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The Benedict Option

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The Benedict Option The Benedict Option A STRATEGY FOR CHRISTIANS IN A POST-CHRISTIAN NATION R o d B r e h e r SENTINEL Introduction: The Awakening Chapter 1: The Great Flood Chapter 2: The Roots of the Crisis Chapter 3: A Rule for Living Chapter 4: A New Kind of Christian Politics Chapter 5: A Church for All Seasons Chapter 6: The Idea of a Christian Village Chapter 7: Education as Christian Formation Chapter 8: Preparing for Hard Labor Chapter 9: Eros and the New Christian Counterculture Chapter 10: Man and the Machine Conclusion: The Benedict Decision 237 Acknowledgments 245 Notes 247 Index 257 ■ r Let us arise, then, at last, For the Scripture stirs us up, saying, “Now is the hour for us to rise from sleep.” (Romans 13:11) —Rule of Saint Benedict 1 CHAPTER 3 A Rule for Living ou can’t go back to the past, but you can go to Norcia. And the Yglimpse 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 thirty-five miles through harsh mountain country. It is easy to imagine how isolated Norcia was in Benedict’s day—and why, to our knowledge, the saint went down the mountain, never to return. One warm February morning I traveled to the Monastery of St. Benedict, the home of fifteen monks and their prior, Father Cassian Folsom. Father Cassian, a sixty-one-year-old American, reopened the monastery with a handful of brother Benedictines in December 2000, nearly two centuries after the state shut the tenth-century prayer cita­ del’s doors and dispersed its monks. The suppression of the Norcia monastery happened in 1810 under laws imposed by Napoleon Bonaparte, then the ruler of northern Italy. Napoleon was a tyrant who inherited the anti-Christian legacy of the French Revolution and used it to devastate the Catholic Church in all territories under French imperial rule. Napoleon was the dictator of a 48 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 eighteen hundred years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you.” Four years after sending the Benedictines away from their home of nearly a millennium, Napoleon’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 tenth 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 Bene­ dictine 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.”1 Like today, I thought, 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, well, monklike. But when he speaks, in his gentle baritone, you feel as if you are talking to your own father. Father Cassian speaks warmly and powerfully of the integrity and joy of the 49 m e Deneaici wpuon 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 ayes 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 theyes 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 reli­ gion 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 mon­ astery 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 guardrails have disappeared, and the world risks careering off a cliff, but we are so captured by the lights and motion of modern life that we don’t recognize the danger. The forces 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.2 That is common to all monastic living, but Benedict’s Rule adds three distinct vows: obedi­ n xiuiv/ lux uivi ence, 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 Scrip­ ture 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, Bene­ dict’s Rule was for the ordinary and weak, to help them grow stronger in faith. When Benedict began forming his monasteries, it was com­ mon practice for monastics to adopt a written rule of life, and Bene­ dict’s Rule was a simplified and (though it seems quite rigorous to us) softened version of an earlier rule. Benedict 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 fa­ thers, 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 edict 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 drain­ age channel, the field will become healthy and useful. W hat’s more, once the water becomes contained within the walls of the channel, it will flow with force and can accomplish things. 51 “A Rule works that way, to channel your spiritual energy, your work, your activity, so that you’re able to accomplish something,” Fa­ ther Cassian said. “Monastic life is very plain,” he continued. “People from the out­ side perhaps have a romantic vision, perhaps what they see on televi­ sion, 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.
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