Chapter 3: A Rule for Living

To start chapter three Dreher introduces us to the monastery at Norcia, the hometown of St. Benedict, and the monks who live there. He gives us a glimpse into their lifestyle and purpose and then uses this as a springboard into the “Rule of St. Benedict,” which is the detailed instruction for organizing and governing a monastic community.

Dreher notably points out that the Rule, “far from being a way of life for the strong and disciplined…was for the ordinary and weak, to help them grow stronger in faith.” This doesn’t apply just to head knowledge about the Faith. Rather, the Rule helps to “channel your spiritual energy into conversion of heart and putting beliefs into practice.

In short, the Rule is “an instruction manual for how to form one’s life around the service of Jesus Christ within a strong community.” The main point of the Benedict Option is that we can use this Rule, at least in adapted form, as a guide to building strong Christian communities that will preserve the Faith in the West through a time of testing and antagonism.

There are seven main element to the Rule, and Dreher shows that we can apply each of them to form a strong Christian community. The first is order, which is really a recognition of the order that God has written into creation. The effort of Christians to hold onto order and truth stands in stark contrast to a world of disorder and constantly changing values. This order keeps us focused on God and prevents us from wandering away with the latest fashions in theology and culture.

The second element, not surprisingly, is prayer. This includes both private and communal prayer, and both structured prayer like the Liturgy of the Hours and less structured prayer like lectio divina. This prayer is simply time spent being with God and communicating with Him. Without this explicit element in community it is easy for the community to simply become a social circle which can lose its rudder and drift off with cultural trends.

As ridiculous as it sounds, it is extremely easy to find Christian groups in which none of the members have a deep or regular prayer life or relationship with Christ. The element of prayer is one that has to be fought for on a daily basis and at an individual level. It is too easy to think that there is not time in the schedule to fit in prayer, and soon enough prayer disappears completely. This is when Christian identity starts sliding easily into the realm of moralistic therapeutic deism or conforming to whatever the prevalent cultural trends may be.

The third element is work. There are two primary views of work in society today – for some it is a source of identity, for others it is simply a means to make money so that we can do whatever we wish. The Benedictines show us that neither of these views is correct. Our work is not supposed to serve us, but rather it should serve God. Our work is an opportunity to glorify God.

Dreher suggests that we need to reorient to this view of work as glorifying God, especially as we move toward a time when Christians will lose their careers and be blocked out of certain professions due to their faith. Seeing our work as serving God rather than serving or defining us will help as some proportion of Christians are forced to work in a field other than their chosen profession.

The fourth element of the Rule is asceticism, or the taking on of physical rigors for the sake of a spiritual goal. An obvious example of this is fasting. Asceticism trains us to put God ahead of ourselves and helps to prevent against self-centeredness by saying no to our desires and yes to God. As one of the Benedictine monks mentioned to Dreher, “We are often further away from God than we realize. Asceticism serves as a healthy reminder of how things are. It’s not a punishment for being so far away.”

A great illustration that Dreher uses when discussing asceticism is that of an athlete training his body for competition. In the same way, asceticism trains us in the love and service of Christ and His Church.

The fifth element of the Rule is stability. For the monks this means spending their entire lives in the same monastic community. For lay people, stability means setting roots and investing in community. Moving from city to city from one job to another to climb the career ladder, or eschewing family and community for the sake of travel and novel experiences cuts off the roots that build community. There is great value in the lifelong relationships of a deep, stable community in times of trouble, but also in everyday tasks of supporting one another, raising children, etc.

This leads into the sixth element of the Rule, which is in fact community. In a deep, strong community the individual members are really part of an organic whole, a spiritual family. These communities allow for accountability between the members and deep levels of support. This level of community is difficult to achieve and even more difficult to maintain, especially among a variety of families from differing backgrounds, and it can take some reckoning.

The social interaction within a strong community leads to bonds that are hard to match in any other way, though. This interaction is glaringly absent from society today. Much of human interaction has been reduced to pixels on a screen, and this can never replace the bonds between real people, especially those formed over a long time in community.

The seventh element of the Rule which Dreher focuses upon is hospitality. This is the part that many reviews and discussions of the book seem to miss. While the element of stability and community that he recommends require us to draw back a little bit from society to augment our closeness and cohesion with others that share our faith, we still must reach out, welcome, and serve outsiders.

The Rule requires monks to welcome outsiders, at least to a point. That hospitality cannot interfere with the community’s way of life. As one of the monks puts it, “If we let visitors upset the rhythm of our life too much we can’t really welcome anyone.” Even so, the goal is to be as open to the outside world as possible.

I like how another of the monks describes the balance between preserving the community and welcoming outsiders: “Yes, you have to have borders, but our duty is not to let the borders stay there. We have to push outward, infinitely.” He states that this is done first by changing our own hearts toward God, and then our families, and then the world.

The final element of the Rule is balance. The Benedictines strive to be rigorous but not extreme. As one of the monks says, “If a community relaxes its discipline too much it will dissolve. But if it is too rigid, it will make people crazy.” He says that a balanced community should show good fruit – they should be cheerful and happy, growing, doing good, and helping people.

It is also pointed out that balance is not to be confused with spiritual mediocrity. This is where some amount of rigor comes in, especially in prayer. The balance is not between good and bad, but between different goods. The end goal, given to us by God, is to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect. This is a goal that requires balance in the approach, but really requires total abandonment of self-will to the will of God.

Applying all of these elements to the building of strong Christian communities, Dreher suggests, is what will help to build strong fortresses of the Faith to stand in contrast to the culture, and against its onslaughts, in the coming years when orthodox Christianity becomes increasingly unwelcome in the West.

The conundrum faced by a community that begins to implement the various elements of the Rule is the identity and relevance dilemma, as pointed out by Bishop Robert Barron. This theory states that the more we emphasize the uniqueness of Christianity, the less is seems to speak to the wider culture, and the more we emphasize the connection between faith and culture the less distinctive Christianity becomes.

The Benedict option is asking us to move to one end of this dilemma, or perhaps to the opposite end than we have been: emphasize the uniqueness of Christianity and let the culture view it as irrelevant for a time. Keep it alive until the culture is looking for what Christianity has to offer, and then offer it in spades.

Bishop Barron also offers an example of this being done very successfully, one that I had not heard connected to the Benedict Option before. Growing up in Poland under Nazi and Communist rule, Karol Wojtyla (later Pope John Paul II) was a part of an underground theatre group that kept Polish literature, poetry, and faith alive in an environment of dramatic oppression. Later on, as a priest, then bishop, then Pope, he was able to help bring the Polish culture back from the ashes to become one of the more prominent Catholic countries today.

Perhaps the difference in this example is that the Polish people were trying to outlast an outside force that was controlling their country, while the West is moving into a self-inflicted oppression of Christianity in the sense that it is our own country and culture that is secularizing. Even so, I think this is a great illustration of how the Benedict Option can be effective.

The coming chapters will break from the macro-level examination of the Benedict Option and start digging into some of the specifics for how the Benedict Option can be carried out.