opinion, goes beyond
vociferous to what I may term uncharitably strident and niggling: “The Benedict
Option Isn’t One,” The Intercollegiate
Review (20 July 2015, LINK).
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