The Benedict Option

During my youngest daughter's sophomore year at Concordia University - Chicago, she was required to read part of Rod Dreher's well-known book The Benedict Option - A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (Sentinel Press, 2017, 2018). After she was finished using the book I told her that I would like to borrow it to read myself.  Unfortunately, I have spilled coffee on it, so I guess I'll be purchasing the book now! I had heard about the book prior to my daughter using it, but for one reason or another never got around to reading it. 

I took my time working through its roughly 250 pages, but it is really not a difficult read.  One of the criticisms of his work, as it came indirectly to me, was this sense of escapism.  But that is anything but the message he hopes to convey.  Toward the end of the volume Dreher makes an effort to clarify what the Benedict Option is and what it is not:  "The Benedict Option is not a technique for reversing the losses, political or otherwise that Christians suffered.  It is not a strategy for turning back the clock to an imagined golden age.  Still less is it is plan for constructing communities of the pure pure, cut off from the real world.  To the contrary, the Benedict Option is a call to undertaking the long and patient work of reclaiming the real world from the artifice, alienation, and atomization of modern life.  It is a way of seeing the world and of living in the world that undermines modernity's big lie: that humans are ntohign more than ghosts in a machine, and we are free to adjust its settings in any way we like"  (236). 

There is a little of everything between the covers of this little volume: history (especially a particularly positive view of the Medieval era!), theology, a look at education, morals and ethics, the nature of monasticism in the modern world, the essence of Benedictine spirituality, etc. Now Dreher comes from the Easter Orthodox tradition, transplanted from Protestant roots.  That said, I did not find myself at odds with his theology as expressed in his book.  On the contrary, I found myself nodding in agreement, refreshed by an approach to Christian living that took a step back from the political need to change the secular structure to focusing our energies instead on the Christian church and its families.  It was also an admission, as the subtitle to the book indicates, that we do not live in a nation predominated by Christians morals.  We have more in common with the sixth century Benedictines who lived and worked and ministered in the shadow of the fall of the Roman Empire.  We are therefore not looking to recreate that golden age where the church again has influence and even power, if ever such an age truly existed in a pure form.  Rather we are looking to be true lights in a dark world. 

I highly recommend the reading of this book.  It is worth your time and contemplation if you are trying to find a way to be an active and engaged Christian in a world that often has no need for Christians, let alone any patience for them