A Decade Of Old Donkeys
Hardness, holiness, and the unbought grace of life: 2010-2020
This afternoon, I was looking through my phone for a photo, and rolled across a shot from exactly one year ago tonight. One of my oldest friends was in town visiting from New York City. We were sitting in my living room, having a drink, looking rested and cozy. We had no idea what would soon hit us. I say “us,” meaning all of us, but 2020 hit him especially hard. My friend contracted Covid over the summer. His father died of it in a nursing home.
What a terrible year this has been — a real challenge to my faith that we should not lose hope, because even in suffering, there is meaning. It has posed quite a challenge to my conviction that this world, both the good and the bad, are here to sharpen us spiritually, and to teach us love and mercy. I do believe those things are true. But they are easy things to profess when life is good. Our convictions only mean something if they hold fast under fire.
A friend e-mailed me today to express concern that I was going to burn out, writing both my TAC blog and this newsletter every weekday. That’s a risk, I replied, but the truth is, I told him, that as the days have grown darker, I have discovered a personal need to write this newsletter. I’m the kind of person who processes his thoughts through writing. In a way, I’m writing myself out of a hole (or at least using words to keep myself from sliding down into one). If my words can help you in this way too, well, glory to God for all things.
Here’s a piece of good news from this year. Lawrence Wright’s very long piece in The New Yorker titled “The Plague Year” records plenty of bad faith and stupid decisions, but there is also in it moral heroism (medical personnel) and a staggering achievement — in this case, by Dr. Barney Graham and Dr. Jason McLellan. Graham is the scientist in charge of the Covid vaccine process:
Within a day after Graham and McLellan downloaded the sequence for sars-CoV-2, they had designed the modified proteins. The key accelerating factor was that they already knew how to alter the spike proteins of other coronaviruses. On January 13th, they turned their scheme over to Moderna, for manufacturing. Six weeks later, Moderna began shipping vials of vaccine for clinical trials. The development process was “an all-time record,” Graham told me. Typically, it takes years, if not decades, to go from formulating a vaccine to making a product ready to be tested: the process privileges safety and cost over speed.
Graham had to make several crucial decisions while designing the vaccine, including where to start encoding the spike-protein sequence on the messenger RNA. Making bad choices could render the vaccine less effective—or worthless. He solicited advice from colleagues. Everyone said that the final decisions were up to him—nobody had more experience in designing vaccines. He made his choices. Then, after Moderna had already begun the manufacturing process, the company sent back some preliminary data that made him fear he’d botched the job.
Graham panicked. Given his usual composure, Cynthia, his wife, was alarmed. “It was a crisis of confidence that I just never see in him,” she said. So much depended on the prompt development of a safe and effective vaccine. Graham’s lab was off to a fast start. If his vaccine worked, millions of lives might be spared. If it failed or was delayed, it would be Graham’s fault.
After the vaccine was tested in animals, it became clear that Graham’s design choices had been sound. The first human trial began on March 16th. A week later, Moderna began scaling up production to a million doses per month.
Think of the pressure on those men! And look what they accomplished. The Swedes can’t forge those Nobel medals fast enough.
Some people say that the new decade starts on January 1 of years that end in zero, but formally, the new decade begins on January 1 of years that end in one. If that’s our standard, then the decade that ends in a few hours began for me, my wife, and my kids in Starhill, the little country settlement where I grew up. We had driven down from Dallas to spend time with my folks and my sister’s family. In mid-January, we were packing our things and moving to Philadelphia for me to take a job at a foundation. While we were there, we noticed that my sister Ruthie had a persistent cough. It was the damnedest thing, she said; it had been hanging on since October.
On February 16, I stood in the bathroom of our apartment in Philadelphia listening to my mother sobbing on the other end of the line. She was at the hospital. Exploratory surgery showed that Ruthie had lung cancer. Later that morning I was on a flight to Baton Rouge. That week, I stayed at Ruthie and her husband Mike’s house in Starhill to keep their two daughters who were still at home (the oldest had just started college) so Mike could stay with Ruthie in the hospital. On that first night, I lay in Ruthie and Mike’s bed with their little girl Rebekah, 7, sleeping next to me. In this passage from my 2013 book The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming, I recalled what happened:
Till that point, I hadn’t allowed myself to give in to my emotions, but there, in Ruthie’s bed, under cover of darkness, I let go. I wept convulsively, and wordlessly demanded that God justify what He had allowed to happen to my sister and her family. I knew that God could not by His nature will evil, but He let this happen for some reason. Why? I screamed silently, scalding tears rushing out of the corners of my eyes.
Then, suddenly, I became aware of a presence in the bedroom, hovering over the bed. It instantly sobered and quieted me. I had my eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling dimly illuminated by the security lights outside the window. Nothing was visible there. But something – someone – was there. Was it God? Was it an angel? I can’t say. I can’t even say if it was male or female. But I sensed that it was a being of some sort, and that it conveyed authority and strength that was almost physical. It felt as solid, as cool, as serene as a marble altar. Something, or someone, was there.
I did not hear a word with my ears, but in the half a minute this experience lasted, words formed in my mind. I cannot remember them precisely, but the presence communicated to me that Ruthie would not survive this cancer, but that I should not fear, that all would be well, because this must happen. It was in the order of things.
And that was all. The presence departed, leaving me with a sense of calm resignation. If it must be, it must be. But I cannot tell anybody but Julie about this, I resolved, because I don’t want them to lose hope. Then I fell asleep.
Ruthie held on for nineteen months, but just as I had been told, she finally succumbed to it. She died suddenly at home in the autumn of 2011. The decade began with shock, and loss. Notice, though, that at the beginning of this terrible journey for my sister and her family, I received — or at least I believe that I received — divine assurance that all would be well, even though the worst would happen.
A couple of months after she was diagnosed, after the chemo and the radiation had made her lose all her hair, bloated her beautiful face, and scarred it with acne, Ruthie told me with confidence that she believed she was “standing right where God wants me to be.”
“Rod, it seems like every single day the most interesting people are brought across my path.” And then she told a moving story about a suffering man she and Mike had met by apparent happenstance. They spent an hour with him, just listening to his story, and sharing their story. The whole thing, Ruthie said, was a blessing. She said she probably wouldn’t have been able to meet any of these people if not for her cancer.
“Rod, look at all I have. I mean, look at all I have! ” she said. “Okay, yeah, I have cancer. But I also have God. And I have my family. And I have all these friends, and all this love. It’s unbelievable how blessed I am.”
What a mystery it all was, and is. What does it mean for the death of a wife and mother in the prime of her life to be in the order of things? What kind of order is that? All I could say then, and all I can say now, is that I believe God sent an angel to reassure me that all was as it had to be. My sister Ruthie didn’t need a visitation to bolster her faith. She was all in from the beginning.
After her death, Julie and I moved with the kids down to Louisiana, to be closer to family. I was so full of hope then. It hurts to think about it, even now. I had no way of anticipating what was coming. As my longtime readers know, my niece Hannah, who was then 19, told me one night in Paris why nothing Julie and I did to try to get closer to her sisters was working, or would ever work: because their mother (and their grandfather, my dad) raised them to think of us as bad city people, not to be trusted. I will never, ever forget where I was standing on the Boulevard Saint-Germain when she broke the news to me. She did it not to be cruel, but because she couldn’t stand to see us working so hard, and getting nowhere, and not knowing why.
That revelation changed everything. All I thought I knew about my family was shattered. I confronted my dad about it. He denied it feebly, but I knew it was true, and he did too. Nobody apologized or gave us a chance; nobody thought there was anything to apologize for. Just like that, things fell apart. I fell into a deep depression, and chronic illness (Epstein-Barr) triggered by the stress of it all.
But the crisis compelled me to face down once and for all some dragons that had been menacing me all my life. I discovered Dante, of all things — and as Virgil led the pilgrim Dante out of the dark wood, so did the poet lead me out of my own despond. And not only that, he led me to a much deeper relationship with God. There was another bedside visitation from an angel, or so I believe. In the book about how God used Dante to save my life, I wrote about how the poet’s leading helped me untangle a painful knot that misled me into thinking that I was a disappointment to my Creator. And then:
A few nights later, I was lying in bed in the dark, with Julie asleep next to me. I was saying my five hundred Jesus Prayers, frustrated because I had put it off till the last moments of the day, and struggling through my fatigue to focus on it. By the time I arrived at the fourth cycle around my prayer rope—that is, after three hundred prayers—I was on autopilot.
And then something strange happened. The words God loves me appeared not in my head but in my heart. It was the strangest thing—like someone was standing at my bedside, placing them into my chest. Not God loves you, but God loves me.
Just like that: God loves me. Like it was the most natural thing in the world.
There it sat in my heart, like a pearl, glowing. It scared me at first, this mystical experience, because I feared it might go away. I finished my prayers, smiling in the darkness, because the words remained there, radiating. I fell asleep with the words repeating in my mind: God loves me. God loves me.
When I awakened the next morning, the first thing I noticed was a feeling in my chest. It was as if someone had laid a cornerstone in my heart, and chiseled into the stone were those three blessed words. All morning, I could physically feel them in my chest, humming along like a happy little pacemaker. I refused my usual impulse to analyze what happened; I chose to accept it as a gift.
To this day, the words remain there, as if they were written on my heart. God loves me, and he had established a beachhead within my soul. It was a small patch of ground, but it was real and firm, and now it was where I stood. And Dante Alighieri had led me to it.
That changed so much for me. I had been a believing Christian for over twenty years at that point, but had never been able to accept God’s love, except in a theoretical sense, because I had confused God the Father’s perfect love with the imperfect love of my dad, who cared deeply for me, but who regarded me as a disappointment. If I had not come to Louisiana and gone on that excruciating, unsought pilgrimage, I likely never would have known in my heart that God loves me.
And, as my longtime readers know, I never would have been there to hear my father, not long before his death in 2015, tell me that he was sorry for the way he treated me. I never would have been there to spend the last week of his life living with him in his bedroom, giving him home hospice morphine, rubbing lotion into his feet, praying with him, talking with him, and accompanying him on the final steps of his journey. It was golden. Late at night on the day he died, I finally understood why the day of my life that I had dreaded for years came as a blessing: because I had accepted the truth that the nun Piccarda, in the Paradiso, told the pilgrim Dante: “In His will is our peace.”
Not “in our happiness is our peace,” or “in our escaping suffering is our peace,” but in His will. For me at the time, that meant obeying what my priest, Father Matthew, told me back then: continuing to show love to my dad, even if he could not love me back as I thought I deserved. I didn’t want to do it, but I did it. As Father Matthew said, had Christ not done that for me? A hard truth, but the truth all the same.
Within a year of my dad’s death, our little Orthodox mission congregation in Starhill decided to shut our doors. We had no choice. We weren’t growing, and when one family left, we no longer had the money to afford a priest. That loss hurt. We had been praying together for three years, and had buried one of our founding members, Jack Cutrer, who had struggled for years with kidney disease, and who was found dead one morning in his house. He was only 41. They found Jack with his prayer rope in his hand; he had been praying when he died.
I prayed at Jack’s grave last week, on Christmas Eve, as I always do. Here was how Jack’s grave looked that afternoon. Notice the epitaph:
If you read my Dante book, you know that Father Matthew and I went to the funeral home and, according to Orthodox practice, anointed his naked body and prayed ritually over it as we dressed him for the funeral. I was afraid of this, afraid to see my friend’s dead body, afraid to touch it. My God, I had been standing next to him in church earlier that week. But this is what Orthodox people do. I wrote in the book:
Listening to Father pray, I found myself thinking, yes, this had been the right thing to do.
The strange ritual that I had dreaded had not been easy, but it had been holy. Standing there with my head bowed, having spent nearly two hours handling the body of my friend, I had felt underneath my fingers and palms the terrible chill of death, its weight, its finality. This is what Christ delivers us from. And yet, because He sanctified the flesh by His incarnation, so too do we do the flesh honor by treating the body of our beloved dead with such tenderness and respect.
After final prayers, we were finished. The entire ritual took two hours.
Hard, but holy. Looking back on this past decade, that emerges as a core theme in my life, and maybe even the core theme. That is, the idea that we can’t disentangle the hard from the holy, the difficult from the divinely ordained. This concept is at the heart of the book I published this year, about the lessons learned by Christians who resisted Soviet bloc totalitarianism. How was it that Solzhenitsyn, in The Gulag Archipelago, was able to write, “Bless you, prison”? It’s because his suffering in prison awakened him to truth, to humanity, and to God. In my reading, nothing impressed me more than the slim volume titled This Saved Us, by a physician and leader of the Slovak underground Catholic church, Silvester Krcmery. When the secret police threw him into prison, Dr. Krcmery said he resolved to be “like Peter, to close my eyes and throw myself into the sea.” He wrote:
In my case, it truly was to plunge into physical and spiritual uncertainty, an abyss, where only faith in God could guarantee safety. Material things which mankind regarded as certainties were fleeting and illusory, while faith, which the world considered to be ephemeral, was the most reliable and the most powerful of foundations. The more I depended on faith, the stronger I became.
It is true that I was drawn to these stories because I kept hearing from emigres to the US from communist countries that things happening now in our country remind them of what they once fled. But looking back now, I can see that my own struggles trying to make sense of suffering, and of learning to see God in it, and to trust God through it, opened my heart and my mind to the hard-won wisdom of these saints and heroes.
Their stories — especially Dr. Krcmery’s — set me right in the late spring, when I was stuck in self-pity over the Covid crisis. Krcmery writes that at the beginning of his long prison sentence, he resolved to refuse self-pity. Rather, he saw himself as “God’s probe,” as a man whose divinely prescribed mission was to bear witness, to repent, and to serve others. He writes, “Every morning in prison, I began my daily programme by saying, ‘With you and for you brothers… .’” From the beginning, Krcmery received everything as an opportunity to grow in love, faithfulness, and solidarity with his fellow sufferers.
Isn’t that what we are called to do? How far I am from being like Dr. Krcmery, who was only 27 years old when his prison ordeal began. But at least my work has given me the chance not only to learn about him, and those like him, but to tell others, and maybe even to inspire us to see the holiness in what is very hard.
This decade has been marked by so much loss — of loved ones, and of illusions. But it is always gain to know the truth, even if the truth hurts. Besides, if not for the suffering I’ve watched (my sister’s), that I’ve been through myself, and if not for the hard times I see coming for the church (and the ardent desire to help us prepare), I would not have written four books in eight years. If there is any hope, any wisdom, any faith, or any good thing in those books, they come from brokenness and pain.
Maybe the darkness of this past decade dominates my mind right now because of the year we have all had. It would not be faithful to the record, though, to end this reflection without giving thanks to all the great things that have happened to me — most of all, the new friends I’ve made through my travels. When the decade began, I had no idea who the monks of Norcia were. There are more than a few people who I now consider among my closest friends who, in 2010, were unknown to me. These men and women give me such joy.
I’m thinking right now especially of the happiest man in the world, Marco Sermarini, an Italian lawyer, head of the G.K. Chesterton society of Italy, and leader of the Catholic lay community called the Tipi Loschi. I met him in Norcia in 2016, in the church of the monks (it would collapse later that year, in an earthquake). If you read The Benedict Option, you know about Marco and his beautiful community. If there is a more joyful man walking the earth, I don’t know him. When I was on French TV in 2018 to promote the French translation of the book, the interviewer asked me who was my hero. I might have said Joseph Ratzinger, but instead I said Marco Sermarini. Why is that? Because of his honest joy, his big heart, and his manifest love for God and for others. That, and the fact that he’s just so grateful for everything. Marco shines light in this world of shadows.
On that first time I met him, back in 2016, I spent a couple of days with him and his community. We drove around the hills overlooking their small city on the Adriatic, San Benedetto del Tronto, talking about the various crises we all face, and how overwhelming they seem. Marco, behind the wheel of his SUV, said to me:
“Don’t worry if you haven’t got it all figured out now. Don’t worry if you aren’t a thoroughbred horse. If there aren’t any thoroughbreds, well, use a donkey. I’m an old donkey doing the best he can with what he has. But remember, Jesus Christ came into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey.”
I am grateful for that old Italian donkey, and all the old (and not-so-old) donkeys I have met in this hard, holy decade, and who have taken me into their hearts, and allowed me to take them into mine. They are part of what Russell Kirk lauded as “the unbought grace of life.” As much as I focus in my writing on finding meaning in suffering, and therefore hope, let it not be forgotten that life often surprises us with joy. I am not always visited by angels, but I am visited by good friends, old and new, and that is more blessing than I deserve.
Happy New Year! Felice Anno Nuovo! In this new year, let’s give thanks for unbought graces, and live to redeem the time.
From The Mailbag
Some correspondence about last night’s newsletter about holy fools and Lamed Vovniks. A Baltimore reader writes:
When I was in college at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor was graced with a very oddball character called (by his own preference) Shakey Jake. He was an aging and very fey black man. There were many homeless and mentally ill people on the streets of the pretentious city since a state hospital had closed a ways down the highway. However Jake was unique among that sort. He wandered about with an old out-of-tune guitar which he strummed and sang to (he couldn't carry a tune in a bucket). He was friendly, and not in a creepy way, and boundlessly cheerful. The man could have lightened the mood at a funeral. He was not on drugs (other than maybe psych meds?) His conversation was a bit erratic but never too irrational to follow. And he never asked for money or anything else. He became something of Ann Arbor institution. People saw to it that he had plenty to eat, warm clothes in winter and even a place to sleep. There were t-shirts and bumper-stickers made: "I Brake For Shakey". He died in 2007. There's even a Wikipedia article about him, complete with photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakey_Jake
Here’s another:
I encountered a yurodivya in Cracow about four or five years ago. It wasn't particularly dramatic, but there wasn't too much doubt. My daughter, who was four at the time, was pitching a fit as small children will do when they don't get their way when this cheerful old lady came up and tried to cheer her up. I think she was Ukrainian. She started off by giving small pastries from one of the near-by street carts. Later she led us off to the Franciscan Church close by. I think it was the Church of the Holy Spirit, but I don't remember exactly.
These churches often have the kind of a museum feel to them, as places where you're supposed to look but not touch and not make too much noise. Well, she walked right in as though she owned the place, led my children into one of the side chapels, and proceeded to boost them up so that they could touch the statues of the angels on the alter. She led them to a reproduction of the shroud of Turin at the back, and encouraged them to touch that as well, and led them a bit closer to the relics of one saint than the “curators” probably would have liked.
Later we went into the main part of the cathedral, and she led them closer to the high alter than we were supposed to go, but clearly told them that they weren't supposed to climb on this one. The second side-chapel had an Adoration, and she led them out of that one when it was clear that they were going to be just a little too noisy.
Throughout all of this I kept thinking of St. Paul's remark about being a fool for Christ and the part in the Gospel where Jesus says to “suffer the little children to come unto me and hinder them not.” When she finally had to go to work she left my children each with one of those little devotional cards of Matka Boska Częstochowska and my wife a Ukrainian New Testament (my wife has been speaking Slovak and Russian since she was born, so she has no trouble with Ukrainian).
Another reader:
My patron Saint, Xenia of St. Petersburg, is one of them. Before she lived the life as a homeless woman in the crappy parts of St. Petersburg, Russia; she was a woman married to an army officer, Andrei Petrov. Maj. Petrov died unexpectedly at a party without the Sacraments of Confession or the Eucharist. His death so affected Xenia that she turned her whole heart, mind and soul to God. So much so that after some time, she abandoned her former life and became a Fool for Christ. So much so that she wore his army uniform and demanded she be called 'Andrei Feodorovich'. Besides wanting her deceased husband to be in the Bosom of Abraham, she wandered around the crappy parts of St. Petersburg with nothing besides herself and God. Her freedom from worldly life, in time became well known. People began to notice something special about her, despite her eccentricities. Her closeness to God could not be overlooked. So much so, that she is known as a Saint of God.
She lived at the time of the American Revolution.
Also, if a society does not have eccentrics, it becomes sadistic. Notice that the Nazis and Soviets tried to kill off as many as possible. Society needs people who are off the beaten path. Civilization itself is dependent on this because it makes our lives more livable and humane.
Another:
In reading this morning’s Daily Dreher my mind went immediately to a man I knew many years ago.
Mike was a missionary kid born in Papua New Guinea to a physicist turned missionary who lived on the island for 20 plus years evangelizing and translating the Bible into the native dialects. Mike was always a little bit different. He left Papua New Guinea as a young man and came to the US. Mike was an itinerant preacher, to support himself he worked odd jobs but mainly lived off the largess of others.
He was fearless in proclaiming the Gospel. He always carried a large stack of Bible tracts which he passed out to anyone who would give him the time of day. I remember one time he was telling me about witnessing to some of my brother’s friends. My brother gravitated to the wrong side of the tracks and hung with a pretty rough crowd. But Mike approached them not intimidated in the least by all the drugs and alcohol and belligerent attitudes on display. He shared the Gospel with these young men and am sure that the seed was planted. I know that at least a couple of the men there repented and gave their life to God several years later. I like to think that Mike’s intrepid witnessing played a part in that. When recounting the incident Mike said that they were a lot more receptive to his efforts than most of the respectable people he talked to.
I am a pretty introverted person. A stoic German-American about as far from Mike in personality as you can get. To be honest, I didn’t really know how to take him and tended to avoid him most of the time outside a few conversations over the years. However, one time he asked me for a ride home. After he climbed into my truck he asked if I would make a stop on the way home at the local Masonic Lodge. I hesitantly agreed. When we arrived he asked me to wait in the truck and keep it running while he went inside to drop something off. He pulled a handful of tracts out of his bag and off he went. About 15 minutes later he hurriedly came back to the truck and said we had to leave.
I took him to the house where he was staying with some friends and when we pulled in the drive he asked if we could pray together. I said sure. Mike asked a blessing on me for giving me a ride, and then prayed that God would provide a spouse for me. I was single at the time and unbeknownst to him really struggling with that at the time. (from your writings it was a similar situation to yours prior to you meeting your wife) It was powerful, sincere, and from the heart. Six months later I became engaged to my wife of 23 years. It is truly a blessed marriage. I am not saying that the reason for the marriage was Mike’s prayer but I am sure there was something to it.
Mike remained an itinerant preacher his entire life. Traveling the mid-west and occasional trips abroad, mainly to Brazil where he married. Mike passed away this past July. The world is a sadder, less interesting place without him. He touched many lives and boldly proclaimed Christ to all those he came in contact with.
One more:
When I was becoming a Christian, I was still pursued by doubts, as well as some of the creatures I'd entertained in my previous life. Walking down a city sidewalk, some of these railed in my inner ear, much like some of your TAC commenters, against the irrationality of Christianity, even its supposed insanity. It just so happened that I then was passing by a light pole with three daily newspaper boxes chained to it. (Obviously still the heyday of the print new media.) I happened to glance at the headlines, reporting the events in the world. "No," I realized, then retorted, "THAT is insane."
Perhaps someone observing me, conversing with no one visible, would have taken me for a fool. In the sense of being set aside to be able to perceive God's wisdom measured against the folly of the world, perhaps I may even have been holy. I have often since been foolish; but thank the Lord He is not a man, that He should lie.
We’re Almost There
Tomorrow night’s newsletter (Friday’s) will be the final free one. There will be a button at the bottom that will allow you to subscribe to the paid version. Again, it will be five dollars per month (= 25 cents per night), or $50 per year. I’m still trying to figure out what kind of premium to offer to those who have the means and the desire to support my newsletter at a higher level. If you will not be joining us on the paid version, I am still grateful to you for reading. If I can figure out how to make it work, I will send out a newsletter every couple of weeks with the “best of” the Daily, to remind you that we’re still here, and to invite you to subscribe.
Remember that I always like hearing from you, even if I can’t respond to everybody’s e-mails. I’m at roddreher — at — substack — dot — com.
See y’all next year.
Oh, p.s., the author of the poem about friendless churches, in the previous newsletter, is Kathleen Hagberg. She gave me permission today to reveal her name.