Chapter 1 - The Great Flood
(note - author starts with the recounting of an unexpectedly horrific flood and the shock and surprise and unpreparedness it was greeted with by those whose lives were greatly changed for the worse by it...and likens that to Bible believers who are living in the US in this time of great, horrific change of the spiritual landscape..)
2 in my 2006 book Crunchy Cons, which explored a countercultural, traditionalist conservative sensibility , I brought up the work of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who declared that Western civilization had lost its mooring. the time was coming, sad Mac, when men and women of virtue would understand that continued full participation in mainstream society was not possible for those who wanted to live a life of traditional virtue. these people would find new ways to live in community, he said, just as Saint Benedict, the sixth-century father of Western monasticism, responded to the collapse of Roman civilization by founding a monastic order.
I called the strategic withdrawal prophesied by MacIntyre 'the Benedict Option'. the idea is that serious Christian conservatives could no longer live business-as- usual lives in America, that we have to develop creative, communal solutions to help us hold on to our faith and our values in a world growing ever more hostile to them. we would have to choose to make a decisive leap into a truly countercultural way of living Christianity or we would doom our children and our children's children to assimilation.
the steady decline of Christianity and the steady increase in hostility to traditional values came to a head in April 2015, when the state of Indiana passed a version of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration act. the law merely provided a valid religious liberty defence for those sued for discrimination.it did not guarantee that those defendants
3 would prevail. gay rights activists loudly loudly protested, calling the law bigoted - and for the first time ever, big business took sides in the culture war, coming down firmly on behalf of gay rights. indiana backed down under corporate pressure - as did Arkansas a week later.
this was a watershed event. it showed that if big business objected, even Republican politicians in red states would not take a stand, even a mild one, for religious freedom. professing orthodox biblical christianity on sexual matters was now though to be evidence of intolerable bigotry. conservative christians had been routed. we were living in a new country.
and then 2 months later the US Supreme Court declared a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. the decision was popular with the American people, which had, over the previous decade, undergone a staggering shift on gay rights and same-sex marriage. the decision was popular with the American people, which had, over the previous decade, undergone a staggering shift on gay rights and same-sex marriage. no sooner was the right to gay marriage achieved than activists and their political allies, the Democratic Party, began pushing for transgender rights.
Post Obergefell, christians who hold to the biblical teaching about sex and marriage have the same status in culture and increasingly in law, as racists. ( oh Lord, help me as a professing follower of You never treat any person who has sinned or is sinning in a way that I would not like to be treated by them...except to tell them about what Jesus says about what they are or have done...if that is Your direction for me to them...even if it is deemed 'illegal' by men...) the culture war that began with the Sexual Revolution in the 1960s has now ended in (note - political) defeat for christian conservatives. the cultural left - which is to say, increasingly the American mainstream - has no intention of living in postwar peace. it is pressing forward with a harsh, relentless occupation, one that is aided by the cluelessness of christians who don't understand what's happening. don't be fooled: the upset presidential victory of Donald Trump has at best given us a bit more time to prepare for the inevitable.
I have written The Benedict Option to wake up the church and to encourage it to act to strengthen itself, while there is still time. if we want to survive, we have to return to the roots of our faith, both in thought and in practice.
(note - christians under attack have options: in the Bible are examples of those who were directed of the Lord to
1. FLEE (Elijah, the Apostle Peter etc. ),
2. BEAR WITNESS TO THE TRUTH CONFIDENTLY, REJOICING AND BEING EXCEEDING GLAD (means skip about with mirth!) for great is our reward in heaven! matt. 5.12;
3. LIVE IN degrees of SEPARATION FROM SOCIETY all the way to the near complete separation from a surrounding, hostile society as put forth in this book, and
4. FIGHT as God's leading might be (Jesus in telling His disciples to put away their swords in the face of death-dealing (to Himself) confrontation with the Jewish religious authorities and their hirelings) at times (He says, if My kingdom were of this world, my followers would FIGHT.))
we are going to have to learn habits of the heart forgotten by believers in the West. we are going to have to change our lives and our approach to life, in radical ways. in short, WE ARE GOING TO HAVE TO BE THE CHURCH, without compromise, no matter what it costs.
this book does not offer a political agenda. now is it a spiritual how-to manual, nor a standard decline and fall lament...
10 in 2005, sociologists Christin Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton examined the religious and spiritual lives of American teens from a wide variety of backgrounds. what they found was that in most cases, teenagers adhered to a mush pseudo religion the researchers deem Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD)
MTD has 5 basic tenets;
1. a God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
3 the central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when He is needed to resolve a problem.
5. God people go to heaven when they die.
this creed, they found, is especially prominent among Catholic and Mainline Protestant tees. evangelical teens fared measurably better but were still far from historic biblical orthodoxy. (the researchers) claim the MTD is colonizing existing Christian churches, destroying biblical Christianity from within and replacing it with a pseudo-Christianity that is 'only tenuously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition.
MTD is not entirely wrong. after all, God does exist, and He does want us to be good. (yet..it's mostly about improving one's self-esteem and subjective happiness and getting along well with others.
15 Rome's fall left behind a staggering degree of material poverty, the result of both the disintegration of Rome's complex trad network and the loss of intellectual and technical sophistication.
in these miserable conditions, the church was often the strongest - and perhaps the only -government people had. within the broad embrace of the church, monasticism provided much-needed help an hope to the peasantry and thanks to Benedict, a renewed focus on spiritual life led many men and women to leave the world and devote themselves wholly to God within the walls of monasteries under the Rule....
16 in his book After Virtue, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre likened the present cultural moment to the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. he argued that the West has abandoned reason and the tradition of the virtues in giving itself over to the relativism that is now flooding our world today. we are governed not by faith or by reason or by any combination of the two. we are governed by what Mac called Emotivism: the idea that all moral choices are nothing more than expressions of what the choosing individual feels is right.
Mac said that a society that governed itself according to emotivist principles would look a lot like the modern West,in which the liberation of the individual's will is thought to be the greatest good. a virtuous society, by contrast, is one that shares belief in objective moral goods and the practices necessary for human beings to embody those goods in community.
...in a post-virtue society, individuals hold maximal freedom of though and action and society itself becomes 'a collection of strangers, each pursuing his or her own interests under minimal constraints.
achieving this kind of society requires
1. abandoning objective moral standards;
2. refusing to accept any religiously or culturally binding narrative originating outside oneself, except as chosen
3. repudiating memory of the past as irrelevant and
17 4. distancing oneself from community as well as any unchosen social obligations
this state of mid approximates the condition known as barbarism when we think of barbarians, we imagine wild, rapacious tribesmen rampaging through cities, heedlessly destroying the structures and institutions of civilization simply because they can. Barbarians are governed only by their will to power and neither know nor care a thing about what they are annihilating.
18 ...recognizing the toxins of modern secularism, as well as the fragmentation cause by relativism, Benedict Option christians look to Scripture and to Benedict's Rule for ways to cultivate practices and communities.
Chapter 2 - The Roots of the Crisis
22 the loss of the christian religion is why the West has been fragmenting for some time now, a process that is accelerating. how did it happen? there were 5 landmark events over 7 centuries that rocked Western civilization and stripped it of its ancestral faith:
23 -in the 14the century, the loss of belief in the integral connection between God and Creation - or in philosophic terms, transcendent reality and material reality
-the collapse of religious unity and religious authority in the Protestant Reformation of the 16the century
-the 18th century Enlightenment, which displaced the christian religion with the cult of Reason, privatized religious life and inaugurated the age of democracy
-the Industrial Revolution (ca. 1760-1840) and the growth of capitalism in the 19th and 20th centuries
-The Sexual Revolution (1960- now)
24 Medievals experienced the divine as far more present in their daily lives. as it had been for most people, christian and otherwise, throughout history, religion was everywhere and -this is crucial - as a matter not merely of belief by of experience. in the mind of medieval christendom, the spirit world and the material world penetrated each other. the division between them was thin and porous. another way to put this is that the medievals experienced everything in the world sacramentally...
sacramentalism had a much broader and deeper meaning in the mind of the Middle Ages. people of those days took all things that existed, even time, as in some sense sacramental. that is, they believed that God was present everywhere and revealed Himself to us Through people, places and thing through which His power flowed.
...Medieval man held that reality - what was Really real - was outside himself and that dwelling in the darkness of he Fall, he could not fully perceive it.but he could relate to it intellectually through faith and reason and know it through conversion of he heart. the entire universe was woven into God's own Being, in ways that are difficult for
25 modern people, even believing christians, to grasp. christians of the Middle Ages tgook Paul's words recorded in acts - 'in Him we live and move and have our being' - and in his letter to the Colossians - 'He is before all things and in Him all things hold together' - in a much more literal sense than we do.
Medieval Europe was no christian utopia. the church was spectacularly corrupt, and the violent exercise of power - at times by the church itself -seemed to rule the world . yet despite the radical brokenness of their world, medievals carried within their imagination the powerful vision of integration. in the medieval consensus, men construed reality in a way that empowered them to harmonize everything conceptually and find meaning amid the chaos.
the medieval conception of reality is an old idea, one that predates christianity. in his final book The Discarded Image, C.S.Lewis, who was a professional medievalist, explained that plato believed that two things could relate to each other only through a third thing. in what l called the medieval 'Model', everything that existed was related to every other thing that existed, through their shared relation ship to God. our relationship to the world is mediated through God, and our relationship to God is mediated through the world.
humankind dwelled not in a cold, meaningless universe but in a Cosmos (def - order, form, arrangement), in which everything had meaning because it participated in the life of the Creator. says, L, 'every particular fact and story became more interesting and more pleasurable if, by being properly fitted in, it carried one's mind back to the Model as a whole.
26 for the medievals, says L, regarding the cosmos was like 'looking at a great building' - perhaps like the Chartres cathedral - 'overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony.
the medieval model held all of Creation to be bound in a complex unity that encompassed all of time and space. it reached its apogee (def - highest, most distant point) in the highly complex, rationalistic theology known as Scholasticism, of which the brilliant 13th century Dominican friar Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) was the greatest exponent.
the core teaching of Scholasticism include the principle that all things exist and have a God-given essential nature independent of human thought. this position is called 'metaphysical realism'. from this principle comes what Charles Taylor identifies as the 3 basic bulwarks upholding he medieval christian 'imaginary' - that is, the vision of reality accepted by all orthodox christians from the early church through the high Middle Ages:
-the world and everything in it is part of a harmonious whole ordered by God and filled with meaning - and all things are signs pointing to God.
-society is grounded in that higher reality.
-the world is charged with spiritual force.
these 3 pillars had to crumble before the modern world could arise from the rubble, Taylor says. and crumble they did...
....the theologian who did the most to topple the mighty oak of the medieval model - that is, Christian metaphysical realism - was a Franciscan from the British Isles, William of Ockham (1285-1347).
27 the ax he and his theological allies created to do the job was a big idea that came to called nominalism.
realism holds that the essence of a thing is built into its existence by God and its ultimate meaning is guaranteed by this connection to the transcendent order. this implies that Creation is comprehensible because it is rationally ordered by God and a revelation of Him.
'the heavens declare the glory of God and the sky above proclaims his handiwork, says the psalmist. the sense that the material world discloses the workings of the transcendent order was present in ancient philosophy and in many world religions, even nontheistic ones like Taoism. metaphysical realism tells us that the awe we feel in the presence of nature, beauty or goodness - the feeling that there must be more than what we experience with our senses - is a reasonable intuition. it doesn't tell us who god is, but it tells us that we are not imagining things: something - or someone - is there.
Aquinas puts it like this: 'to know that someone is approaching is not the same as to know that Peter is approaching, even though it is Peter who is approaching. through prayer and contemplation, we may build on that intuition and come to know the identity of the One we sense. for example, the yearning for meaning and truth that all humans have, says David Bentley Hart, is simply a manifestation of the metaphysical structure of all reality.
...for Ockham, if something is good, it is because God desired it to be so. the meaning of all things derives from God's sovereign will - that is, not because of what He is, or because of His participation in their being, but because of what He commands. if He calls something good today and the same thing evil tomorrow, that is His right.
this idea implies that objects have no intrinsic meaning,
28 only the meaning assigned to them and therefore no Meaningful existence outside the mind. a table is just wood and nails arranged in a certain way, until we give it meaning by naming it 'table'. (nomen is the Latin word for 'name', hence nominalism.)
in Ock's thought, God is an all-powerful entity who is totally separate from Creation. God has to be, taught Ock, or else His freedom to act would be bound by the laws He made. a truly omnipotent God cannot be restrained by anything, in his view. if something is good, therefore, it is good because God said so. God's will, therefore, is more important than God's intellect.
this sounds like angels-dancing-on-the- head-of -a-pin stuff, but its importance cannot be overstate. medieval metaphysicians believed nature pointed to God. Nominalists did not. they believed there is no inner meaning existing objectively within nature and discoverable by reason. meaning is extrinsic (def - not essential or inherent) - that is imposed from the outside, by God - and accessible to humans by faith in Him and His revelation alone.
if this sounds like plain good sense to you, then you begin to grasp how revolutionary nominalism was. what was once a radical theory would, in time, become the basis for the way most people understood the relationship between God and Creation. it made the modern world possible - but as we will see, it also set the stage for man enthroning himself in the place of God.
ideas don't occur in a vacuum. as C.S. Lewis put it, 'we are all very properly, familiar with the idea that in every age the human mind is deeply influenced by the accepted Model of the universe. but there is a two-way traffic; the Model is also influenced by the prevailing temper of mind. nominalism emerged from a restless civilization whose people were questing for something different. the Middle Ages were an age of intense faith and spirituality, but as even the art of poetry of the 14th century showed, humanity began turning its gaze away from the heavens and toward this world.
after Ockham, the so-called natural philosophers - thinkers who studied nature, the precursors of scientists - began to shed the metaphysical
29 baggage bequeathed to them by Aristotle and his medieval christian successors. they discovered that one didn't need to have a philosophical theory about a natural phenomenon's being in order to examine it empirically and draw conclusions.
meanwhile, in the world of art and literature, a new emphasis on naturalism and individualism emerged. the old world, with its metaphysical certainties, its formal hierarchies, and its spiritual focus gradually ceased to hold the imagination of Western man, art became less symbolic, less idealized, less focused on religious themes, and more occupied with the life of man.
the Model shuddered under philosophical assault, but horrifying events outside the world of art and ideas also shook it to the core. War - especially the Hundred Years War between France and England - wracked western Europe, which also suffered a catastrophic 14th century famine. worst of all was the Black Death, a plague that killed between one-third and one-half of all Europeans before burning itself out. few civilizations could withstand those kinds of traumas without tremendous upheavals.
for all these reasons, the Model broke apart. metaphysical realism had been defeated. what emerged was a new individualism, a this-worldliness that would inaugurate the historical period called the Renaissance. the defeat of metaphysical realism inaugurated a new and dynamic phase of Western history - one that would culminate in a religious revolution.
Renaissance and Reformation
Renaissance is a French word meaning 'rebirth'. it refers to the cultural efflorescence that accompanied the West's rediscovery of the Greek and Roman roots of its civilization. it is important to note that the term was not applied to the period bridging the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern era until the 19th century.
30 it contains within it the secular progressive belief that the religiously focused medieval period was a time of intellectual and artistic sterility - a ludicrous judgment but an influential one.
nevertheless, the Renaissance does mark a distinct change in European culture, which shifted its focus from the glory of God to the glory of man, 'we can become what we will, ' said Pico della Mirandola (1463-94), the archetypal Renaissance philosopher. it was not an open form of satanic defiance - indeed, Pico uttered that famous line in an oration in which he cautioned against abusing God's gift of free will - but those words express the Renaissance's optimism about human nature and its possibilities.
what was being reborn in the Renaissance?
the classical spirit of ancient Greece and Rome, which had gone into eclipse following the fifth century collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and the subsequent advent of the christian medieval period. while the late medieval period concentrated on the rediscovery of Greek philosophical texts, Italian scholars of he 14th century led the way in reviving ancient literature and history. 'Man is the measure of all things, said the ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras, in a line that also described the spirit of the new age dawning upon europe.
Renaissance humanism began to consider the world through classical insights and emphasized the study of poetry , rhetoric and other disciplines we not call the humanities. though humanist culture was not as narrowly focused on the faith as its medieval predecessor, it was by no means anti-christian. the Ren brought into Western christianity a greater concern for the individual, for freedom and for the dignity of man as bearing the image of God.
Medieval christianity focused on the fall of man, but the more humanistic christianity of he Renaissance centered on man's potential. christian humanism was far more individualistic than what came before it and it sought to christianize the classical model of the hero, the man of virtue. scholasticism emphasized reason and intellect as the way to relate to God; christian humanism focused on the will.
31 the danger was that christian humanists would become too enamoured of human potential and man's capacity for self-creation and lose sight of his chronic inclination toward sin. this was a temptation to which the Italian humanists were particularly susceptible. they were all too pleased to cast off the sackcloth and ashes of medieval asceticism and revel in the glory and vigor of the sensual life. not so with the humanists of northern Europe, who were more modest in their piety and restrained in their optimism about human nature. they were more drawn to Scripture than to philosophy and were concerned primarily with reforming the church toward a more rigorous morality and a more democratic religious life. they viewed with skepticism, even disdain, the sensuality that had overtaken European life, especially in the church.
Renaissance Rome was a cesspit of vice and the corruption reached far beyond the papal court and the Vatican walls. many bishops were despised for their worldliness, while drunken and ignorant parish clergy, indifferent to the Gospel, were disrespected by their angry flocks as the church hemorrhaged spiritual and moral authority, the clamor for change rose . but the Renaissance popes, prisoners of their own greed and tastes for opulence, refused to listen. they thought what they had would last forever.
it took an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther to shatter their illusions - and with it, the religious unity of the West...
32 ...Reformation-era christians - Protestants - would no longer bow before what the Reformers believed to be superstition and idolatry. Scripture was heir only authority in religious matters...
because religion was inseparable from politics and culture, the Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, quickly led to a series of savage wars that shredded Europe. to be fair, the Wars of Religion were as political, social, and economic as they were religious but the religious basis for the wars caused weary European intellectuals to explore ways of living peaceably with the schism between Rome and the Reformers.
The Dawn of the Enlightenment
the Scientific Revolution indirectly suggested a possible way out.
even as the Wars of Religion raged, science made rapid advances.
33 the Scientific Revolution was a roughly 200 year period of staggering advances in science and mathematics that began with Copernicus (1473-1543), who showed that the earth was not the fixed center of Creation and ended with Newton (1642-1727), whose breakthough discoveries lad the foundation for modern physics. the era overturned he aristotelian-Christian cosmos - a hierarchical model of reality in which all things exist organically through their relationship with God - in favor of a mechanical universe ordered by laws of nature, with no necessary grounding in the transcendent.
most leaders of the Scientific Revolution were professing christians, but the revolution's grounding lay undeniably in nominalism. if he material world could be studied and understood on its own, without reference to God, then science can exist on its own, without reference to God, than science can exist on its own, without reference to Go, then science can exist on its own, free of theological controversy.
this practical proposition allowed science to develop unhindered by metaphysical and religious suppositions. science focused on facts about the material world that could be demonstrated and it had an empirical method of testing hypotheses to prove or disprove their claims.
and science Worked, in practical ways. Sir Francis Bacon, an important late Renaissance philosopher and founder of the scientific method, famously said that scientific discovery ought to be applied 'for the relief of man's estate' - that is, to improve the lives of humans by reducing their pain, suffering and poverty. this was a turning point in the history of ideas. the natural world was to be taken no longer as something to be contemplated as in any way an icon of the divine, but rather as something to be understood and manipulated by the will of humankind for its own sake. in this way, the Scientific Revolution further distanced god from Creation in the minds of men.
the Scientific Revolution culminated in the life and work of Sir Isaac Newton, a physicist, mathematician, and unorthodox christian who fabricated a new model of the universe that explained its physical workings in a wholly mechanical way. Newton certainly believed that
34 the laws of motion he discovered had been established by God. yet Newton's God, in contrast to the God of traditional christian metaphysics, was like a divine watchmaker who fashioned a time piece, wound it and let it carry on with His further involvement.
the explosion of science changed Western epistemology, the study of how we know what we know. Aristotelian science, which dominated the Middle Ages, was based on metaphysicl concepts about the essential nature of things. the new science jettisoned the metaphysical baggage and reasoned from empirical observations alone. philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes (1596-1650) would change the approach to the epistemological question even further. whereas Bacon said we should develop models by reasoning from empirical observation, Des took a more purely rationalsitic approach.
Des taught the the best method was to begin by accepting as true only clear ideas that were beyond doubt. you should accept nothing as truth on the basis of authority and you should even doubt your senses. only those things of which you can be certain are true. and the first principle of all under this method is, 'I think, therefore I am.
....what Des did - and what makes him the father of modern philosophy - was to invert the medieval approach to knowledge. to the Scholastics reality was an objective state and humankind's role was first to understand the metaphysical nature of reality. only then could humans begin to explore knowledge of the world and everything within it. Des, on the other hand, began all inquiry with radical subjectivity, declaring that the first principle of knowledge was that the Self is conscious of itself.
35 Descartes's philosophy opened the door to the world-changing project dubbed 'the Enlightenment' by its cheerleaders eager to contrast it to the supposedly dark days when revealed religion had its death grip on the Western mind. at its core, the Enlightenment was an attempt by European intellectuals to find a common basis outside religion for determining moral truth. the success of science led moral philosophers to explore how disinterested reason, which was so successful in the realm of science, could show the West a nonsectarian was to live.
the philosophers of the Enlightenment sought to use reason alone to establish a new basis for political and social life, one that was separated from the past. they tried to create a secular morality that any reasonable person could understand and affirm, and they believed that this was possible. they also advocated science and technology as a way to impose man's rational will upon nature and they extolled the freely choosing individual.
for our purposes, the Enlightenment matters because it was a decisive break with the christian legacy of the West. God, if he was mentioned at all, was not the
God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob but the nondescript divinity of the Deists. Deism, a rationalistic school of thought that emerged in the En, holds that God is a cosmic architect who created the universe but does not interact with it. Deism rejects biblical religion and the supernatural and bases its principles on what can be know about God - the 'Supreme Being' - through reason alone.
most of the American Founding Fathers were either confessed Deists like Benjamin Franklin (also a Freemason) or strongly influenced by Deism (eg. Thomas Jefferson) Deism was a powerful intellectual force in 18th century American life. John Locke, the English political philosopher whose teaching was a great influence on the American founding, was technically not a Deist - his belief in miracles contradicted the Deists' watchmaker God - but his philosophy was strongly consonant with deist principles.
36 Locke believed that the autonomous individual, born as a blank slate, with on innate nature, is the fundamental unit of society. the purpose of the government, according to Locke, is not to pursue virtue but rather to establish and guard a social order under which individuals can exercise they will within reason. government exists to secure the rights of these individuals to life, liberty and property. the authors of the Declaration of Independence changed this formulation to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of Happiness'., a phrase every American schoolchild learns in his civic catechism.
the US Constitution, a Lockean document, privatizes religion, separating it from the state. every American schoolchild learns to consider this a blessing and perhaps it is. but segregating the sacred from the secular in this way profoundly shaped the American religious consciousness.
for all the good that religious tolerance undoubtedly brought to a young country with a diverse and contentious population of Protestant sectarians and a Catholic minority, it also laid the groundwork for excluding religion from the public square by making it a matter of private, individual choice. in the American order, the state's role is simply to act as a referee among individuals and factions. the government has no ultimate conception of the good and it regards its own role as limited to protecting the rights of individuals.
when a society is thoroughly christian, this is an ingenious way to keep the peace and allow for general flourishing. but from the Christian point of view, Enlightenment liberalism contained the seeds of Christianity's undoing.
in a letter to soldiers in 1798, John Adams, a Founding Father and practicing Unitarian, remarked:
we had no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. it is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
Adams understood that liberty under the Constitution could only work if the people were virtuous, restraining their passions and directing them toward the good - as defined, presumably, by Adams's rationalistic religious belief. fortunately, having gone through the First Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century, America was strongly Evangelical and citizens had a strong shared idea of the Good and a shared definition of virtue. unfortunately, this would not last.
Democracy, Capitalism, Romanticism: The Calamitous Nineteenth Century.
in the middle of the 18th century, new technological breakthroughs began to give man unprecedented power over nature. this led to an explosion in manufacturing and commerce, which brought revolutionary changes to society. the socially stable was of life based on farming and crafts came to an end. Peasants moved en masse to cities, where they became workers in the new factories. the social hierarchies of the traditional family and village began to dissolve.
the same was true in politics. the American Revolution in 1776 overthrew monarchy and established a constitutional republic. the far bloodier French Revolution of 1789 was much more radical attempting near-totalitarian refashioning of French society in the name of republicanism. its terror ended in the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte, who restored order, but the violence unleashed by the revolution and its ideals rocked Europe for the rest of he century. it shook monarchies and established orders, using the ideals of liberty and democracy to batter older authoritarian structures.
around the same time, artists and intellectuals began to rebel against Enlightenment reason and the effects of the Industrial Revolution
38 the Romantics, as they wee called, found many aspects of the new rationalist, mechanized society distasteful but had no interest in returning to the christian world. they prized emotion, individuality, nature and personal freedom.
they advocated an ideal of the heroic, creative individual, one who rejects the strictures of society, one who follows his feelings and intuitions. for the Romantics, meaning and release from the ugliness of modern society was to be found in art, nature, and culture. theirs was a primitivist reaction against the cold rationalism of the preceding age.
though a man of the Enlightenment era, philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) became the father of Romanticism. Rou advanced the idea that man is born naturally good but is corrupted by society. from Rou came the modern notion that the freer a society is, the more virtuous it is. the people, in expressing the 'general will', are always right.
Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat traveling through America in 1831-2, observed Rou's egalitarian ideals in practice. in Democracy in America, Toc concluded that democracy was the future of Europe, but observed that with its drive for equality which entailed making standards relative to the majority's will, democracy risked eliminating the virtues that made self-rule possible. democracies will succeed only if 'mediating institutions', including the churches, thrive.
in the 19th century, intellectual elites understood that the world around them was quickly fragmenting. 'all that is solid melts into air, said Marx and Engles's Communist Manifesto (1848), which accurately observed that the Industrial Revolution had destroyed old certainties. writing a generation after Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche understood natural selection to mean that there is no divine plan guiding man's development. it is random, based on the survival of the fittest. Nietzsche drew on Darwin to formulate a philosophy extolling strength and the individual will.
39 'God is dead and we have killed Him, said Nietzsche, stating a blunt truth about the West's nascent atheism...
despite the disillusionment of artists, philosophers and other culture producers, the 19th century was a time of great religious fervor in England and America. the Victorian era in England stretched from 1837 until the turn of the 20the century and featured a popular Christianity that was muscular, moralistic and disciplined. it was notably civic-minded, with a strong emphasis on social reform. this reformist Evangelicalism spread to the US, sparking the Third Great Awakening, which brought explosive growth in Protestant churches and laid the groundwork for the Social Gospel movement. rising European immigration brought Catholics pouring into American cities by the hundreds of thousand.
the important changes, though, took place among the cultural elites, who continued to shed any semblance of traditional christianity. in America, from 1870 through 1930, these elites worked what sociologist Christian Smith terms a 'secular revolution'. they harnessed the energy and tumult of industrialization to remake society along broadly 'progressive' lines.
the effects of this progressive movement on American religious life were vast. it began the long liberalization of Mainline Protestantism by infusing it with a passion for social reform, over and against personal
40 piety and evangelizing. progressives turfed the Protestant religious establishment out of universities and other leading cultural institutions. it pushed religion to the margins of public life, advocating science as the primary source of society's values and as a guide to social change. within christianity, it replaced the religious model of the human person with a psychological model centered on the Self. and progressives' political ardor for greater democracy and egalitarianism (def - belief in the equality of all people, esp. in political, economic or social life) found expression in church life by eroding the authority of the clergy and Scripture.
the 20the century arrived amid a wave of optimism about the West's future. it was a time of hope and faith in progress. the dream came to a catastrophic end in 1914, with the outbreak of the deadliest war the world had ever seen.
The Triumph of Eros
the mass savagery of World War I, 4 years of grinding combat that consumed the live of 17,000,000 soldiers and civilians, shattered European ideals and dealt a mortal blow to what remained of Christendom. the war's aftermath accelerated the abandonment of traditional sources of cultural authority. sexual morality loosened. new styles of art and literature arose, making a conscious and definitive break with the discredited values of the prewar world.
Western civilization had been abandoning christianity fro quite some time, but it still had a sense of progress and purpose to unify it and to give its people direction and order to their lives. none of the progress -scientific, technological, economic, political, or social - prevented Europe from turning itself into a charnel house.
this was the period in which the West moved from what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called 'solid modernity' - a period of social change that was still fairly predictable and manageable -to 'liquid modernity', our present condition, in which change is so rapid that no social institutions had time to solidify.
41 Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, found his true genius not as a scientist but as a quasi -religious figure who discerned and proclaimed the Self as a deity to replace the Christian religion. yet F's immense cultural authority depended on his role as an icon of science. among secularized elites, who disseminated F's views widely through mass media, F's vision had the force of revelation precisely because elites believed it to e scientific.
to F, religion was nothing more that a man-made mechanism to cope with life and to manage instincts that, if allowed to run free, would make civilization impossible. Western man had lost God, and with that a sense that there was a higher authority to give life ultimate meaning. but man had to get on with life somehow.
F's answer was to replace religion with psychology. in his therapeutic vision, we should stop the fruitless searching for a nonexistent source of meaning and instead seek self-fulfillment. the pursuit of happiness was not a quest for unity with God, or sacrificial dedication to a cause greater than oneself but rather a search to satisfy the Self.
in the past, a person looked outside himself to learn what he was to do with his life. but in modernity, when we know that religion and all claims to transcendent values are an illusion, we must look into ourselves for the secret to our won well-being . psychology did not necessarily intend to change a man's character, as in the old Christian therapies of repentance as a step toward conforming to god's will, but rather to help that man become comfortable with who he is.
Sociologist Philip Rieff, the great interpreter of F, described the shift of Western consciousness like this: 'Religious man was born to be saved. Psychological man is born to be pleased.
the 1960s were the decade in which Psychological Man came fully into his won. in that decade, the freedom of the individual to fulfill his own desires became our cultural lodestar (def - or 'loadstar'- 1. a star that shows the way 2. Polaris (North star) 3. something that serves as a guide or on which the attention is fixed.) and the rapid falling away of American morality from its christian ideal began as a result. despite a conservative backlash in the 1980s, Psychological Man won decisively and now owns the culture - including most churches - as
42 surely as the Ostrogothes, Visigothes, Vandals, and other conquering peoples owned the remains of the Western Roman Empire.
in 1966, at the beginning of this new age, Rieff published a study called The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud, a book that still stuns with its prescience. (def - knowledge of things before they exist or happen.) in it Ri, an unbeliever, argued that the West, amid unprecedented liberty and prosperity, was going through a profound cultural revolution. it had not become atheist, but it had spiritualized desire and embraced the secular 'gospel of self-fulfillment.
most people understood that Western culture had been slowly moving away from christianity since the Enlightenment, but Rieff said the process had gone much farther than most people realized.
in Rieff's theory of culture, A CULTURE IS DEFINED BY WHAT IT FORBIDS. each culture has its own 'order of therapy' - a system that teaches its members what is permitted within its bounds and gives them sanctioned was to let off the pressure of living by the community's rules. which are traditionally rooted in religion. moreover, the asceticism in a culture - that is, the ideal of self-denial - cannot be an end in itself, because that would destroy a culture. rather, it must be a 'positive asceticism' that links the individual negating his own particular desires to the achievement of a higher, positive, life-affirming goal.
the main thing that helps a culture survive, Re wrote, is 'the power of its institutions to bind and loose men in the conduct of heir affairs with reasons which sink so deep into the self that they become commonly and implicitly understood'. a culture begins to die, he went on, 'when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling, first of all to the cultural elites themselves.
in other words, the Judeo-Christian culture of the West was dying because it no longer deeply believed in Christian sacred order, with it's 'thou shalt nots'. and it had no way of agreeing on the 'thou shall nots' that every culture must have to restrain individual passions and direct them to socially beneficial ends. what made our condition so revolutionary
43 he said, was that for the first time in history, the West was attempting to build a culture on the Absence of belief in a higher order that commanded our obedience. in other words, we were creating an 'anti-culture', one that made the foundation for a stable culture impossible.
that is, instead of teaching us what we must deprive ourselves of to be civilized, we have a culture build on a cult of desire, one that tells us we find meaning and purpose in releasing ourselves from the old prohibitions, as we self-directed individuals choose.
'Eros must be raised to the level of a religious cult in modern society, not because we really are that obsessed with it. but because the myth of freedom demands it, says political philosopher Stephen L. Gardner. 'it is in carnal desire that the modern individual believes be affirms his 'individuality' the body must be the true 'subject' of desire because the individual must be the author of his own desire.
the Romantic ideal of the self-created man finds its fulfillment in the newest vanguards of the Sexual Revolution, transgendered people. they refuse to be bound by biology (note - read 'God', our creator)
and have behind them an elite movement teaching new generations that gender is whatever the choosing individual wants it to be. the advent of the birth control pill in the 1960s made it possible for mankind to extend its conquest and subjection of nature to the will to the human body itself. transgenderism is the logical next step, after which will come the deconstruction of any obstructions, in law or in custom, to freely chosen polygamous arrangements.
sure, there will be costs to extending the Sexual Revolution. we saw them in its first phase. the 1970s, the so called Me Decade, was when the 1960s came to the rest of America. the divorce rate, rising in the 1960s, mushroomed in the 1970s. abortions skyrocketed. but there was no going back. the new order found its constitutional confirmation in the Supreme Court's 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision reaffirming abortion rights. justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the pro-choice majority, explained (no doubt unintentionally) how the Sexual Revolution depends on a radical, even nihilistic, (def - '"nothing"; total rejection of established laws and institutions) conception of freedom:
44 at the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and of the mystery of human life.
here is the end point of modernity: the autonomous, freely choosing individual, finding meaning in no one by himself.
'everyone has a right to develop their own form of life, grounded on their own sense of what is really important or of value. people are called upon to be true to themselves and to seek their own self - fulfillment. what this consists of, each must, in the last instance, determine for him or herself.. no one else can or should try to dictate its content. (note - this encapsulates the death sentence for any nation...when they consciously do only what they want rather than what God wants.)
of course every age has had its morally lax people and people who have forsaken ideals and commitments to pursue their heart's desire. in fact, every one of us christians is like that at times; it's called sin. what's distinct about the present age, says Taylor, is that 'today many people feel called to do this, feel they ought to do this, feel their lives would be somehow wasted or unfulfilled if they didn't do it.
what is 'it'? following your own heart, no matter what society says or the church or anybody else. this kind of thinking is devastating to every kind of social stability but especially to the church. the church, a community that authoritatively teaches and disciples its members, cannot withstand a revolution in which each member becomes, in effect, his own pope. churches - Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox - that are nothing more than a loosely bound assembly of individuals committed to finding their own 'truth', are no longer the church in any meaningful sense, because there is no shared belief.
in this sense, christians today may think we stand in opposition to secular culture, but in truth we are as much creatures of our own time
45 a secular people are, as Charles Taylor puts it, 'the entire ethical stance of moderns supposes and follows on from the death of God (and of course, of the meaningful cosmos). we may deny that God is dead, but to accept religious individualism and its theological support structure. Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, is to declare that
God may not be quite dead, but He is in hospice care and confined to the bed.
let's review a timeline of how the West arrived at this blasted heath of atomization, fragmentation, and unbelief.
14th century: the defeat of metaphysical realism by NOMINALISM in medieval theological debates removed the linchpin linking the transcendent and the material worlds. in nominalism, the MEANING of objects and actions in the material world DEPENDS ENTIRELY ON what MAN assigns it. war and plague brought the medieval system crashing down.
15th : the RENAISSANCE dawned with a new optimistic outlook on HUMAN POTENTIAL and began shifting the West's vision and social imagination from God to man, whom it saw as 'the measure of all things'.
16th: REFORMATION broke the religious unity of Europe. in Protestant lands, it birthed an unresolved CRISIS OF RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY, which over the coming centuries would case unending schisms.
17th - the WARS OF RELIGION resulted in the further DISCREDITing of RELIGION and the founding of he modern nation-state. the SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION struck the final blow to the organic medieval model of the cosmos, replacing it with a vision of the UNIVERSE as A MACHINE. the mind-body split proclaimed by DESCARTES APPLIED THIS TO the body. MAN became alienated from the natural world.
18th - The ENLIGHTENMENT attempted to create a PHILOSOPHICAL FRAMEWORK FOR LIVING in and governing society ABSENT RELIGIOUS REFERENCE. REASON THE POLESTAR of public life , with RELIGION- considered a burden from the Dark Ages - RELEGATED TO the PRIVATE LIFE. the French and American revolutions broke with the old regimes and their hierarchies and inaugurated a democratic, egalitarian age.
19th: the success of the INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION pulverized the agrarian way of life, uprooted masses from rural areas and brought them into the CITIES. relations among people came to be defined by MONEY. the ROMANTIC MOVEMENT REBELLED AGAINST THIS IN THE NAME OF INDIVIDUALISM and passion. ATHEISM and MARXist-influenced progressive social reform spread among cultural elites.
20th: the horrors of the TWO WORLD WARS severely DAMAGED FAITH IN the gods of reason and progress and IN the GOD of Christianity. with the growth of technology and mass CONSUMER society, people began to pay more attention to themSELVES and to fulfilling their individual DESIRES. the SEXUAL REVOLUTION exalted the desiring individual as the center of the emerging social order, deposing an enfeebled Christianity as the Ostrogoths deposed the hapless last emperor of the Western roman Empire in the fifth century.
the long journey from a medieval world wracked with suffering by pregnant with meaning has delivered us to a place of once unimaginable comfort but emptied of significance and connection. THE WEST HAS LOST THE GOLDEN THREAD THAT BINDS US TO GOD, CREATION AND EACH OTHER. unless we find it again, there is no hope of halting our
48 Chapter 3 - A Rule for Living
you can't go back to the past, but you can go to Norcia. and the glimpse of the christian past a pilgrim gets there is also, I am confident, a glimpse of the christian future.
Norcia - the modern name of Benedict of Nursia's birthplace - is a walled town that sits on a broad plateau at the end of a road that winds for 35 miles through harsh mountain country. it is easy to imagine how isolated Norcia was in Ben's day - and why, to our knowledge, the saint went down the mountain, never to return.
the suppression of the Norcia monastery happened in 1810 under laws imposed by Napoleon Bonaparte, then the ruler of norther Italy. Napoleon was a tyrant who inherited the anti-christian legacy of he French Revolution and used it to devastate the Catholic Church in all territories under French imperial rule. Napoleon was the dictator of a
49 French state so anticlerical that many in Europe speculated that he was the Antichrist.
legend has it that in an argument with a cardinal, Napoleon pointed out that he had the power to destroy the church.
'Your majesty, the cardinal replied, we, the clergy, have done our best to destroy the church for the last 1800 years. we have not succeeded and neither will you.
4 years after sending the Benedictines away from their home of nearly a millennium, Nap's empire was in ruins and he was in exile. today, the sound of Gregorian chants can once again be heard in the saint's hometown, a melodious rebuke to the apostate emperor. sometimes the past, as an American novelist famously said, is not even past.
the Monastery of St. Benedict is not the world's first Benedictine monastery. monks did not establish themselves in this town until the 10th century (or possibly earlier; written records only go back to the 900s). most of the men who refounded the monastery are young Americans who have chosen to give their lives wholly to God as Benedictine monks - and not just as monks but as Benedictines committed to living out the fullness of their tradition.
as I settled into the quiet of my monastery guest room after a morning in Norcia, I reflected on how unlikely it was that from this small town high in the mountains came the spark that kept the light of faith alive in europe through very hard times. that spark shone forth in a world when, in the words of the english lay Benedictine Esther de Waal, ' life was an urgent struggle to make sense of what was happening'. Like today, I though, then drifted off to sleep.
the next morning I met Father Cassian inside the monastery for a talk. He stands tall, his short hair and beard are steel-gray and his demeanor is serious and, will, monklike. but then he speaks, in his gentle baritone, you feel as if you are talking to your own father. Father Cassian speaks warmly and powerful of the integrity and joy of the
50 Benedictine life, which is so different from that of our fragmented modern world.
though the monks here have rejected the world. 'there's not just a No; there's a Yes too, Father Cassian says. It's both that we reject what is not life-giving and that we build something new. and we spend a lot of time in the rebuilding and people see that too, which is why people flock to the monastery. we have so much involvement with guests and pilgrims that it's exhausting. but that is what we do. we are rebuilding. that's the Yes that people have to hear about.
Rebuilding what? I asked.
'to use Pope Benedict's phrase, which he repeated many times, the Western world today lives as though God does not exist, he says. 'I think that's true. fragmentation, fear, disorientation, drifting - those are widely diffused characteristics of our society.
Yes, I thought, this is exactly right. when we lost our christian religion in modernity, we lost the thing that bound ourselves together and to our neighbors and anchored us in both the eternal and the temporal orders. we are adrift in liquid modernity, with no direction home.
and this monk was telling me that he and his brothers in the monastery saw themselves as working on the restoration of Christian belief and christian culture. how very Benedictine. I leaned in to hear more.
this monastery, Father Cassian explained and the life of prayer within it, exist as a sign of contradiction to the modern world, the guardrail have disappeared and the world risks careering (def - to run or move rapidly along; to go full speed) off a cliff, but we are so captured by the lights and motion of modern life that we don't recognize the danger. the fores of dissolution from popular culture are too great for individuals or families to resist on their own. we need to embed ourselves in stable communities of faith.
Benedict's Rule is a detailed set of instructions for how to organize and govern a monastic community, in which monks (and separately nuns) live together in poverty and chastity. that is common to all monastic living, but Benedict's Rule adds 3 distinct vows: obedience
51 stability (fidelity to the same monastic community until death), and conversion of life, which means dedicating oneself to the lifelong work of deepening repentance. the Rule also includes directions for dividing each day into periods of prayer, work and reading of Scripture and other sacred texts. the saint taught his followers how to live apart from the world, but also how to treat pilgrims and strangers who come to the monastery.
far from being a way of life for the strong and disciplined, Benedict's Rule was for the ordinary and weak, to help them grow stronger in faith. when Ben began forming his monasteries, it was common practice for monastics to adopt a written rule of life, and Ben's Rule was a simplified and (though it seems quite rigorous to us) softened version of an earlier rule. Ben had a noteworthy sense of compassion for human frailty, saying in the prologue to the Rule that he hoped to introduce 'nothing harsh and burdensome' but only to be strict enough to strengthen the hearts of the brothers 'to run the way of God's commandments with unspeakable sweetness and love'. he instructed his abbots to govern as strong but compassionate fathers and not to burden the brothers under his authority with things they are not strong enough to handle.
for example, in his chapter giving the order of manual labor, Ben says, 'let all things be done with moderation, however, for the sake of the faint-hearted. this is characteristic of Benedict's wisdom. he did not want to break his spiritual sons; he wanted to build them up.
despite the very specific instructions found in the Rule, it's not a checklist for legalism. 'the purpose of the Rule is to free you. that's a paradox that people don't grasp readily, Father Cassian said.
if you have a field covered with water because of poor drainage, he explained, crops either won't grow there, or they will rot. if you don't drain it, you will have a swamp and disease. but if you can dig a drainage channel, the field will become contained within the walls of the channel, it will flow with force and can accomplish things.
'A Rule works that way, to channel your spiritual energy, your work, your activity, so that you're able to accomplish something, Father Cassian said.
'Monastic life is very plain, he continued. 'People from the outside perhaps have a romantic vision, perhaps what they see on television, of monks sort of floating around the cloister. there is that, and that's attractive, but basically, monks get up in the morning, they pray, they do their work, they pray some more. they eat, they pray, they do some more work, they pray some more and then they go to bed. it's rather plain, just like most people. the genius of Saint Benedict is to find the presence of God in everyday life.
people who are anxious, confused and looking for answers are quick to search for solutions in the pages of books or on the Internet, looking for that 'killer app' that will make everything right again. the Rule tells us: No, it's not like that . you can achiever the peace and order you seek only by making a place within your heart and within your daily life for the grace of God to take root. divine grace is freely given, but God will not force us to receive it. it takes constant effort on our part to get out of God's way and let His grace heal us and change us. to this end, what we think does not matter as much as what ewe do - and how faithfully we do it.
a man who wants to get in shape and has read the best bodybuilding books will get nowhere unless he applies that knowledge in eating healthy food and working out daily. that takes sustained willpower. in time, if he's faithful to the practices necessary to achieve his goal, the man will start to love eating well and exercising so much that he is not pushed toward doing so by willpower but rather drawn to it by love. he will have trained his heart to desire the good.
so too with the spiritual life. right belief (orthodoxy) is essential, but holding the correct doctrines in your mind does you little good if your heart-the seat of the will - remains unconverted. that requires putting those right beliefs into action through right practice (orthopraxy), which over time achieves the goal Paul set for Timothy when
53 he commanded him to 'discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness. I Timothy 4.7
the author of !! Peter explains well the way the mind, the heart,and the body work in harmony for spiritual growth.
'now for this very reason also, applying all diligence, in your faith supply moral excellence and in your moral excellence, knowledge and in your knowledge, self-control and in your self-control, perseverance and in your perseverance, godliness and in your godliness, brotherly kindness and in your brotherly kindness, love. for f these qualities are yours and are increasing, they render you neither useless nor unfruitful in the true knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. II Pet. 1.5-8
though it quotes Scripture in nearly every one of its short chapters, the Rule is not the Gospel. it is a proven strategy for living the Gospel in an intensely christian way. it is an instruction manual for who to form one's life around the service of Jesus Christ, within a strong community. it is not a collection of theological 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 he Lord are looking on the good and evil in very place'. Prov. 15.3
the Rule is for monastics, obviously, but its teaching are plain enough to be adapted by lay christians for their own use. it provides a guide to serious and sustained christian living in a fashion that reorders us interiorly, bringing together what is scattered within our own hearts and orienting it to prayer. if applied effectively, it disciplines the life we share with others, breaking down barriers that keep the love of God from passing among us and makes us more resilient without hardening our hearts.
in the Benedict Option, we are not trying to repeal 700 years of history, as if that were possible. nor are we trying to save the
54 West. we are only trying to build a christian way of life that stands as an island of sanctity and stablility amid the high tide of liquid modernity. we are not looking to create heaven on earth; we are simply looking for a way to be strong in faith through a time of great testing. the Rule, with its vision of an ordered life centered around Christ the the practices it prescribes to deepen our conversion, can help us achieve that goal.
ORDER
if a defining characteristic of the modern world is disorder, than the most fundamental act of resistance is to establish order. if we don't have internal order, we will be controlled by our human passions and by the powerful outside forces who are in greater control of directing liquid modernity's deep currents...
...the point of life, for individual persons, for the church and for the state, is to pursue harmony with that transcendent, eternal order.
55 to order the world rightly as christians requires regarding all things as pointing toChrist. chap. 19 of the Rule offers a succinct example of the connection between a disciplinary teaching and the unseen order. in it, Ben insturcts his monks to keep their minds focused on the presence of God and His Angels...
'we believe that the divine presence is everywhere and that 'the eyes of the Lord are looking on the good and the evil in every place. (Prov. 15.3) writes Ben...
57 'the structure of live in the monastery, the things you do every day, is not just pointless repetition... its to train your heart and your spirit so that when you need it, when you don't feel strong enough to will yourself to get through a difficult moment, fall back on your training. you know that you wouldn't be strong enough to do it if you hadn't been kind of working at it and putting all the auxiliary (def - additional, reserve things in place.
PRAYER
that radiance is a fruit of dep and constant prayer. the Apostle Paul told the church in Thessalonica to 'pray without ceasing' I Thess. 5.17. benedictines consider thie entire lives to be an attempt
58 to fulfill this command. strictly speaking, prayer is communication, either privately or in community, with God. more broadly, prayer is maintaining an unfailing awareness of the divine presence and doing all thins with Him in mind...
to prayer is to engage in contemplation. the word has a particular meaning to monastics. it refers to what they believe is the highest state of the christian life; to free oneself from the cares of he flesh to adore and praise God and to reflect on His truth. this is in opposition to the active life, which is to do good works in the world.
think of the Gospel story of the sisters Martha and Mary. (note - Jesus said of Mary, who sat at His feet and did not help Martha to fix a mean...that Mary had 'chosen the better part'...)
for the monks, prayer is not simply words they speak. each monk spends several hours daily doing lectio divina, a Benedictine method of
59 Scripture study that involves reading a Scripture passage, meditating on it, praying about it and finally contemplating its meaning for the soul...
60 WORK
...if you know anything about the Benedictines, you will probably have heard that their motto is ora et labora - Latin for 'prayer and work'...'Idleness is the enemy of the soul, says St. Ben in Chapter 48 of the Rule the idea is that to be idle is to open the door to slothfulness.
61 ..the work must serve not ourselves but God and God alone...if they come to be proud of their work, the abbot must find something else for them to do. ...humility is that important. and monks must be scrupulously honest in their business dealings...because in all things God must be glorified.
...'any time we take something neutral, something material, and we make something out of it for the sake of giving glory to God, it becomes sacramental, it becomes a channel of grace.
62 'by means of the work in the kitchen, I'm establishing order. I'm exercising my God-given governance of the creative world, he sad. 'from a human perspective, work is so important because it helps us exercise that God-commanded dominance over the earth. and from a practical point of view, it provides for ourselves and others. it's important for us to know that through our work, we are making an important contribution to the community.
'we are called to love...work is a concerted way of showing our love for others. in that sense it can become very transformative - and very prayerful too.
'too often it's seen as a burden and it doesn't have to be...
in days to come, circumstances will compel christians - particularly those in certain professions - to rethink our relationship to our work.
63 ASCETICISM
this comes from the Greek word askesis, meaning 'training'. the life prescribed by the Rule is thoroughly ascetic. Monks fast regularly, live simply, refuse comfort and abide by the strict rules of the monastery. this is not a matter of earning spiritual merit. rather, the monk knows the human heart and how its passions must be reined in through disciplined living. Ascet is an antidote to the poison of self-centeredness common in our culture, which teaches us that satisfying our own desires is the key to the good live.
65 STABILITY
..a tree that is repeatedly uprooted and transplanted will be hard pressed to produce healthy fruit. so it is with people and their spiritual lives.
66 Sygmunt
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