Sometimes a Kiss is More Than a Kiss

Far and away my favourite example of popes and kisses has to be Pope Paul VI who, in December 1975 fell to his knees to greet the representative of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, Metropolitan Meliton, who came to tell him that Orthodoxy was organizing itself to launch an official dialogue with the Catholic Church. Overjoyed by this news, Paul VI fell to his knees and astonished everyone by kissing Meliton's feet. It had a powerful effect on those in the Sistine Chapel with the two churchmen, but on many others in Orthodoxy as well.

This story has been in (limited) circulation for a while, but was written up in a very short little book I enjoyed reading when it first came out, Rome & Constantinople: Pope Paul VI & Metropolitan Meliton of Chalcedon by Athanasios Papas, trans. George Dion Dragas (Orthodox Research Institute, 2006), 60pp. (There are some photos of the incident here.)

Fast forward to this week's utterly silly furor over the pope's hand being kissed. The question nobody is asking is of course psychological. Outside a liturgical exchange of the kiss of peace, what motivates people to want to do this? And what motivates people to rush to judge Pope Francis over this when the evidence from the event in question seems less than straightforward and admits of several plausible interpretations? For many Catholics, of course, this is just one more piece of evidence of how wicked a man he is for defying such a "sacred tradition."

But why should this be a tradition in the first place? And how "traditional" is it, anyway? Would it be more traditional if he had people kiss his feet, as used to be prescribed by protocol until only a few decades ago? Would he be thought more traditional if he brought back the papal slippers with a cross on them to receive the kisses of the people prostrate before him on his throne? Would that reassure people, and give them an extra frisson at being able to indulge in not one but two kisses, and not of his hand or ring, but of his feet while they are on their knees?

The need to do this is what should give us pause. Already, of course, his most vocal detractors are insisting that people always and only do this to show reverence to Christ, and if he doesn't like it or prevents them from doing it, then he must be like Ayn Rand (as one person put it on Twitter) denying the divinity of Christ. Kissing the ring, then, is a sign of impeccable Christology or something called "orthodoxy."

Some people--perhaps--may see themselves doing it solely for that reason, but I wager they are a vanishingly small minority, and even they are not doing it for that reason alone. One of the things we ought by now to have learned from Freud is that our motives are rarely if ever that unequivocal--even as we remain largely unaware of our motives, which are revealed by our actions. (See his 1914 essay  "Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through" for more on this.)

To his credit, the erstwhile Catholic Rod Dreher has helpfully drawn our attention to these mixed motives in reflecting on the earlier crisis of sex abuse that engulfed Bernard Cardinal Law of Boston in 2002 and how Dreher used the act of ring kissing as tendentiously as today's critics of Francis are doing:

This is nobody’s fault but my own. Part of that involved hero-worshipping Pope John Paul II, and despite having a healthy awareness of the sins and failings of various bishops, exaggerating the virtues of bishops my side deemed “orthodox.” Bernard Cardinal Law was just such a bishop. I count it as one of the most shameful acts of my life the moment when I rushed across a courtyard in Jerusalem to kneel and kiss Cardinal Law’s ring.

I don’t count it as a sin to kiss a cardinal’s ring; what was wrong was my motivation for doing so: I felt so much pride in showing myself to be an orthodox Catholic paying due homage to an orthodox archbishop in that public way.

It was, in other words, and as we say today, virtue signalling. But why?

Again the question before us is psychological. Leaving aside the claims to be demonstrating piety or respect for an "office," why do Christians, all children of the same Father, feel the need to elevate some of their number and prostrate before them? This is a question taken up to powerful effect by another Spanish Jesuit, Carlos Dominguez-Morano in his recent and hugely important book Belief After Freud.

I draw on Dominguez-Morano in my new book Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power, where I was forced to spend time on such psychological questions as are engendered by the personality cult around the pope, and discuss in detail three very revealing instances--from a group of laics, from a prominent priest, and from an entire episcopal conference (that of England and Wales)--of this need to prostrate themselves before the pope and engage in self-abasement while figuratively kissing his ring (if not other more posterior parts). Whether you kiss the ring or not, and whether he likes it or not, are all entirely beside the vastly more interesting and important question: why this is a felt need in the first place?

Christian Intentional Communities

Amidst the myriad of flaws and lacunae (enumerated here) in Rod Dreher's little book, none is more fatal than its romanticization of local community. As I noted in 2015, I have some personal experience, over more than a decade, of a variety of forms of Christian intentional communities in several places and the many difficulties they experience, especially when it comes to open, honest, charitable acknowledgement, let alone resolution, of internal conflicts. They can, to be sure, offer wonderful gifts, as I experienced from my community after I very nearly died in 1996 when I was hit by a bus in Ottawa while riding my bike. It took me nearly a year to recover--three months in hospital, and six months learning to walk again--and during that time I had wonderful support from my community. But I also saw first-hand, there and in other communities, how Christians are tempted to ignore serious problems, thereby making them much worse.

We have not had, until now, a lot of research into Christian intentional communities. But a new book looks sure to begin the overdue process of filling in some gaps about how such communities are structured and function: Religious Vitality in Christian Intentional Communities: A Comparative Ethnographic Study by Mark Killian (Lexington Books, 2017), 226pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Through ethnographic research, Killian examines vitality in Philadelphia and Berea, two Christian Intentional Communities whose participants live in close proximity with one another to achieve religious values. Pulling from Anthony Giddens’ theory of structuration, Killian argues that the vitality of both communities cannot be reduced to deterministic structural, individual, or organizational causes. Rather, vitality in these communities is affected by all of these causes in relationship to one another. In other words, it’s not that each explanation “matters” (e.g., social structures matter, organizational behaviors matter, individual religious choices matter), but that these explanations matter to each other (e.g., social structures matter to individual choices, individual choices matter to organizational behaviors, and social structures matter to organizational choices, etc.). To make this argument, Killian develops the idea of the vitality nexus—the interconnected relationship between the various explanations of religious vitality.

Reading Dreher with Schmemann and MacIntyre (and thus Marx)

After having written something in 2015 about Rod Dreher's project of marketing MacIntyre's concluding (and regretted) peroration to After Virtue, I decided to not bother with the "Benedict option" any more pending the release of the book, which is now upon us.

In the meantime I had hoped the nascent book might deal with serious issues in a way that Dreher's journalistic jottings up to 2015 had not manifested--not least in its relentlessly tendentious treatment of one paragraph of MacIntyre while neglecting many more important essays and books of his, not the least of which is Secularization and Moral Change.

Dreher did not read Secularization and Moral Change, and we know this from the potted history he gives us as when, e.g., he insouciantly claims that "the loss of the Christian religion is why the West has been fragmenting for some time now, a process that is accelerating" (22).  MacIntyre--who is as much an intellectual historian as he is moral philosopher--writing in 1967, having laid out in this book (as well as other places--e.g., A Short History of Ethics) abundant historical evidence for his thesis, argued forcefully that “the view that moral and social change is consequent upon the decline of religion is false, and the view therefore that such change could be arrested or could have been arrested by halting the decline of religion is also false. I have argued instead that the causes of moral and social change have lain in the same urbanization and industrialization that produce secularization” (p. 58; my emphasis). While Dreher nods his head towards the Industrial Revolution, he never really takes MacIntyre seriously and investigates the role of urbanization and industrialization. Nor, worse, does he do the only sensible thing and pursue a critical analysis of the role of economics beyond the dominant neoliberal paradigm. We shall return to this problem presently.

Though I have every sympathy with Dreher's evidently sincere desire to see Christianity flourish everywhere possible, I regret to say that Dreher's book offers little that is new and fresh to assist with such a task. It is, rather, wreathed about with the stale air of apocalypticism on the cheap. In reading Dreher I was ineluctably drawn back to a passage from the great Orthodox liturgical theologian Alexander Schmemann's Journals: "In the Bible, there is space and air.  In Byzantium the air is always stuffy, always heavy, static, petrified."

In fact, several passages from Schmemann came back to mind in reading Dreher, whose book fixates on same-sex marriage and gender issues to an unhealthy and unhelpful degree. None seems more acute or appropriate than this one: In March 1976 during Lent, Schmemann wrote: "Students' confessions. Always sex. I am beginning to think that this sin is useful; otherwise they would consider themselves saintly and plunge into guruism." Dreher's entire project reeks of guruism.

It is, of course, the nature of gurus that they must convince you of their epistemological superiority, as it were: they know things that you cannot possibly know, or know as fully as the guru. And one of the things the guru knows is just how bad things are, and how badly you need his advice, his counsel and wisdom, his program and, especially, his merchandise to get you out of the deplorable state of affairs you are otherwise condemned to inhabit.

That is the most objectionable feature of Dreher's book: its profiteering on the back of despondency and determinism as manifested in several such claims as "the wave cannot be stopped, only ridden." Or when he counsels Christians to build an "ark" instead of fighting "unwinnable political battles" (12). Or when he flatly insists that "the new order is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be lived with" (18).

These claims are theologically objectionable insofar as he presumes to know that nothing can be changed, and thus there is no room for the virtue of hope.

These claims are objectionable also on historical grounds, for while Christianity has dwindled and even died off in parts of the world at different points of history (see the history of the Assyrian Church of the East for the clearest example of this), such a process is by no means inevitable or, as Dreher suggests, entirely out of our control. Such a process, moreover, forgets the surprising ways in which the Church can rebound precisely when, in worldly eyes, she seems to be at her weakest.

Those who are more literate in Catholic history than Dreher is can tell you that as recently as 1978 the Catholic Church was increasingly being written off by journalists like Dreher as having suffered mortal blows coming out of the 1960s (with the Sexual Revolution that Dreher tediously bores on about: "History's Most Revolutionary Revolution" [201]) and in the aftermath of the chaotic Second Vatican Council, which sapped the Church's energy and focus from within at precisely the moment she was also beset from without by seemingly inexorable political forces--communism, consumerism, etc. But along came the whirlwind from Poland to upend all expectations of decline, and to sow seeds of dramatic new birth, not least in Eastern Europe, but also elsewhere in the Church through new programs, communities, and movements. Many problems remain, to be sure, but it is undeniable that John Paul II gave new dynamism to the Church at a moment when some pundits were pessimistically predicting inexorable decline and doom, as Dreher is now doing with a grandly (if very superficially) ecumenical sweep that includes Protestants and Orthodox (whose own resurgence in the post-Soviet period, after far worse, and much more genuine, "persecution" than anything faced by Christians in America today, is ignored by Dreher).

At the turn of the 19th century, similar prognostications of decline and demise were made by many as the Church in the West was being clobbered in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and the rise of modern nation-states, including Italy, whose formation would deprive the Church of the Papal States which were thought--wrongly, as we now see, and as Pope Leo XIII [r. 1878-1903] himself quickly came to see--as being essential to the mission of the Church. But it was under Leo especially that the Church--and especially the papacy--found a new focus and dynamism and emerged into the twentieth century on an upward trajectory, aided in no small part by money gained as compensation from Italy for loss of the Papal States and as part of the Lateran Treaty process.

In the middle of the 16th century, in the heat of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the plight of the Church again looked dire to many, and even what ultimately proved to be the great reforming Council of Trent was, for some of the time, a very close-run thing that nearly fell apart. But ultimately Trent proved to be a success, and the Church was again on the move with new orders like the Jesuits and new dynamism that recovered much of what she had lost, and opened up new avenues, taking on new nations and continuing to grow globally.

Going back further still to the rise of the mendicant orders, the Church in the age of Dominic and Francis was, as is well known, thought by those giants, and many others, to be in a massive state of disrepair and dissolution, perhaps fatally so. But responding, so he believed, to the Lord's call to "repair my Church," the poverello of Assisi launched a reformation that is still going on more than 800 years after his death, as the Sisters who sponsor and run my own University of Saint Francis daily, cheerfully attest.

Knowing even just a little bit of this history must surely give one pause and reason to question Dreher's firm determination that Christianity in North America and Western Europe is finished, a judgment from which he seemingly permits no dissent. Examining Christian history all the way back to the beginning helps one to see that the Church has always been in a cycle of decline and rebirth, rising in some places at some times while sinking in others.

There are other serious problems with Dreher's recounting of history, not least his retailing of the discredited notion of "wars of religion" and his indifference--which nobody who takes MacIntyre seriously could ever justify--around the founding of the modern nation-state.

But arguably the most egregious flaw with Dreher's historical section (ch.2) is its attempt to describe the history of the Enlightenment without even mentioning, let alone having read, MacIntyre's Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, a book MacIntyre himself said was necessitated by what After Virtue didn't accomplish, left out, or needed to be further developed or changed. The convenient neglect of such a crucial if dense book reveals once and for all that Dreher's read of MacIntyre is entirely selective and tendentious.

Dreher's lack of familiarity not just with Catholic and broader philosophical history, but also with Catholic life in this country (and others) in any serious detail is really telling--apart, that is, from his boutique examples in Italy, Oklahoma, Maryland, etc. For there are plenty of Catholics I know who have been doing the things he has packaged together, and been doing them without fanfare for decades. There are, moreover, many Catholics emerging today--especially among the much-feared and much-derided "millennials"--who have a deep grasp of the faith and a deeper desire to live it. I see them every semester in my classes, and they give me a modest degree of hope.

Dreher goes on and on about "moralistic therapeutic deism" (never taking seriously some of the criticism of that claim and its research, which I have myself heard from other Catholic sociologists), but the Catholics I see in my classes are, with each passing year, farther and farther removed from that. He also makes much of the previous pope's comments about the "dictatorship of relativism," but with all due respect to Ratzinger, and again following MacIntyre (see his essay "Plain Persons and Moral Philosophy: Rules, Virtues, and Goods," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 66 [1992]: 3-19), my classroom experience has made it clear to me that nobody is ever really a relativist. When I have taught ethics and moral theology to students, disabusing students of a lazy relativism is an easy job by asking them to tell me how they live their lives when faced with significant moral choices.

I have now taught for almost 20 years in three countries at a number of Catholic institutions at both the high-school and university level. With each passing year my students seem, quietly and imperfectly, but firmly and hopefully, to be growing in the strength and depth of their faith. I find, therefore, Dreher's narrative of unrelenting decline to be extremely selective in its evidence, and plainly to ignore plenty of evidence I have myself seen first-hand.

So are my examples correct, and Dreher's wrong? Do my anecdotes trump his? I would not for a moment claim that. In fact, for a moment, let us suppose, that Dreher is more right than wrong about our particular moment in North American and West-European Christian history. Let us suppose Christianity is largely on life support, and may soon die out almost entirely. What is to be done? The answer he proposes to this is of course the "Benedict option."

But what kind of solution is this? Here remedy and disease seem almost indistinguishable, and here a deeper appreciation of MacIntyre could, perhaps, have rescued Dreher's project at the moment of its conception. For Dreher's project seems ab initio to have fallen into the very pit MacIntyre predicted not in After Virtue but in a 1979 essay "Theology, Ethics, and the Ethics of Medicine and Health Care: Comments on Papers by Novak, Mouw, Roach, Cahill, and Hartt" in the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 4 (4): 435-443. There MacIntyre recognized the dangers of "the peculiarly deep secularization of our pluralist culture," which

offers traps to the theologians into which they continually fall. A culture of systematic unbelief would provide a relatively unambiguous context for theological utterance, while a pluralist culture offers an atmosphere of tolerant absorption through which the theologian is diminished and patronized and in which the theologian too often responds either by an anxious accommodation to the culture or by an equally adaptive reaction against it.

Dreher is clearly in the latter category, offering a reactionary take on this moment in our history. Like too many reactionaries he is a member of the bourgeoisie, proof of which can be seen in the very notion of a Benedict option, which can be dismissed as both harmless and irrelevant precisely because it has failed to offer us--as MacIntyre continues later in the same essay--"a theological critique of secular morality and culture," including, of course, the economics of late capitalism.

The "Benedict option," then, seems to participate too much in the fatalistic neoliberal economics of the culture it claims to resist. Dreher's whole project seems an example of the "normal nihilism" Stanley Hauerwas, himself hugely influenced by MacIntyre of course (but here, instead, drawing on James Edwards) describes thus:

Laid out before one are whole lives that one can, if one has the necessary credit line, freely choose to inhabit: devout Christian; high-tech yuppie; Down East guide; great white hunter. This striking transformation of life into lifestyle, the way in which the tools, garments, and attitudes specific to particular times and places become commodities to be marketed to anonymous and rootless consumers.

The whole "Benedict option" smacks of just such a "transformation of life into lifestyle," and its uses and abuses of Benedict have turned that great saint into a commodity to be marketed to "anonymous and rootless [Christian] consumers," alas.

In this regard, all those commentators worried about the political implications and applications of Dreher's proposal have nothing to worry about: he is simply not radical enough, for his proposal--to borrow Pickstock's language about the dreamy reforms of Vatican II--manifests "an entirely more sinister conservatism" that fails "to challenge those structures of the modern secular world that are wholly inimical to liturgical purpose."

Far from challenging, let alone overthrowing, those structures, Dreher beats an unseemly and hasty retreat from them and says the idea of anybody challenging them is pointless. Worse, Dreher sneers that those who still want to challenge the structures of the modern secular world are deluded. Those who do not read the signs as he does are dismissed as "the most deluded of the old-school Religious Right" or as out of touch as "White Russians" after the Revolution (12). But assertions do not arguments make, and such derisive dismissals as these merely underscore Dreher's very flimsy and intellectually fragile plaidoyer for a particular program that will appeal to people most like Dreher--middle-class American Christians.

But gurus have no greater insight into the future than anyone else. Indeed, gurus are especially to be put rather severely to the question (to use a MacIntyrean formula) precisely insofar as they try to see and say how things are and how they are going to turn out. Let us invent a law here--call it Merited Commensurability: the more adamant someone is in saying that such and such is bound to happen, the more we ought to greet such claims with the strongest skepticism.

I rather wish Dreher had a deeper recognition of the contingencies of culture and unpredictability of human events. At one point he edges up to such a recognition, saying "History is a poem, not a syllogism" (23) but he has no sooner delivered himself of that single line then he races back to what the psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan has called a narrative of "chosen trauma" in which the West is in inexorable decline, and persecution of Christians is coming in fast and thick as far as the eye can see. (Dreher's treatment of Freud [pp. 42-43] turns the latter into the usual sort of grotesque one would expect from those who have never read primary sources. Dreher reads everything through Philip Rieff's The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud.)

Dreher's overheated narrative of trauma and decline could have benefited from a hefty dose of modesty and restraint at the urge to predict the future. Here I rather wish he had some of the modesty as manifested, e.g., in Churchill's eloquent eulogy for Neville Chamberlain delivered in the mother of Parliaments in late 1940 after his predecessor's death:

At the lychgate we may all pass our own conduct and our own judgments under a searching review. It is not given to human beings, happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values.

Dreher's "scale of values" inclines toward recommending such things ("options" indeed!) as deeper prayer and more frequent fasting, these being unobjectionable--indeed noble--in themselves.

But when they are packaged together with still further options enjoined upon others, and when especially they are read, as they only can be read, in light of his regular gastronomic ejaculations on his blog about oysters and mustards, or, now, the bourbon cocktail invented by a friend and called the "Benedict option," I could not help but think of another work of MacIntyre's that Dreher seems never to have read, viz., Marxism and Christianity. There MacIntyre says of the Tractarians and the "ascetic disciplines" (weekly communion, intense local community life, regular fasting, auricular confession, and other devotions practiced in ritually resplendent churches) which they commended to everyone that these disciplines "were of a kind possible only to a leisured class."

Like most members of the leisure class, Dreher evidences little interest in the social environment flourishing on a wide scale, preferring only that it do so for the small communities he advocates, and, of course, for himself. Though Dreher commendably says at one point, "love the community but don't idolize it" (137), the rest of his book is precisely such near-idolatry. Here again one can only note that a deeper, more sophisticated engagement with MacIntyre would have saved Dreher from such fatuities.

In dozens of places, MacIntyre has offered repeated demonstrations of, and arguments against, what he calls the "communitarian mistake" which is premised upon "a further mistake...that there is anything good about local community as such" because those "communities are always open to corruption by narrowness, by complacency, by prejudice against outsiders and by a whole range of other deformities, including those that arise from a cult of local community" (Dependent Rational Animals, 142; my emphasis). To avoid such problems and deformities, local communities must engage in many things, including "a rejection of the economic goals of advanced capitalism" (Ibid., 145). Dreher seems totally uninterested in any such rejection.

It is more than a little amazing that Dreher seems to lack self-awareness of how such advanced capitalism makes his peripatetic blogging life possible, but makes many of his proposals impossible for too many other people, who must pick up and move far from family and community merely to survive economically. Here we must include his praise of "stability" (65-67), his advocacy that one must "live close to other members of your community" (129-34), his insistence that public schools be abandoned and people should home-school their kids (165-66), and his impertinent demand that "church can't just be the place you go on Sundays--it must become the center of your life" (131). Try recommending any one of these things, never mind all of them (and still others he recommends) to the people working three jobs just to pay rent and forced to relocate every few years when jobs disappear.

Incidentally, those Tractarians recommending such ascetic disciplines as Dreher does, and those practicing them, did not always have an easy time of it in the Church of England of the late 19th century. There was considerable opposition to many of these proposals, as John Shelton Reid's fascinating book Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism showed. In the end, the "ritualists" and Tractarians, when they did not decamp for Rome, were reduced to a Dreher style of pleading merely for the right to be left alone pursuing their "option" for what Cardinal Manning came caustically to call "private judgment in gorgeous raiment, wrought about with divers colours."

Newman, of course, came to loathe private judgment. In his Apologia Pro Vita Sua and then especially in his famous Biglietto speech, he denounced private judgment as just another species of liberalism. Newman, acutely aware of the contingencies of history, especially Christian history, and loathe to make the sorts of facile prognostications that Dreher does, ended that speech in Rome after being given a red hat by Leo XIII with this apt reminder:

Christianity has been too often in what seemed deadly peril, that we should fear for it any new trial now. ... Commonly the Church has nothing more to do than to go on in her own proper duties, in confidence and peace; to stand still and to see the salvation of God.

Dreher is not content to stand still and see the salvation of God. His busybody guruism seeking to safeguard "orthodox Christianity" is, as MacIntyre suggested decades ago, a typical reaction of the leisure class that often has the greatest tendency to fixate (as Kate Daloz has recently shown in fascinating detail) on simplicity, intentional community, and various forms of voluntary self-denial--whether in monasteries or pseudo-monastic communities. It is the leisure class especially among converts to Orthodoxy (in what Amy Slagle has aptly called the The Eastern Church in the Spiritual Marketplace: American Conversions to Orthodox Christianity) who most often seem to fetishize monasteries, who have the time and money to obsess over "monasticism" and "tradition" in psychologically suspect ways, running after their "spiritual fathers" for permission to pee or clip their toenails on Fridays in Lent.

Dreher, of course, is not made of such stern fanaticism, and, curiously but revealingly, his gaze falls primarily upon Catholic and Protestant communities in preference to, e.g., Mt. Athos (which is to his credit given some of the hysterical nonsense that sometimes issues from the so-called holy mountain). Nevertheless, one must challenge this desire to play at being a monk or a quasi-monastic, and one must regard any and all calls for "new forms of community" with a great deal of skepticism until and unless they engage in--as MacIntyre says--“rethinking even further some well-established notions of freedom of expression and of toleration. But about how to do this constructively in defence of the rational politics of local community no one has yet known what to say. Nor do I.”

Absent such serious rational thought, and attendant safeguards, one can only be cautious and reluctant to pursue such a life, much as would-be monks rightly were before their tonsure. I am told by a liturgist of impeccable scholarship that some recensions of the Byzantine rite of monastic tonsure saw the hegumen or abbot toss the scissors away three times when presented with them by the would-be monk, who would then have to scramble across the floor to retrieve them repeatedly, each time being reminded of the seriousness of the state of life he was about to enter and the real risks he would run thereby.

Because of those risks, it is imperative, then, that one must repeatedly and ruthlessly interrogate any romanticism about monastic or community life in any form, for they are fraught with conflicts and problems, not the least of which is a tendency toward escapism and subtle forms of self-promotion--and not-so-subtle forms of control and manipulation or outright sexual abuse. Returning once again to Dreher's fellow Orthodox Alexander Schmemann (the relative neglect of serious engagement with Orthodox sources in this book must be read as a marketing strategy to appeal to the vastly more numerous Catholics and Protestants in this country), we see that Schmemann has already offered us severe warnings about these temptations in a bracing and acid passage from January 1981:

More and more often it seems to me that revising the monasticism that everybody so ecstatically talks about–or at least trying to revive it–can be done only by liquidating first of all the monastic institution itself, i.e. the whole vaudeville of klobuks, cowls, stylization, etc. If I were a staretz–an elder–I would tell a candidate for monasticism roughly the following:

–get a job, if possible the simplest one, without creativity (for example as a cashier in a bank);

–while working, pray and seek inner peace; do not get angry; do not think of yourself (rights, fairness, etc.). Accept everyone (coworkers, clients) as someone sent to you; pray for them;

–after paying for a modest apartment and groceries, give your money to the poor; to individuals rather than foundations;

–always go to the same church and there try to be a real helper, not by lecturing about spiritual life or icons, not by teaching but with a “dust rag” (cf. St Seraphim of Sarov)....

–do not thrust yourself and your service on anyone; do not be sad that your talents are not being used; be helpful; serve where needed and not where you think you are needed;

–read and learn as much as you can; do not read only monastic literature, but broadly...;

–be always simple, light, joyous. Do not teach. Avoid like the plague any “spiritual” conversations and any religious or churchly idle talk. 

Real monastics, whether Benedictine or otherwise, know that the course of wisdom is to be found not in talking "church talk" or promoting "options" but in listening and serving everyone without drawing attention to oneself. Real monastics who have done that include another of Dreher's fellow Orthodox nowhere in evidence in his book: Mother Maria Skobtsova, who made wartime Paris her "monastery" without walls, serving the suffering she encountered there, including the Jews service to whom and protection of whom cost Maria her life in the gas chamber of Ravensbrück. She would later be canonized by the Orthodox church not just for this sacrifice of her life but also for her monastic service in and for the city of Paris--not atop some mountain somewhere or in an inaccessible cloister.

What Skobtsova was living was something later described by another Franco-Russian Orthodox theologian, Paul Evdokimov, as "interiorized monasticism" which is lived anywhere and everywhere for the life of the world.

Precisely insofar as it is interiorized, such a monastic spirit it is silent, reflecting, as Thomas Merton once said succinctly, the entire wisdom of the desert fathers and mothers, thus: "Shut up, and go to your cell!"

May we all do so.

An Interview with Rod Dreher

Earlier I posted some thoughts on Rod Dreher's new book, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life. I've since been able to interview him by e-mail and here are his thoughts:

AD: Tell us a bit about your background as a writer and Orthodox Christian.

RD: I've been a journalist for almost 25 years, mostly writing opinion and analysis for newspapers and magazines. I've been on staff at the New York Post, National Review, and The Dallas Morning News, among others, and am at the present time a senior editor at The American Conservative. I was a film critic for a while, but mostly have written about politics, religion, and culture. I'm a cultural conservative, but am registered as an Independent. I've lost most of my interest in politics, and have become far more interested in religious and philosophical questions and concerns. 

I washed ashore in Orthodoxy out of the shipwreck of my Roman Catholic faith. I had been a serious Catholic for 13 years, having come into Catholicism in my twenties from a mainline Protestant background. I had been philosophically oriented as a teenager, but not pious. Reading Thomas Merton, visiting the Chartres cathedral, and encountering Kierkegaard in college -- all these things awakened a sense of quest within me, which culminated, after much struggle, with my becoming Catholic. I was an ardent Catholic, intellectually oriented and, I now see, a rather political one, in a way that no doubt laid the groundwork for my undoing.

In short, I began writing about the church's sex abuse scandal in 2001, and went headlong into the muck in 2002, with the Geoghan trial in Boston, which set off the national wave of scandal revelations. At the time, I did it not in spite of being Catholic, but because I was Catholic. I loved the church and wanted to help purify it of this cancer. Plus, I was a father, and it made me sick to see how bishops and others in church authority had treated children and families. What I did not realize -- though the courageous Catholic priest Tom Doyle had tried to warn me -- was that the evil of this thing was far darker, and went much deeper, than I imagined. I was not prepared for it, especially for the lies and cutthroat behavior of bishops, including cardinals. You think you've read enough church history that you can handle just about anything, but then you talk to a father whose abused son blew his own brains out, and learn that that boy's molester had been tied to four other suicides -- and that the diocese had known about this priest's problem all along, but done nothing. Do that, and think of your own child, and how the church you loved and served would have done the same thing to you and your kid, and it works on your mind. If I had spent even half the time in prayer that I spent talking about church politics, I might have withstood this test. But I didn't, and I didn't. 

The final straw came in 2006, when we learned that a Catholic priest in Dallas who was getting closer to our family was a manipulative liar who wasn't supposed to be in ministry, as he had been accused in Pennsylvania of molesting a teenager. My wife and I were mortified, not least because we thought we were the type of people who couldn't be fooled, given our level of awareness about the issue. But he manipulated our prejudices. Who knows where this would have gone if he hadn't slipped up and showed his cards? Anyway, that was it; we were done. We simply lost the will to believe in the Roman church. I had always imagined that if I had the syllogisms straight in my head, that my faith could withstand anything. But that turned out not to be true. 

There was nowhere else left for us to go but to Orthodoxy. We began attending St. Seraphim cathedral in Dallas, not intending to join, but just to be around the real presence in the Sacrament (Catholics accept the validity of Orthodox sacraments), and to be somewhere where the worship was beautiful, and we didn't carry with us the baggage of fear and loathing of the Catholic hierarchy. Eventually we knew we weren't going to be able to go back to Rome. We were received into Orthodoxy there in Dallas.

It was one of the saddest days of my life. Don't misunderstand -- I don't regret becoming Orthodox, and am, in fact, grateful that the Lord gave me a second chance in the Orthodox church. I felt so mournful over my lost Catholic faith that I couldn't experience the joy that everyone else experiences when they become Orthodox. It's hard to express how painful losing my Catholicism was. I suspect this is what happens when a marriage becomes irretrievably broken. You know that what you once had is gone, and can't come back, and you're relieved to be out of a situation that brought you torment ... but you still mourn. An Orthodox convert from Catholicism that I sort of knew came up to me around that time and started badmouthing the Roman church, and I told him I wasn't interested in that. The whole experience of losing my Catholic faith was the most painful thing I've ever lived through, even more painful than living through the death of my only sibling. It has taken me a long time to heal from it all.

But I'll tell you this: God's hand was in it all. He humbled me in a way I needed to be humbled. I had been a pretty arrogant Catholic. The scandal beat that out of me. I'm a different kind of Christian now. Plus, Orthodox spirituality is helping me get outside of my head, in part by challenging at every turn my deep-seated tendency to intellectualize things. I thought before that because my head was converted, that my heart was too. That's not true.

I can never see the Orthodox church institution with the same naive fideism that I held towards the Roman Catholic institutional church. I came into Orthodoxy chastened and wary -- and, as we've seen in the past few years, the Catholics do not have a monopoly on bad bishops and corrupt priests. I'm grateful to be Orthodox, but deeply wary of the kind of piety I had before, as a Catholic. I see some Orthodox with it, and I go the other way. It's not for me. I can never say often enough, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." 

AD: Tell us a bit about the genesis of this book. At what point did you realize that your sister's illness and death contained a wider, deeper story that needed telling? 

I've written a blog since 2006, and have built up a pretty good-sized following. The blog is my notebook, my diary, a place in which I write straight-up opinion journalism, but also personal reflections. When my sister was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer in 2010, I flew from Philadelphia to Baton Rouge to be with her, and wrote about what I saw. It was a harrowing week, but also a time of extraordinary grace -- all of it pouring through my sister Ruthie, who responded to this catastrophic news with a degree of courage and fortitude that I found to be holy. I simply wrote about what I was seeing there, with my sister, and with the community of friends and family taking care of her. And I wrote about how watching all this was changing my own heart. My readers responded strongly to it, so I kept them updated on all the incredible things happening in Ruthie's life as she fought cancer.

When she died, I wrote about her wake, her funeral, and the incredible things that were happening around her death -- and how it all transfigured this little country town I had left so long ago, such that I wanted to return. Again, readers responded powerfully to these stories. But it wasn't until I told on the blog a story about candles in the cemetery on Christmas Eve, and how a loving neighbor carried on a tradition that my mother was too grief-stricken to celebrate that year, that things really changed. The New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote about that Christmas gift. His column set off a bidding war among New York publishers for the story. A week later, I had a book deal, and The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming was underway. What Brooks saw in this story, and what the publishers saw, was a tale of reverse migration: of someone who rejected an ordinary life in a small town, with all its limits, coming to see in the life and tragic death of his sister a hidden greatness within the ordinary, and a reclamation of the sense of community and rootedness that's missing from so many contemporary American lives.

AD: My friend the Orthodox priest and theologian Michael Plekon has written extensively about what he calls "hidden holiness" in the lives of people not often thought of as saints, but who are nonetheless living holy lives not by being thrown to the lions or saving scores from the gutters of Calcutta, but by staying where they are and loving the people around them. That would seem very much to describe Ruthie, yes? 

Yes, absolutely. Ruthie taught middle-school math in a rural parish in south Louisiana. I was the worldly sibling; she was the one who wanted nothing more than to stay here at home. When we were at college together, we rarely spent time with each other, because we were so different. In Little Way, I tell the story of the time she sat with my best friend and me at dinner in the cafeteria, listening to us talk about Nietzsche, the death of God, and philosophical topics. She stood up and told us we were full of crap (though I think the word was a little more colorful), and that all our philosophical speculation was vanity. What counted was what we did, not what we thought, or so Ruthie thought. She was intensely practical, and very much anti-intellectual (this, even though she made better grades than I did). 

Ruthie led a quiet life. She never much talked about God, just remained faithful to the Methodist church in which we were raised, and in which she and her husband Mike raised their daughters. You might have thought Ruthie was a friendly person, a morally serious person, and even a wise person. But what you didn't know about Ruthie -- well, what I, her brother, didn't know about Ruthie -- was the love and devotion she poured out on her students, many of whom came from poor and broken families. At the visitation, I met so many people who told me some variation of, "You don't know me, sir, but your sister was my teacher, and this is how she changed my life." It was incredible. I saw that Ruthie, a country Methodist, had a lot in common with St. Therese of Lisieux, who described her own path to God as the "little way," in that they both believed that it was not given to everyone to live a dramatic life of grand gestures. They would be satisfied with what God gave them, including where he placed them (a convent, a middle school) and do their best to live and to act in pure love. This was Therese's little way, and it also describes Ruthie's. 

AD: Plekon (among others) has resisted the tendency of older forms of hagiography to turn people into "plaster saints" or what Cardinal Newman called "clothes-racks for virtues." Your book very commendably manages to achieve a balance between recognizing the goodness, sanctity even, in your sister, but also not hiding her conflict with you. Was that a hard balance to maintain? 

Yes, it very much was. The truth is, Ruthie was a saint, or at least I think she was. But she was a human being too, and in my case, it meant she was at times bitter and spiteful toward her brother. Ruthie was a lot like our father, in that she didn't understand why anybody would want to leave what we had here in Louisiana. I've called them Bayou Confucians, because they believe life has a hierarchy, and one's duty if to find one's place within that hierarchy, and live it out. For Ruthie and my dad, my leaving was a sign of betrayal -- and nothing more than that. To be fair, after my first, failed attempt to return, in the mid-1990s, my father had a moment of grace in which he saw -- or said he saw -- that my vocation required me to live away from here. The thing is, we forget such moments of clarity. My father and my sister had a very strong "poetic memory" (I think the phrase is Kundera's), in which they selectively remembered details that caused a narrative to make emotional sense to them. It made emotional sense for Rod to be here with the family -- and ultimately, they wouldn't allow any facts to counter that narrative within their hearts.

This caused me a lot of pain, and truth to tell, it still does. Once Ruthie decided on a story, she hung onto it with the tenacity of a snapping turtle. This served her well facing cancer; the story she hung on to was that God loved her and would be with her no matter what. Don't get me wrong, I believe that's a true story. The point here is the strength with which she clung to that narrative. Unfortunately that trait was destructive of her relationship with me. For a reason I don't fully understand, she would not admit any facts that contradicted what she wanted to believe about me and the things I loved. For Ruthie, to have chosen a way of life other than the one we were prescribed by our father was, it seems, an unforgivable sin. The thing is, there was only one person in the world she judged so uncompromisingly: me.

I don't say all this to invite the reader's pity, but rather to explore the mystery of my sister's character, and of human character. One friend of mine told me the other day that reading my book, he has a tough time accepting my judgment that Ruthie was probably a saint. Like most people who have expressed this to me, he's thinking about the bouillabaisse story, but also about my niece Hannah's revelation in Paris, toward the end of the book. I appreciate his sympathy, but I think in our time, we confuse sanctity with niceness. I can't deny Ruthie's ugliness towards me, but I certainly cannot deny that that's pretty much the only blemish on a lifetime of extraordinary goodness. One does not obviate the other. St. Paul struggled with a thorn in his flesh; Ruthie and I were the thorns in each other's flesh. The difference is that Ruthie had a greater capacity than I to endure emotional pain for the sake of sticking by her principles. My dad is the same way. In most cases, this presents itself as evidence of a principled character, which is what Ruthie was and my dad is. But at times this refusal to examine critically one's own conclusions can manifest as sheer obstreperousness. It's sometimes hard to know where to draw the line.

Anyway, my goal in telling this story was to make the case for why I consider my sister to be a saint, or in any case to have led a life of sanctification, despite her all-too-human flaws. And I wanted to indicate that I too likely played a role in turning my little sister against me when we were young. The bouillabaisse story is, for me, the key myth about my family's attitude to me in adulthood. But the early childhood story with which I begin the book -- the story about Ruthie I told in her eulogy -- is the key myth, in my mind, about the kind of Christ-like character my sister had innately. 

AD: Your title refers to St. Therese of Lisieux. Did your sister ever read her autobiography or hear about her from you? What do you think she would have thought of the comparison?

No, not to my knowledge, unless she saw the comparison on one of my early blogs about her cancer. Ruthie was not well read, and certainly not in the Catholic tradition. She was a conventional churchgoing Methodist, but even her best friend Abby couldn't figure out why Ruthie was so prayerful and spiritually minded, but never came to Bible study or did anything more formal with the church. Ruthie would have reacted against the comparison, not because of anything particular to Therese, but because Ruthie would have considered it ridiculous and embarrassing to compare her to a saint.

Had she read Therese, though, I think she would have felt a deep kinship with the saint, who believed that the ordinary could be sanctified through love. That's how Ruthie lived. One interesting thing I've observed since moving back is how people around town will casually mention to me that they talk to Ruthie, or will pray, asking Ruthie to help them with some challenge. These are Protestants, mind you, but they believe that Ruthie, their friend, lives with Christ now, and can still hear them, and pray for them. Many times I've heard someone talk this way about Ruthie, and thought, This is how we get saints -- in a sociological sense, I mean. There was a holy person who lived in a certain community, and her memory is revered over time, and she is believed to be capable of hearing prayers and helping people after her death. We think, maybe, that we're beyond that today, that saints belonged to ages past. But I'm watching the process happen here. Mind you, a Methodist will never be canonized, but then, most saints who ever lived were never raised to the altar.

AD: What connections do you see between this book and your earlier book, Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots? Do you think if you hadn't written the earlier book you might not have been as open to seeing the virtues of life in a small town in southern Louisiana?  

I'm glad you asked that, because the progression from Crunchy Cons to Little Way tracks a theme within the latter. I began to think more deeply about my own conservatism, and to move in a more traditionalist direction, when I grew deeper into my own Catholic faith after marriage, and when my wife and I had our first child. As I point out in Little Way, my strong tendency is toward contemplation, while Ruthie's was toward action. I was satisfied to theorize about localism and traditionalism, and make a few moves toward living a life more coherent with my beliefs, but I remained a dilettante. Still, I had the theory in my mind, and that was important.

The moment of conversion was standing outside the Methodist Church at my sister's wake, seeing all those people there, and thinking about the 19 months preceding that night -- from Ruthie's diagnosis until that moment -- and grasping in both my mind and my heart that I was witnessing the theories incarnate in the love and community of these people. That night, for the first time, the things I professed as a matter of theoretical ideals entered into my moral imagination in a galvanizing way. If it hadn't been for 10 years of reading Wendell Berry, Crunchy Cons, Front Porch Republic and all that, I might not have been able to recognize the revelation on the church's lawn -- which is to say, I might not have been able to hear God's calling me home.

AD: When Pope Benedict came to the US in 2008, he lamented at one point the loss of Catholic "ghettos" especially among early immigrants and recognized the need deracinated Catholics had today for new and deeper forms of community. What role, if any, do you see churches playing today in helping people find the kind of community your family has been a part of in Starhill for generations?  

I'm not sure, because I'm not sure what "church" means in America today. We have become so individualistic in our approach to religious faith that I don't have a clear model for what stable church community looks like. When I returned to my hometown, I didn't return to the church in which I was raised, the Methodist church, because I am now an Orthodox Christian. Rather, I joined with some fellow Orthodox converts in town, and we opened a mission. I find as a general matter people in town these days are unaware of the theological differences between the churches, or why they are important. That makes it easier to work across denominational lines, but it also means that the loss of particularity, and of social unity around a shared story, makes the kind of deep community the Catholic ghettos experienced highly problematic. 

At the same time, with reference to the churches, as Walker Percy would say, what else is there? St. Francisville is a Christian town. Not everybody goes to church, but the churches not everybody goes to are Christian ones. The town is full of sinners, but there is enough residual Christianity here that the faith is still felt as a force in people's lives, in a way that it is not in most places I've lived (Dallas being the great exception). 

My sense, though, is that the Church -- by which I mean all Christian churches -- has to become far more radical and conscious of itself as a countercultural force, and as a countercultural community, or Christianity will not endure. I'm not talking about adopting a fortress mentality, but rather teaching ourselves and our children what makes us different from others, why we believe the things that we do -- and why that matters. What's more, as my pastor says, Orthodoxy is not an add-on to life; it is a way of life. All churches should regard what they preach in that way. Church must not be merely the middle class at prayer. 

When I say "countercultural force," I'm not talking about being culture warriors per se, but rather living as people who profess and (more importantly) embody a way of life and a vision that serves as a sign of contradiction to the modern world. Ruthie may not have been theologically educated, or even much interested in theology, and she was a flawed vessel, but the life she lived by staying in place and submitting to the limits of place was, to me, a sign of contradiction, and, I think, a call to conversion. It's not that we all must commit to staying in one place, forever and ever, amen -- where would any of us be if not for missionaries, not least among them St. Paul? -- but rather Ruthie's story shows us how much a life lived in faithful service to and friendship with a community can matter. 

Still, I am aware that any words about the value of stability from a man who has a track record of restlessness are bound to be taken with a fistful of salt.

AD: Towards the end of the book, especially during the painful conversation with your niece on the last night in Paris, a comparison came to my mind in reading your struggle to reconcile the holiness and love you saw in your sister with the unresolved conflict between the two of you and her attitude towards you. The comparison was that of Lady Marchmain (Ruthie) and Charles Ryder (you) in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. Lady Marchmain was often thought of by others as being a saint, though her simple, unquestioning piety (and adamantine summary judgments of others) could be off-putting to some, including Ryder, who, early in the book, is very much the questioning skeptic. Later he becomes a believer. Do you think your sister's simple, unquestioning faith and refusal to be mad at God has deepened your own faith and trust? Are the questions for you greater or fewer since her death?

It has, but only indirectly -- and it has reinforced the lessons I've been learning through the practice of Orthodox Christianity. As I detail in the book, I've always been a Seeker; Ruthie was always an Abider. I've been through a number of churches; Ruthie stayed in the church in which we were raised. I don't say this to praise her, necessarily; Ruthie had a considerable mind, but no curiosity about the world of ideas. She was a mathematics teacher, and had a deep and growing interest in science (she told me once that if she beat cancer, she would like to go back to college and study forensic pathology.) What I've learned through Ruthie is to put more value on what we come to know through relationship, and less value on what we come to know through reading or intellection. Ruthie was not balanced; neither am I. But I need more of what she had. 

Similarly, through Orthodoxy, I've learned to focus far more on the conversion of the heart. As a Catholic, I was stuck in my head. Orthodox polemicists tend to blame this kind of thing on the nature of Western Christianity. They may be onto something, but I choose not to think about that. I choose to blame myself. If I had not been a Catholic, I still would have been this kind of Christian. Ruthie excelled in being present in the moment -- even before she was diagnosed. I am bad at that. I am always analyzing the present moment, standing at some remove from it. I have always been mystically inclined, but tripped up by my seeming inability to be still and to be open. I've always faulted Ruthie to some degree for her lack of curiosity, and her instinct to pass negative judgment on anything she didn't understand. But what a source of strength her unquestioning trust in God was as she fought for her life. I realized, as I say in the book, that if I had awakened one day to find that I had Stage Four cancer, I would read every book on my shelves, consult with monks, priests, and sages, agonize over it publicly and privately, and if I were lucky, I would end up exactly where Ruthie started: serene, trusting in God's love, and learning how to cherish every moment of life. 

She could do that because that's how she lived. Hers was a very simple faith, but felt in her marrow. That made all the difference. 

AD: Sum up for us what you hope to have accomplished with the book and what you hope people will take away from it.

First and foremost, I hope people will reflect on the extraordinary life of this ordinary person, my sister Ruthie, and grasp how both goodness and greatness is possible for all of us. As Leon Bloy said, the only tragedy in life is not to have been a saint. I look at Ruthie's life and understand what he means. There was nothing unusual in her life. She was born in an obscure town in the Deep South, married her high school sweetheart, built a house on the land where she was raised, had children, taught school, went fishing, got cancer, and died. Yet within that narrative, she found and lived out such spiritual grandeur, concealed by the very ordinariness of her life. It's there for all of us, I hope to show.

Second, this is a book about home. I hope to speak to restless Americans everywhere -- people like me -- and provoke serious thought and discussion about the meaning of home, and how to achieve the kind of stability we want and need to flourish, but that seems so far away. Ruthie had limitations, but she knew something that so very many of us do not. It's also true, though, as my father's startling confession at the end of the book reveals, that we can never fully know whether we've chosen wisely. 

Third, this is a book about family -- the love we share, and the wounds we inflict on each other. My father and my sister wanted me to come home because they loved me. Yet the way they loved me -- the demanding, intolerant way -- made that impossible, and has set up obstacles even today that I doubt will ever be overcome. These stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and our families, they matter. They really do. A tragedy of my sister and my dad, who were and are exceptionally good and loving people, is that the thing they wanted more than they wanted most things -- a united family, sharing the same place -- they made unattainable. I think we can all learn from that. 

AD: What other writing projects are coming up next? Are you at work on another book at the moment? 

I'm not, but I hope to be soon. I'm looking for another project. This book has, I think, profoundly changed the way I see my vocation. I've been drifting pretty steadily away from political writing since the end of the Bush years, but the overwhelming reaction to Little Way has made me rethink the power of narrative journalism, of storytelling. Ruthie's story made me see the world in a different way, and caused me to change my life -- I think for the better, though this new path has brought with it other challenges. I'm on the lookout for this kind of story now -- stories that tell the truth about the way we live, and the ways we might live, and give people hope. Anyway, the language we use to talk politics has been completely blasted and evacuated of meaning. We need fewer op-ed writers, pundits, and purveyors of argument, and more storytellers.