What the Benedict Option is like

If anyone knows what the Benedict Option is like it would be Rod Dreher, the man who invented it and lives it out day after day. So what's the Benedict Option like?

Let's let Rod tell us in his own terms.

Luxury hotel on Lake Louise, CA courtesy Rod Dreher

Isn’t that something, that view? That beer belongs to Peter Leithart, who was sitting to the left of the frame. I was drinking the same kind. What a gorgeous, gorgeous place. A group of us went walking in Johnson Canyon, part of Banff National Park, in the Canadian Rockies. Then we dropped by to see Lake Louise, which is still frozen over. We had a beer at the hotel on the lake.
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Man, did I ever have a great time with these Lutherans up here!

Man, I'll bet you did, Rod! Sign me up for the Benedict Option today!

Banff National Park has got to be one of the most beautiful vacation destinations ever, and you, too, can access it at its most spectacular if you play your cards right.

You just need to make some arrangements there that have a plausible connection to your business or church doings, then, while "thickening" yourself on a delicious craft beer, write off your expenses as tax deductions against your income or business revenue.*

Now, granted, Rod has the original Benedict Option book-to-be-written-somewhen as his hook, so you'll need to develop a derivative Benedict Option Tax Option of your own.

Maybe pretend to write a book about Rod's pretending to write his original Benedict Option book-to-be-written-somewhen, following in his footsteps as he himself followed Dante's on the Dante Trail when he vacationed in beautiful Italy. And then your friends could pretend to write a book about you pretending to write a book, and so forth. Naturally, as you can see above, there will be necessary expenses involved.

Or maybe something entirely different. You're really only limited by your imagination and the gullibility of the IRS.

The main thing to understand is - just as Rod tells us, over and over - the Benedict Option is not about pulling roots out of the ground and eating them raw in a field behind some nameless monastery outside Rump, Indiana like Kwai Chang Caine in Kung Fu. Dude! No way!

No, as you see can plainly see here, the Benedict Option is about cannily harvesting God's blessings as revealed through the U. S. tax code and living large - in praise of Him, of course.

The Benedict Option: Dum vivimus, vivamus, dude!

 *Note: nothing in the post is to be construed as offering professional tax counseling. See your own tax professional, and soon! April 15 is almost upon us.

Family Option versus Benedict Option

Diane mentioned a word-coupling oft-heard in circles of serious Catholics, Domestic Church, and something sort or half-clicked in my head. Then I see the phrase again in this piece by Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz in reaction to the SSM ruling:

We have perhaps not done enough to teach the beauty of marriage and the purpose and inherent design of family life, but the Church is here to accompany couples as they make the courageous choice to follow this life-giving vocation. We will pray with them and will advocate for them. It is a good time to recommit ourselves — all of us whether clergy or lay — to cherishing marriage and the children of each union as a joy, a place of love and a path to virtue and holiness. If you do not know the deep beauty of the Church’s teachings on marriage and family life, I urge you to make a little time to read and ask questions. Many of the great saints have spoken about the family as the domestic church, the dignity of every person, the sacrament of marriage as a path to holiness, the complete gift of self, the blessedness of fruitful marriage and other topics worthy of contemplation and pursuit.

...and this time it's kind of like V8 head-slap moment. Everything that people want from the so-called Benedict Option is already available to the Domestic Church which is the Catholic Family. Or Christian Family, if you wish. For example, what goes on at our house? Well... Morning Offering, grace before meals, instruction of the ignorant, peace-making, morality 101, political/ethical discussions with those old enough, spiritual reading, Rosary, Angelus (sometimes in Latin), Spiritual Communions, examination of conscience, spiritual reading, Lectio Divina, doing chores and projects, regular meals, obeying rules, consequences for not obeying rules, nighttime prayers where we mention all our friends by name, etc.

What doesn't go on at our house? Network television, excessive use of entertainment media and gaming, pornography, acceptance of sin as OK or "normal", questionable publications, etc. All that secularism stuff.

So no rocket science, no brain surgery, no Benedict Option required to let the good stuff in and keep the bad stuff out.

My wife and kids and I are not perfect, nor do we claim to be. We don't always say the Rosary like we should every day, we don't always remember we're children of God and sometimes we lose our temper (ha! he wrote "we"...) or give in to arguing, bickering, fighting, etc. But that's the Church, that's the Domestic Church, and that's every group of human trying to get along since Adam and Eve. If I was doing everything I could be doing 100%, or even 90%, and there was evidence that something was still missing, maybe I'd buy a quart or two of Benedict Option to throw in the tank. (If it existed.)

So here's the question: why would any serious Christian run after a nebulous and undefined concept like "the Benedict Option" which has no authoritative structure, no discernible form, and no practical precedent in history other than failed communes headed by someone possessing a certain level of nuttiness? The natural alternative is the Family Option, or the Domestic Church, a title for the Christian Family with roots going back to the beginning of Christianity. Every time I hear someone defending the Benedict Option by defining it as a number of holy and good things of which I heartily approve I think they are actually describing a really good example of a Christian Family, a Domestic Church, and not really anything which Rod Dreher & company have in mind for the yet-to-be-defined Benedict Option.

But wouldn't the Benedict Option be helpful to families trying to live up to this ideal? Again, not knowing what the Benedict Option is, we have no idea. All I know is that the Church supports me leading my family and transmitting the faith to them, and so do all our Christian friends and conservative Jewish friends. Even the nominal Catholic people I know respect the fact that I have six kids and am more religious than they are. As for resources, there are all kinds of groups out there like Knights of Columbus, Opus Dei, Spiritual Direction and the USCCB giving out stuff for free.

Did you know you can get the Summa for free on Kindle?

Did you know some creative Catholic people started a website called Domestic-Church.com?

I think we know enough about the what the Benedict Option supposedly is to say that either it is way too restrictive and one-size-fits-all, or if it isn't, then we already have it in the Domestic Church, the Christian Family. Jared Staudt, an actual Benedictine Oblate who I recently mentioned, has his own take on what the Benedict Option might be:

I would propose that the Benedict Option is something simple, which anyone can live, whether they have withdrawn to an enclave or not.... The Benedict Option is really quite simple: it is living the Christian life in a coherent, simple, and prayer centered way in the modern world.

But shouldn't children be sheltered from the world at least until a certain age? Most definitely! That's why God invented the Christian Family. a place where the goal isn't to push them through into adulthood like a factory, but rather to form them into the Christian adults they are meant to be. If you want to live close to a monastery, more power to you. But know that you can probably do more than you are doing right now without living near a monastery. Are you going to Mass every day? Or do you want a personal monk to bring you the Holy Eucharist in your compound so you don't have to get out of your slippers?

In closing, I think that this Benedict Option issue demarcates two ways of thinking about how to approach the challenges of the modern world from a Catholic perspective. I noticed this for some time, ever since I heard people like Rod Dreher speaking favorably of the title of Hillary Clinton's famous ghost-written tome, It Takes A Village. I remembered years before, circa 2000, hearing a priest say something like the following in a wedding homily:

There are a lot of books I'd like to read still in my life, and there is a book which, if it is on the list at all, is fairly close to the bottom. The name of that book is something like "It takes a village to raise a child." [snickers from the congregation] Because truthfully, it doesn't take a village to raise a child. All it takes to do that is a Mother and a Father.

I don't know what we should call these two approaches or how they can be categorized. What I do know is that if we get to do a vacation this summer with our seventh child due to arrive within weeks, we are all going. Together. Yes, we always take the Domestic Church on the road, man.

I'm back from vacation

I was on vacation last week. It was good, thanks. I'm back now.