I don't know how things are in your neck of the post-election woods, but we've had choppers overhead every night and early morning for the last two weeks and it doesn't look to let up any time soon. Frankly, I'm weary of it all. The whole thing. This election cycle broke Facebook for me, possibly permanently. The ugliness that I saw from both sides makes me feel sad and lonely. I will say for the record that I didn't have a dog in this fight; I voted third party for my conscience.
I try to refrain from discussing politics on this blog, but I think today is a good day to share this wonderful reflection by Brian Kaller of Restoring Mayberry, in the hopes that it will provide some ballast to the current mood of the nation. Please read the whole thing--he makes a lot of good points and has the advantage of being somewhat removed from the fray.
From the article:
"I don’t know what kind of president Mr. Trump will be– by all means, keep a watchful eye on his administration. Clinton supporters can stop, however, going on as though they’ve been robbed of the glorious future they were supposed to have, if only their candidate had been elected, and that we are now sliding into an age of evil and darkness. No political figure will fix or destroy everything. There is no bomb counting down to Too Late, no point at which it is Game Over, nor any point where our story ends Happily Ever After. The nation is not a ship that can sink or a train that was speeding towards Progressistan; it was not derailed, and will not get Back on Track.
You won’t defeat the Moonbats, Wingnuts, Useful Idiots or Forces of Hatred, because those are imaginary concepts from a web site – the people on the other side are named Molly and Amy and Adam, and they are trying to do the right thing just like you are. The odds of they, and you, dying is 100% in the long run, but the odds of dying in the next few years in a Zombie Apocalypse, Nuclear Armageddon or Nazi Death Camp are quite low. Remember, we’ve been through this many times before, and we’re still here.
No matter what happens, no matter what your politics, there is one thing that’s bound to help your country in the years ahead. You could help rebuild the social institutions around you -- churches, fraternal organizations, town halls, unions, markets, and webs of mutual obligation – that have so deeply deteriorated. They are what democracy used to be, before it became images on a screen. They are what our dreams used to be made of. They are what kept towns and neighbourhoods functioning fifty or a hundred or two hundred years ago, back before we looked to a candidate to fix everything for us."
~Brian Kaller, "Backing Away from Hyperbole," Restoring Mayberry Blog, November 20, 2016
Put not your trust in princes or in sons of men.
Showing posts with label Benedict Option. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Benedict Option. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 22, 2016
Tuesday, May 24, 2016
Talking Tuesday: Endurance
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| all images via Google Images, of St. Herman of Alaska Monastery in Platina, CA |
We live in interesting times. I could not have predicted the speed with which traditional Christianity would be marginalized in American society, nor ways in which Christians would be forced to abandon the public square.
I'm very interested in the Benedict Option; I'm always thinking about how to consciously structure our family life to revolve around the life of the Church, and to make sure that our children are firmly grounded in the Faith. We will have to be much more deliberate in choosing a Christian path as a family, because we can no longer count on the surrounding culture to shore it up.
I worry about the world my children will inhabit, because I think it will be very different from the one that I knew growing up. I want them to have the tools to live as exiles from the world, to stay strong in their faith, and to order their lives according to the rhythms of the Church. We can learn much from monasteries--I've discussed previously how much I admire the rhythms of life at the monastery of St. Herman of Alaska in Platina, CA. Their lives are not physically comfortable, but I find there is much to learn in how they live them in accordance with the liturgical life of the Church. It is not an easy path, but it is one that Christ called us to as Christians.
The error in this, or least one prominent one, should be obvious: it ignores the Fall and the reality of sin. No culture will persist in virtue without the constant guidance, admonition, and even judgment of the Church. In the absence of these, the seeds of original sin will again sprout into tares that slowly spread and choke out the wheat of the culture.
This is essentially what has been happening to the West since around the time of the Reformation. And yet it has not been until recently that things have come to a head.
What is different now? Well, the Church has neglected the culture for so long that [the culture] now advocates for beliefs and practices that directly contradict the Christian faith.
This is where the difficulty begins, because Christians have gotten soft. We’ve gotten used to our positions of power and influence. When faced with the choice of keeping their faith or their cultural relevance, an increasing number of Christians have been choosing the latter."
If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you....He who hates Me hates My Father also. If I had not done among them the works which no one else did, they would have no sin; but now they have seen and also hated both Me and My Father. But this happened that the word might be fulfilled which is written in their law, ‘They hated Me without a cause. But when the Helper comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify of Me. ~John 15:18-27
The analysis of the current state of affairs in America comes from a reader of Dreher's blog, and I recommend reading the whole thing, but here is the first part:
"I think the story goes something like this: In the first centuries of the Church, Christians were the minority and the outcasts, at times even enemies of the state. Over centuries, and through much toil and blood, we attained toleration. Eventually, that developed into acceptance. Finally, we were ascendant. Christianity became the faith of the Empire. Along with this came positions of power and influence for Christians, who no longer had to fear a conflict between their faith and carrying out the duties of state.
That arrangement more or less persisted for centuries. Obviously, for Orthodox Christians in the East it ended with the fall of the Byzantine Empire and the rise of Islam. In the West, however, the Church remained integrally involved with the state and persisted as a preeminent influence on culture.
Much good has come of this, most especially the influence of Christian anthropology on the arts, philosophy, and political theory. The Church, too, benefited from the need to articulate uniquely Christian understandings of aesthetics, ethics, and political philosophy. The greatest achievements of Western civilization all rest on this foundation laid by Christianity.
However, as has been much discussed, especially by you in connection with the Benedict Option, this longstanding position of power and cultural priority for Christianity has also enabled an, at times, unhealthy laxity within the Church. I’m talking about the propensity of Christians, after they have baptized the culture, to kick up their feet and relax, thinking they have constructed some sort of perpetual motion machine. Once Christianity has formed the culture, this unspoken thinking goes, the culture will perpetuate Christianity. The Church need only see to its rituals, acting as a sort of all-encompassing master of ceremonies for the culture as a whole.
The analysis of the current state of affairs in America comes from a reader of Dreher's blog, and I recommend reading the whole thing, but here is the first part:
"I think the story goes something like this: In the first centuries of the Church, Christians were the minority and the outcasts, at times even enemies of the state. Over centuries, and through much toil and blood, we attained toleration. Eventually, that developed into acceptance. Finally, we were ascendant. Christianity became the faith of the Empire. Along with this came positions of power and influence for Christians, who no longer had to fear a conflict between their faith and carrying out the duties of state.
That arrangement more or less persisted for centuries. Obviously, for Orthodox Christians in the East it ended with the fall of the Byzantine Empire and the rise of Islam. In the West, however, the Church remained integrally involved with the state and persisted as a preeminent influence on culture.
Much good has come of this, most especially the influence of Christian anthropology on the arts, philosophy, and political theory. The Church, too, benefited from the need to articulate uniquely Christian understandings of aesthetics, ethics, and political philosophy. The greatest achievements of Western civilization all rest on this foundation laid by Christianity.
However, as has been much discussed, especially by you in connection with the Benedict Option, this longstanding position of power and cultural priority for Christianity has also enabled an, at times, unhealthy laxity within the Church. I’m talking about the propensity of Christians, after they have baptized the culture, to kick up their feet and relax, thinking they have constructed some sort of perpetual motion machine. Once Christianity has formed the culture, this unspoken thinking goes, the culture will perpetuate Christianity. The Church need only see to its rituals, acting as a sort of all-encompassing master of ceremonies for the culture as a whole.
The error in this, or least one prominent one, should be obvious: it ignores the Fall and the reality of sin. No culture will persist in virtue without the constant guidance, admonition, and even judgment of the Church. In the absence of these, the seeds of original sin will again sprout into tares that slowly spread and choke out the wheat of the culture.
This is essentially what has been happening to the West since around the time of the Reformation. And yet it has not been until recently that things have come to a head.
What is different now? Well, the Church has neglected the culture for so long that [the culture] now advocates for beliefs and practices that directly contradict the Christian faith.
This is where the difficulty begins, because Christians have gotten soft. We’ve gotten used to our positions of power and influence. When faced with the choice of keeping their faith or their cultural relevance, an increasing number of Christians have been choosing the latter."
Our task is to live our lives with integrity, in accordance with God's laws and the Tradition of the Church, with an increased care for that which goes on in our back yards. We must recommit to doing all of the the things that Christ commanded us as the Church to do in our communities, with the person in front of us. This is difficult. I freely admit that the pace and structure of modern life make this task a daunting one, especially for an introvert like me. It is hard to invite people over, to find the time and energy to bring like-minded people together to build community, but it is absolutely necessary to shoring up our faith, and also to give us strength to continue on the Way. Being a Christian in the new order will require some hard conversations--indeed, some hard decisions--about what we will and will not do as Christians in a hostile land. I don't have any answers, only my poor prayers that we may endure.
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
Talking Tuesday: Ken Myers
I was starting to feel a bit better last week, but then a stomach bug bit me on Saturday, and I'm still kind of recovering my energy. I did make it to church on Sunday, but I am wiped out from the weekend's effort.
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| via google images |
Forgive me posting this with relatively little commentary. Today's passage comes from Ken Myers, of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Myers is a man who thinks deeply about the extent to which Christians should engage the larger culture, and how much they should build fences in order to preserve the faith for the next generations. He considers what culture is, and what it should be.
Rod Dreher quotes Myers' first volume of the excellent audio Mars Hill Journal:
"Cultures cultivate. A culture is more like an ecosystem than like a supermarket. And human persons, as encultured creatures, are generally less like independent rationally choosing shoppers than like organisms whose environment predisposes a certain set of attitudes and actions.
Cultures cultivate. Not that our activities are absolutely determined by cultural influences. We are rational beings, not just instinctual beings. We can make choices that go against the conventions sustained around us. We can lean into the prevailing winds, but only if we know how to stand somewhere solid. Only if we are not being carried by the wind. We need to be able to imagine alternative ways of perceiving reality.
Cultures cultivate, so if we want to offset the influence of cultural systems that distort or misrepresent reality, we need more than good arguments that analyze the distortions. We need cultural alternatives that provide opportunities for participating in a different way of telling the story of human experience.
For example, counteracting the materialistic reductionism of our time requires practices that convey to our imaginations the coherent unity of matter and spirit. Challenging the assumptions that human beings are best understood and best treated by social structures as autonomous choosers whose choices provide meaning in an otherwise meaningless universe requires settings in which submission and obedience to some order of things that precedes our willing is known as a delight and a blessing.
Distorted institutions and practices can’t be confronted only by arguments. They require well-ordered practices and institutions. Resisting cultural confusion is more than a matter of thinking outside the box. We need to be able to intuit outside the box. And to encourage well-ordered intuitions to those under our care, especially our children — because cultures cultivate.
I’m surprised by how often this simple fact is ignored by people who talk about cultural engagement. There are people who are honestly concerned about one trend or another in our social life, who regard those problems as the effect of bad arguments or bad intentions, and not, as they often are, as the product of some malformation or other in the shape of lived life. So they end up using malformed tools to repair the damage caused by the same malformed tools, thinking that better ideas, or a more clearly articulated list or priorities, or worst of all, the right political leadership, will fix things. To switch metaphors, they aren’t attending to the ecosystemic causes of those problems. They are applying more fertilizer or more water to plants that are suffering from a fatal amount of shade."
"Cultures cultivate. A culture is more like an ecosystem than like a supermarket. And human persons, as encultured creatures, are generally less like independent rationally choosing shoppers than like organisms whose environment predisposes a certain set of attitudes and actions.
Cultures cultivate. Not that our activities are absolutely determined by cultural influences. We are rational beings, not just instinctual beings. We can make choices that go against the conventions sustained around us. We can lean into the prevailing winds, but only if we know how to stand somewhere solid. Only if we are not being carried by the wind. We need to be able to imagine alternative ways of perceiving reality.
Cultures cultivate, so if we want to offset the influence of cultural systems that distort or misrepresent reality, we need more than good arguments that analyze the distortions. We need cultural alternatives that provide opportunities for participating in a different way of telling the story of human experience.
For example, counteracting the materialistic reductionism of our time requires practices that convey to our imaginations the coherent unity of matter and spirit. Challenging the assumptions that human beings are best understood and best treated by social structures as autonomous choosers whose choices provide meaning in an otherwise meaningless universe requires settings in which submission and obedience to some order of things that precedes our willing is known as a delight and a blessing.
Distorted institutions and practices can’t be confronted only by arguments. They require well-ordered practices and institutions. Resisting cultural confusion is more than a matter of thinking outside the box. We need to be able to intuit outside the box. And to encourage well-ordered intuitions to those under our care, especially our children — because cultures cultivate.
I’m surprised by how often this simple fact is ignored by people who talk about cultural engagement. There are people who are honestly concerned about one trend or another in our social life, who regard those problems as the effect of bad arguments or bad intentions, and not, as they often are, as the product of some malformation or other in the shape of lived life. So they end up using malformed tools to repair the damage caused by the same malformed tools, thinking that better ideas, or a more clearly articulated list or priorities, or worst of all, the right political leadership, will fix things. To switch metaphors, they aren’t attending to the ecosystemic causes of those problems. They are applying more fertilizer or more water to plants that are suffering from a fatal amount of shade."
I think Ken Myers gets at what I wanted Jamie Smith to be addressing in How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor. My two main complaints about Smith's book are a) it is at times painfully obtuse to a non-philosophy person, and I felt like there was a lot of specialist academic argument going on in the footnotes and some in the body of the work that I didn't really understand; and b) his book is largely diagnostic, rather than prescriptive. I realize he is summarizing Taylor, and giving us an understanding of how our modern culture got to the place it is, but I would have liked more prescription. I get how we got here. I want to know where we go from here in order to preserve the faith for our children.
I guess the conclusion I keep coming back to is to simply "do" church. Attend the services, pray in the home as a family, keep the liturgical cycle of feasts and fasts, read the Bible, talk about the Resurrection, talk about Jesus' ministry, talk about the disciples and the early Church, read the lives of the saints, make specific choices as a family to prioritize the Christian life, even if they run counter to the popular culture, limit engagement with secular media, read good books, learn history. I realize it is little enough, but if enough of us do that, it forms a culture that is intuitive for our children, and hopefully will be intuitive then for their children. One that they don't have to consider, but simply live.
Tuesday, January 19, 2016
Talking Tuesday: More Benedict Option
It is Theophany today, so I'm off to church with the kids in a minute. I just finished reading How Dante Can Save Your Life, and want to discuss that in a separate post. For today, I wanted to share two excellent posts from Rod Dreher in the last few days on the Benedict Option--a shorthand term for a strategic cultural retreat by Christians in order to preserve the faith and pass it on to the next generation, while still being salt and light in the present.
In "There and Back Again", Dreher summarizes a recent interview with David Brooks, whose career has moved away from writing about politics to writing about morality and spirituality. My husband read and enjoyed Brooks' latest book last year. It is on my list.
Writes Dreher:
"In his interview, Brooks says when he talks about things like this in places like suburban Connecticut, the women in the audience love it, but the men get antsy, tell him that he’s making them uncomfortable, and that they would rather talk about Chris Christie’s prospects. There’s something important in that response. We are a people, broadly speaking, aware of our deep lack, but we are also unwilling to sacrifice the time and the liberty to invest in the ways of thinking and living that could deliver us from our decadence."
~Rod Dreher, "There And Back Again" The American Conservative Blog, January 13, 2015.
In "Gardeners, Knights, and The Benedict Option", Dreher summarizes a talk given by James Lewis III, a Catholic BenOp living on a suburban farm in Witchita, KS.
Lewis spoke at the Eighth Day Books conference there this weekend, and talked about how the Benedict Option means self-restraint and making counter-cultural choices in the pursuit of holiness.
"A knight, he says, exemplifies courage, self-restraint, and perseverance in service of a higher end. This makes the knight a “witness” to the world. To be a true knight, he said, you have to be willing to be unusual. Even something as simple as having no TV in the house is enough to make you stand out as a freak in today’s world.
“People will ask, ‘How do you live that way? You ask back, ‘Well, how do you live that way?’ We live in different worlds.”"
~Rod Dreher, "Gardeners, Knights, And the Benedict Option" American Conservative Blog, January 19, 2015
Dreher notes in How Dante Can Save Your Life that the root of sin is the failure to love rightly. I think it is worth exploring how we should love, and how we teach our children to love as Christ loved. We must walk the path to theosis ourselves, but also teach our children to walk the path as well. One foot at a time, sometimes with great strides, other times with mincing steps. It is a daunting but necessary task.
Tuesday, December 22, 2015
Talking Tuesday: The Power of Memory Redux
"Connerton says that modernity is a condition of deliberate forgetting, of choosing to deny the power of the past to affect our actions in the present, so as to create a new condition of existence marked by the individual’s freedom of choice. Capitalism requires this deliberate forgetting, and facilitates it, and rites we invent in modern times “are palliative measures, façades erected to screen off the full implications of this vast worldwide clearing operation.”
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What does this mean? He’s telling us that in modernity, the market is our god. It conditions what we imagine to be possible. We can’t dream that life should be ordered by rituals that bound and define our experience, and link it to the past, to a sacred order. There is no sacred order; there is only the here and now, the tangible. The world exists to be remade to fit our desires. There are no ways of living that we should conform our lives to, no stories that tell us how we should live. When Connerton says that in modernity, and under capitalism, we can hardly “imagine life as a structure of exemplary recurrence,” he’s saying that we can no longer easily believe that we should live according to set patterns of thought and action because they conform to eternal truths.
What does this mean? He’s telling us that in modernity, the market is our god. It conditions what we imagine to be possible. We can’t dream that life should be ordered by rituals that bound and define our experience, and link it to the past, to a sacred order. There is no sacred order; there is only the here and now, the tangible. The world exists to be remade to fit our desires. There are no ways of living that we should conform our lives to, no stories that tell us how we should live. When Connerton says that in modernity, and under capitalism, we can hardly “imagine life as a structure of exemplary recurrence,” he’s saying that we can no longer easily believe that we should live according to set patterns of thought and action because they conform to eternal truths.
...
The Benedict Option has to be about learning to love the past, and to care about it, to the point of suffering for it. And not just “the past,” which can become an idol, but the God and the faith that comes to us through the past, in Scripture, and in Tradition. We cannot make it up as we go along. Churches that do this in an attempt to be relevant and seeker-sensitive are preparing their flocks for assimilation to the secular culture."
Read the whole thing.
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