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
