Benedict Option - Thoughts

 

Have you heard of Rod Dreher's Benedict Option, in which the author suggests Christians set up communities to preserve the culture, tradition, sanity and virtue of the West, of the Church herself, in a sea of barbarism? No matter if you haven't, the idea's not new, think "righteous remnant."

All that and more in mind, we heard a talk on just this at Mission #2 this morning. Good stuff, and big thanks to our Baylor doctoral speaker for giving it. But let's get down to practical solutions. Here we are in a sea of apostasy and secularism, it's the air we breathe. And with that, we're fragmented, atomized.

Case in point. Set up your local church as a true community of faith and sanity against the rising tide of increasingly obvious barbaric wickedness. Good call, but how, when your church is spread across territory half the width of Wales, in Texas. Hardly the local solution Dreher recommends. Problem.

Solution? Catastrophe. What brought Benedict of Nursia to Monte Casino? The call of God, obviously, but also the decay, devolution and catastrophic fragmentation of the Roman State. It wasn't working anymore and, in fact, had been ravaged by war, plague and just about every other terror.

So Benedict, a nobleman, renounced his wealth and withdrew, with a servant, let the reader understand, to what became the foundation stone of western monasticism and the salvation of its civilization and faith. And my point was this. 

If we're to form true counter cultural communities it might just take a disaster to force us into it. That said, wealthy patrons wouldn't hurt.

As a doomer, I wager the former, ask the dam Monkey.

Your Old Pal,

LSP

Dies Irae

 

This seems appropriate, right about now. Dies Irae? Day of wrath and doom impending. David's word with Sibyl's blending, Heaven and earth in ashes ending.

Note "Sibyl's blending." Classicism aside (you've read the Sibyline Oracles, right? Trick question, they were burned in the 5thC A.D., thanks Stilicho, dammit), it ends:

Low I kneel, with heart's submission, See, like ashes, my contrition, Help me in my last condition. Ah! that day of tears and mourning, From the dust of earth returning Man for judgement must prepare him, Spare, O God, in mercy spare him.

Kyrie Eleison. That's us, in Lent.

God Bless,

LSP

Fixed The Rig

After dropping the Cadet (potential) at school, I dropped off the rig at the Brazen Pineapple, known colloquially as Gene's Auto Body. Then I walked home, because I didn't have a vehicle and didn't care to ask for a "loaner."

It still seems odd after growing up in England to see dirt roads within city limits but I like that, it's Centex Country, right along with the grain bins, sorry, bins not in the frame.

So are shacks, which are somehow less bucolic than the dirt roads and grain silos of this small slice of rural Texan paradise. Imagine, there you are in your shack, it's triple digits and the food stamps have just run out because you've swapped them out for meth. Not so pastoral idyll.

Still, the town's getting fixed up, with new shops on the Square and attractive older houses being renovated and sold. Who to? People from Dallas, I'd imagine, who can't afford the 500k+ price tag of living in the appalling and soul-destroying metrosprawl.

I thought all this and more as I strolled down the leafy boulevards of my quaint farming community and pondered the transnational, satanic, globalist elites that destroyed this town to make themselves even richer. Where will it end? 

Pitchforks and Nooses down the Mall? Maybe. More likely a gradual breakdown of central government which, ironically, runs out of cash.

Of course we've seen it all before. Cast your minds back to Rome which, at its peak, was a city of over a million people. Then picture that same city in the 7th century AD, perhaps viewed from the Palatine Hill and the just at that point intact palace of the Caesars. What do you see?

A sea of ruins stretching out to the horizon, broken by still-standing monumental architecture, such as the Pantheon and Coliseum. Below you lies the broken Hippodrome with its ghosts of long dead crowds. Rome at this point maybe musters 20,000 souls.

This Texan town was 20,000 strong 50 years ago, now it's 7,000 if it's lucky. 

Draw the moral as you will.

Quo Vadis,

LSP