Rule of Saint Benedict

Review: Stability

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Stability, Nathan Oates. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2021.

Summary: An exploration of the Benedictine commitment to stability, and what it can meet to sink our roots deeply, first into Christ, and then into the people and places to which he invites us.

We are a society on the move. I’m thinking just now of our church community. We have been a part of that community for 31 years and I can only think of eight people who were there when we came. Some of the departures were for very good reasons, to launch ministry elsewhere or to take a job that made sense for their calling. Some moved to nicer homes further away, and soon after found another church. Some just moved on for various reasons of dissatisfaction. At one point, during a difficult season when a number left, I described this as having pieces ripped out of my favorite shirt. Those departures hurt the most, and like other losses, I may not think of it as much, but the grief never goes away.

When Nathan Oates writes about stability, he is not insisting that we all stay put but rather that the stability that puts down deep roots, with Christ and with people in a place, is what births meaningful movement. It is different from the kind of restless movement of the gyrovague, that keeps thinking that the next new thing will satisfy our longings. (I should mention that the author does believe leaving abusive situations warranted.)

Oates turned to studying the life and rule of St. Benedict, the father of Western monasticism. Benedict gathered communities of those who wanted to set themselves apart from the world and created a Rule to govern their communal life. One of the problems he encountered was those who would never settle down in one place and it was he who coined the term gyrovague. His answer? He asked those who would join his communities to take a vow of stability: “to seek God in this place with this community under the guidelines established by this rule.” It was a commitment to a place, a people, and a purpose. Oates roots this call to stability in the omnipresence of God. We don’t have to go somewhere else to find God. Why then is there so much going in scripture? It is not in order to find God or whatever we are looking for, but rather that we have found what we are looking for.

Oates took his study of Benedict to another level, spending three weeks at the monastery at Norsia where the movement began. One of his first discoveries is to discover his days (and nights) being organized around prayer, seven times a day, where people scheduled meeting up “after Lauds.” You prayed more than you ate–two meals a day. Oates found himself constantly hungry. Instead of taking a break to pray, they took breaks from prayers, which Oates discovered is the monks’ real work. He learns that the formative work of stability comes as one goes deeper when things get hard, much like the choice every married couple faces. In turn, the stability of the monks becomes “the footing” for others around them. He describes the security the monks of Tibhirine provided their village–even when they suffered the death of a number of community members in a raid.

Oates sought to apply all this in his own church community, which led to four practices. First was to regularly celebrate the root of stability that bore fruit in the lives of people–birthdays, anniversaries, and even departures. Second, they valued the permanency of people. In this congregation it meant “raising our kids together.” Earlier, he speaks of a group of men who participated in his son’s “rite of passage” into adulthood. Third, they developed practices of placement, various traditions of community shared year after year–common meals and prayers, rites of passage, celebrations, and benedictions. Finally, he contends that families remain the primary formational communities (I wish he would have said more here about those who are not in families, where the church is family).

He concludes with an interesting question: where do we stay from here? The real issue is not just staying in a place or going. It is about radical stability–going deeper in Christ, growing closer to God. It has to do with prayer. The monks prayed a lot, and the point was deepening intimacy with God. He makes me wonder if so much of our present instability attests to how distant God is for us, and how so much of our grasping and contending is really an exercise in “looking for love in all the wrong places.” Oates believes the monastic practice of stability is something that God can use to renew our relationships, churches, and communities. So, where will you stay from here?

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: The Benedict Option

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The Benedict Option

The Benedict Option, Rod Dreher. New York: Sentinel, 2017.

Summary: A proposal that in the face of pervasive cultural decline that has led to political, theological, and moral compromise within the church, it is time for Christians to consider a kind of strategic withdrawal patterned on the monastic movement founded by St. Benedict.

The idea of “the Benedict Option” first came to my attention last summer when I was writing decrying the poisonous discourse, and what I felt was the lack of real choices in our presidential and some other races. A friend posted a comment pointing me to the writing of a conservative commentator, Rod Dreher, and articles he had written about “the Benedict Option,” inspired by the ideas of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. Subsequently, I wrote a post asking the question, “Is it Time for the ‘Benedict Option’?” My own opinion at the time was that while Dreher raises some critically important issues to which I believe churches must address themselves, I argued for an alternative sociologist James Davision Hunter calls “faithful presence.”

Now Dreher has published a fuller version of his argument in the recently released The Benedict Option. While I stand by my earlier opinion about the proposal, I have a deeper appreciation for the concerns that motivate Dreher and the value in what he proposes. Reading this fuller statement of the outworking of his ideas raised some additional concerns both about what he proposes and what he fails to address.

First of all, critical to understanding Dreher’s proposal is his assessment of the state of our culture in America. He opens the book likening the situation to a catastrophic flood in which the most strategic option of the survival of the church is the build an ark. He cites the failure of political “culture wars,” culminating in the legalizing of gay marriage, and the morally and theologically compromised state of conservative, mainline Protestant, and Catholic churches alike, typified in what Christian Smith has called “moral therapeutic deism”. He contends that it is time for the church to consider a strategic withdrawal along the lines of St. Benedict, who found Rome after barbarian invasions both in ruins and decadent. It is important to read Dreher closely here or one will simply hear him as saying we need to “head for the hills” or all become monks. Perhaps his choice of flood imagery is unfortunate here. Many of his examples in subsequent parts of the book suggest rather Christians who are part of counter-cultural communities that form people in Christ in the midst of an increasingly and more radically secular environment.

What does Dreher draw from the example of Benedict (and modern day Benedictine communities which he visited)? Fundamentally he argues that Christians need to be in a community with a rule of life that forms character, informs behavior, and educates for orthodoxy. Such communities reflect a God-shaped order, life of prayer, work, ascetic practices, stability, hospitality, and balance.

After making the case for the need for the Benedict Option, including a history of the decline of western culture, and describing what may be drawn from the Benedictine example, Dreher discusses what this means for a number of areas of life:

  • Politics. Dreher contends efforts of “values voters” to shape a national agenda around Christian values has failed. He calls for a localism that begins by re-establishing bonds of substantive community both within local congregations and in one’s local setting.
  • The Church. He argues for rediscovering how Christians prayed, lived, and worshiped in the past. This includes recovering liturgical worship that involves the whole of one’s body, fasting and other ascetic practices, church discipline and witness through the arts.
  • The Christian Village. Dreher thinks not only the family but also “the village” has an important impact on our lives, and particularly those of our children and strengthening our social networks within churches and between orthodox churches should be a priority.
  • Education. Dreher’s concern for children comes through in many chapters, and particularly here. He argues particularly for pulling children out of public schools and for “classical Christian education.”
  • Work. He argues that Christians should be prepared to lose their jobs in many fields where choices of conscience may mean being fired. Christians may need to be entrepreneurial and start their own businesses, be prepared to work in trades and do physical labor, and support one another.
  • Sexuality. The church needs to recover a vibrant message about sexuality rooted in creation and incarnation that supports chasteness and marital fidelity between men and women, particularly stands with those who are single and recognizes the scourge of pornography.
  • Technology. We need to recognize how we’ve allowed technology to take over our lives, through the internet, smartphones, and even reproductive technologies and that technology is not morally neutral. Dreher would withhold smartphones from teenagers.

I think the most compelling part of Dreher’s argument is that American culture is eating the church’s lunch, so to speak. At best, churches provide a thin, spiritual veneer over beliefs and behaviors that contradict church teaching and reflect secular culture rather than vibrant Christian belief and practice. The most important part of his argument is his call for learning from Benedict about the value of a communal rule of life that shapes character, belief, and practice.  Dreher has a positive, supportive view of the arts and a vision for the attractive value of cultivating beauty in our communities. I affirm his concluding call that the Benedict Option be embraced out of love, not fear.

Other parts of his argument rest heavily on whether you accept his assessment of the culture, and the remedy of radical withdrawal. With politics, I think there is something to be said for a greater focus on localism and a disengagement from national political efforts. I disagree that we should do so because of “failure” but rather that the church’s “captivity” to particular political parties was never a good idea. His discussion of withdrawing from schools was particularly troublesome to me as a sweeping recommendation (I realize this may be necessary in some contexts). Christians who come together to pray for, volunteer with, support, and engage their local schools have a great impact in many cases, support Christians teaching in the schools, and can teach their children how to think critically about what they are hearing and engage appropriately.

I’m also concerned for what I do not hear. Apart from one or two statements against racism, this felt like a very “white” book. It did not seem rooted in conversations with people of color or the ethnic churches of which they are part. Education proposals that focus on classical education in the western tradition ignore the realities of ethnic minorities who bring other rich cultural and intellectual traditions with unique insights into the Christian faith into our communal life. The book appeared to me to assume an audience that is conservative and college educated. While focusing heavily and repeatedly on sexual politics, the book had little to say about solidarity with Christians across racial lines, addressing issues of income disparities (apart from some ideas of distributivism and “helping each other out”), or caring for the creation (something the Benedictines do both in living close to the land, and with their focus on poverty which takes just enough to live from the land).

Dreher’s proposal has provoked a national conversation, including reviews and discussion in major media outlets and even an op-ed by David Brooks in the New York Times. It is a book that deserves the attention of church or ministry leaders who take seriously their responsibility for the formation of those in their care. It is worth a read by public educators to understand the concerns (whether warranted or not) many thoughtful religious people have about the current state of public education. I hope this book brings Dreher into a wider conversation beyond the conservative constituency for whom he typically writes, that they will engage seriously with his central contentions, and in turn, that it might lead Dreher into a greater “communion of the saints” that includes Christians of other ethnicities and political commitments.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: The Rule of Saint Benedict

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The Rule of Saint Benedict
The Rule of Saint Benedict by St. Benedict of Nursia
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

For most of us to read this work is to enter another world. Not only is this written in the 6th century AD but it is written about a kind of experience, the truly monastic life, that few of us will experience, much less understand. So what is the worth of this work?

First of all, the choice of a monastic life is the choice to pursue a greater love of God and holiness of life through poverty, simplicity, submission, and stability in a community. For those who don’t choose monastic communities, it seems there is much we can still learn from Benedict, if we are willing to accept the challenge implicit in the “rule” he develops.

Benedict covers all matters of life in the monastery from the qualifications of the abbot to entering the monastery to the ordering of Psalms used in the prayers of the hours to times for meals, amounts of food and drink, the care of the sick, the treatment of guests and even the qualifications of the porter and the cellarer (the person responsible for keeping the monastery in food and drink).

Perhaps most challenging are some of the rules pertaining to excommunication. It seems on first reading harsh, because one can be excommunicated for even minor faults. Reading more carefully, it is evident that much of this has to do with resistance to the authority necessary to sustain such a community. There also are clear provisions for the abbot to work with the excommunicate to restore him and specific steps to restoration. What all this speaks into is the recognition that sin is deceitful and its roots go deep into our lives and that if one cares deeply about pursuing a holy life, such drastic measures may be necessary and that we cannot do it ourselves but only as we come under the authority of Christ and those who minister on his behalf.

Much of this challenges our “I’m basically a good person” culture that embraces radical personal freedom. It recognizes that freedom often comes through submission to the rule of another that brings order to lives out of control. And so, I think there are a number of insights from Benedict’s “Rule” that apply to those of us not living as monastics:

1. If loving God above all else is indeed the one thing in our lives, then this implies the simplicity that removes all that distracts from this pursuit.

2. Some “rule of life” is necessary for all of us–a rhythm of ordering our hours and days around the pursuit of our first love.

3. We cannot do this alone. Work and prayer in community with others of like mind is important to sustaining our resolve.

4. “Submission” is a nasty word to most of us in contemporary society and yet if we do not submit to Christ and those seeking genuinely to act on his behalf as shepherds to us, how can we hope to flourish “in green pastures and beside still waters”?

This particular edition is preceded by an essay by Thomas Moore and a helpful chronology of monasticism. Even if all the details of monastic life seem irrelevant, I would recommend reading the first seven chapters which include discussions of humility, the restraint of speech and seeking the counsel of others that have relevance for all of us. But the rest will not take a great deal of time, the whole “Rule” only occupies 70 pages in this edition.

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