At the table, we all agreed that the only thing left to conservatives to fight the Machine directly is politics, because political institutions are the only things that we have the opportunity to control. Everything else is controlled by the cultural Left. Everything. ......... ....... I am not sure that fighting the machine directly through politics is confronting it directly but is instead the diversion that is needed to actually fight the machine directly. As you reported Orban saying something along the lines of politics can only provide the space to live a religious life. (yes I know that is a paraphrase). The space being provided can't be the main line of confrontation. The community in France you described is the real direct confrontation. All other communities like that are the real direct fight to the machine. The machine seeks to control our lives. Any out and proud rebuke to that line of thought and life is directly fighting against the machine because then a true alternative is proposed for others to see, not space to form such a community but an actual community rebuking in action a repudiation of the machine's control. Politics has to go with such actions but to really fight back we have to create little Benedict Options communities and get the word out about them. We have to visibly provide a better way, even if persecution in some form comes. Anyways it is early and I am not done with coffee. I will get back to this idea later if I can
Happy Easter from Canada Rod. I agree that the West is in for a period of spiritual darkness. For whatever reason, our society has decided to self-destruct. Those of us who follow you appreciate your efforts. As long as there are some of us who understand and believe in Christian values, and try to uphold them in our lives, there is hope for the future.
As an aside one aspect of the Gloom and Doom narrative I take strong issue with is the notion that only the US (or more broadly "the West") is in trouble. Nope, not at all. The whole world is, and specific cultural facets are irrelevant to the business, though those (along with technological and economic factors) may help determine who different peoples come out in the aftermath.
Whatever, Jon, this is just more gibberish. Incomprehensibly I thank you.
Don't you understand that we are the most influential and power-mad country, that we have the biggest shoulders and invented the crazy train, which you say the world is riding? Suddenly you will really care about cultural decline and all kinds of decline when Trump gets re-elected, how much do you want to bet -- nothing?
Yup. Case closed.
Here's another communist joke, my friend, you would do better just to repeat this:
"Comrades, the failing, decadent West is at the edge of the precipice... and we are one step ahead of them!"
Sigh. That's all just dust in the wind. There's a juvenile tendency on the Right and Left to pretend history is some sort of vaudville morality play. It isn't. Fickle Fortune holds sway and she gives blows and favors with no regard to anyone's virtue or wickedness. There's an entire branch of theology devoted to the question of theodicy: why good and evil that happen to us do so at such utter random. IMO it's the most important philosophical question out there and I struggle with it greatly.
Lift up your eyes from the minutiae of Now. There's a (metaphorical) tsunami coming and it will have no more respect for national or confessional or even species boundaries than the Black Death or the asteroid that did in the dinosaurs.
I agree. The rest of the world does not get a pass. This is a global turning of the tide. Read your bible. This is preparation for the manifestation of a global figure who will be welcomed as a man of peace who will momentarily calm the unrest that is fomenting before our eyes: anti christ. False messiah. And we are not just talking about the geographic playing field. We are also talking about what the greek language uses to describe the concept of “world”: Kosmos.
Kosmos includes the mental dimension. The non-divine perception of our purpose that we collectively promote as the meaning of existence. As the germans call it: WELTANSCHAUUNG.
Very heartening about La Lucerne. I see this happening in a small way around other monasteries as well.
I can’t agree that the only thing left to fight the Machine directly is politics (nor, for that matter, that we can truly control political institutions). Politics are a reflection of the human heart. That’s where the battle is won or lost, at Solzhenitsyn’s border between good and evil in every heart.
Thank you Rod for once again giving me a fly-on-the-wall view of other dimensions of the christian community.
Being raised by attendees of Billy Graham tent meetings and converts of Aimee Semple McPherson (hell, my great aunt was an evangelist converted to the faith while doing business with her husband the goon. He worked for Al Capone. My aunt used to travel with her brother and cousin from Logan Iowa to deliver gin to Capone in Chicago. She was a wild-red-haired flapper and wasted no time catching the eye of one of Capone’s goons. The family still has a sawed off shotgun owned by Capone. I only learned of this about 15 or 20 years ago and it floored me because we only knew her as this tongue-talking firebrand Pentecostal.)
The catholic and orthodox world is like a foreign language that I am trying to learn so that I can communicate with the broader christian family. Having said that, we need to stay connected. There is no time left for doctrinal polemics. The Benedict Option is critical for the church going forward, however the various communities may define it. Not everybody can relocate to the glorious Normandy refuge. And I know that that is not what you are saying. I stand with you in supporting the essential truth of the matter: the tide is rising and christians everywhere need to own their commitment to Christ and put the toys and distractions away and set your face like a flint to the work of Christ and the resistance against the spirit of anti christ.
This is no drill. We have come to the kingdom for this hour.
I forgot to mention that my aunt’s conversion from a life of gangster crime was through Aimee McPherson. She was with her goon husband in LA while he was “doing business”. She had time to kill on a Sunday and was in the Silverlake/Glendale area. She saw a sandwhich board sign on the sidewalk outside a church inviting people in. She walked into McPherson’s Sunday service and was transformed by the message of the Gospel.
That's fascinating, and it underscores the ability of the preached Gospel, apart from apologetics, to save. Apologetics - evidence - is always welcomed, and there are lives in which God has used it to build faith, but always, it's the Gospel which will do the work of God in drawing people to Himself.
I love these old stories about our ancestors. Modernity tends to regard the past as simple, traditional, conformist (and hence the need to purge what came before with progressive nonsense) but these folks were anything but. Our grandparents were complex human beings who almost always rose to the occasion, despite suffering and adversity. And they didn't complain like we do today.
That is indeed great news on Good Friday. I’m happy for you—not only to see your ideas become a book, but then going on to have such a magnificent manifestation in the world. It’s fantastic, Rod. Hopefully many more to come. Wow, what a beautiful piece of news.
Rod, I’m paraphrasing from memory (and hoping I’m remembering correctly) but I remember you writing years ago, when you were visiting with the Tipi Loschi, that Catholicism in the Old World is different than it is here in America, in a way that Americans can’t understand—that in America everyone is Protestant, even Catholics. What did you mean?
Solene Tadie has been writing about these re-emerging spiritual centers for a few years now (mostly in France, but in Europe more generally as well). Her colleague, Jonathan Liedl, has been writing on similar topics more recently. These stories validate Rod's point in Live Not By Lies that the Europeans are farther "advanced" in their understanding of the post-Christian world we now live in and are beginning to form real communities to counter the storm. Americans, unfortunately, are still debating whether this situation simply is a temporary setback. As such, the Europeans should be watched as the real leading lights (a truly contrarian thought, but one that repeats in history).
Regarding the BO and Political Option (PO), it seems to me at a very high level that the two concepts are coming at the "problem" from different perspectives: The PO is coming from a top-down perspective (working on ways to create the appropriate operating environment) and BO is coming from a bottom-up perspective (creative minorities working out the small-scale experiments that might be scaled to a broader landscape). As such, you need both to reimagine and rebuild society. One without the other will not work. Both groups need to recognize this symbiotic relationship. Unfortunately, the folks that would naturally occupy both camps do not talk the same language and thus tend to work against each other. In the Hungarian case, the PO clearly is in place but the BO appears to be in a very early stage of development. Attracting BO entrepreneurs into the Hungarian sandbox is the key to fully leveraging the PO heavy lifting to date...
This is so exciting! Thank you for sharing the story in France inspired by The Benedict Option. I have to go there someday. France has a very special place in my heart because it was in Sacre Couer the Holy Spirit opened my heart and called me into the Catholic Church. I grew up Church of Christ in Arkansas and was very much lower middle class and the last place I ever expected to ever actually get to be standing one day would be in a church in Paris. And the very last thing I ever expected to be doing was weeping there after knowing the Lord had called me to become Catholic after walking in strictly as a somewhat anti-Catholic tourist and not even understanding a word that was being said.
Oh what a blessing James.
que Dieu protège et permette.
At the table, we all agreed that the only thing left to conservatives to fight the Machine directly is politics, because political institutions are the only things that we have the opportunity to control. Everything else is controlled by the cultural Left. Everything. ......... ....... I am not sure that fighting the machine directly through politics is confronting it directly but is instead the diversion that is needed to actually fight the machine directly. As you reported Orban saying something along the lines of politics can only provide the space to live a religious life. (yes I know that is a paraphrase). The space being provided can't be the main line of confrontation. The community in France you described is the real direct confrontation. All other communities like that are the real direct fight to the machine. The machine seeks to control our lives. Any out and proud rebuke to that line of thought and life is directly fighting against the machine because then a true alternative is proposed for others to see, not space to form such a community but an actual community rebuking in action a repudiation of the machine's control. Politics has to go with such actions but to really fight back we have to create little Benedict Options communities and get the word out about them. We have to visibly provide a better way, even if persecution in some form comes. Anyways it is early and I am not done with coffee. I will get back to this idea later if I can
Happy Easter from Canada Rod. I agree that the West is in for a period of spiritual darkness. For whatever reason, our society has decided to self-destruct. Those of us who follow you appreciate your efforts. As long as there are some of us who understand and believe in Christian values, and try to uphold them in our lives, there is hope for the future.
As an aside one aspect of the Gloom and Doom narrative I take strong issue with is the notion that only the US (or more broadly "the West") is in trouble. Nope, not at all. The whole world is, and specific cultural facets are irrelevant to the business, though those (along with technological and economic factors) may help determine who different peoples come out in the aftermath.
But overall a inspring piece from Rod.
Whatever, Jon, this is just more gibberish. Incomprehensibly I thank you.
Don't you understand that we are the most influential and power-mad country, that we have the biggest shoulders and invented the crazy train, which you say the world is riding? Suddenly you will really care about cultural decline and all kinds of decline when Trump gets re-elected, how much do you want to bet -- nothing?
Yup. Case closed.
Here's another communist joke, my friend, you would do better just to repeat this:
"Comrades, the failing, decadent West is at the edge of the precipice... and we are one step ahead of them!"
Sigh. That's all just dust in the wind. There's a juvenile tendency on the Right and Left to pretend history is some sort of vaudville morality play. It isn't. Fickle Fortune holds sway and she gives blows and favors with no regard to anyone's virtue or wickedness. There's an entire branch of theology devoted to the question of theodicy: why good and evil that happen to us do so at such utter random. IMO it's the most important philosophical question out there and I struggle with it greatly.
Lift up your eyes from the minutiae of Now. There's a (metaphorical) tsunami coming and it will have no more respect for national or confessional or even species boundaries than the Black Death or the asteroid that did in the dinosaurs.
I agree. The rest of the world does not get a pass. This is a global turning of the tide. Read your bible. This is preparation for the manifestation of a global figure who will be welcomed as a man of peace who will momentarily calm the unrest that is fomenting before our eyes: anti christ. False messiah. And we are not just talking about the geographic playing field. We are also talking about what the greek language uses to describe the concept of “world”: Kosmos.
Kosmos includes the mental dimension. The non-divine perception of our purpose that we collectively promote as the meaning of existence. As the germans call it: WELTANSCHAUUNG.
Christ alone is our hope.
Congratulations about La Lucerne, that place sounds enchanting.
Well now I have somewhere to shoot for in retirement. The Villages in Florida be damned.
The Abbey reminds me of Pusey House Oxford. There is always something going on there and so many more people come in compared to say 15 years ago.
My bishop has talked of “front porch ministries”: activities that draw people in who might not normally be interested in going to a church.
Ken, you are unduly fond of that anecdote. Happy Easter, anyway.
You are right. That was a bit gratuitous. I deleted it for the sake of good will.
Very heartening about La Lucerne. I see this happening in a small way around other monasteries as well.
I can’t agree that the only thing left to fight the Machine directly is politics (nor, for that matter, that we can truly control political institutions). Politics are a reflection of the human heart. That’s where the battle is won or lost, at Solzhenitsyn’s border between good and evil in every heart.
Vote your conscience and preach christ.
Given the Abbey's focus on art, perhaps you should try to connect them with the Ukrainian icon artist Ivanka Demchuck?
Thank you Rod for once again giving me a fly-on-the-wall view of other dimensions of the christian community.
Being raised by attendees of Billy Graham tent meetings and converts of Aimee Semple McPherson (hell, my great aunt was an evangelist converted to the faith while doing business with her husband the goon. He worked for Al Capone. My aunt used to travel with her brother and cousin from Logan Iowa to deliver gin to Capone in Chicago. She was a wild-red-haired flapper and wasted no time catching the eye of one of Capone’s goons. The family still has a sawed off shotgun owned by Capone. I only learned of this about 15 or 20 years ago and it floored me because we only knew her as this tongue-talking firebrand Pentecostal.)
The catholic and orthodox world is like a foreign language that I am trying to learn so that I can communicate with the broader christian family. Having said that, we need to stay connected. There is no time left for doctrinal polemics. The Benedict Option is critical for the church going forward, however the various communities may define it. Not everybody can relocate to the glorious Normandy refuge. And I know that that is not what you are saying. I stand with you in supporting the essential truth of the matter: the tide is rising and christians everywhere need to own their commitment to Christ and put the toys and distractions away and set your face like a flint to the work of Christ and the resistance against the spirit of anti christ.
This is no drill. We have come to the kingdom for this hour.
Yes, Brother. In Jesus’ name.
No quarter.
I forgot to mention that my aunt’s conversion from a life of gangster crime was through Aimee McPherson. She was with her goon husband in LA while he was “doing business”. She had time to kill on a Sunday and was in the Silverlake/Glendale area. She saw a sandwhich board sign on the sidewalk outside a church inviting people in. She walked into McPherson’s Sunday service and was transformed by the message of the Gospel.
That's fascinating, and it underscores the ability of the preached Gospel, apart from apologetics, to save. Apologetics - evidence - is always welcomed, and there are lives in which God has used it to build faith, but always, it's the Gospel which will do the work of God in drawing people to Himself.
It also shows that the Lord may work through people who are morally compromised-- indeed we would be quite bereft were that not true.
There are no humans that are not morally compromised.
I love these old stories about our ancestors. Modernity tends to regard the past as simple, traditional, conformist (and hence the need to purge what came before with progressive nonsense) but these folks were anything but. Our grandparents were complex human beings who almost always rose to the occasion, despite suffering and adversity. And they didn't complain like we do today.
Indeed
Come on Orthodox leaders! Where is our La Lucerne?
Yes indeed.
That is indeed great news on Good Friday. I’m happy for you—not only to see your ideas become a book, but then going on to have such a magnificent manifestation in the world. It’s fantastic, Rod. Hopefully many more to come. Wow, what a beautiful piece of news.
Rod, I’m paraphrasing from memory (and hoping I’m remembering correctly) but I remember you writing years ago, when you were visiting with the Tipi Loschi, that Catholicism in the Old World is different than it is here in America, in a way that Americans can’t understand—that in America everyone is Protestant, even Catholics. What did you mean?
Solene Tadie has been writing about these re-emerging spiritual centers for a few years now (mostly in France, but in Europe more generally as well). Her colleague, Jonathan Liedl, has been writing on similar topics more recently. These stories validate Rod's point in Live Not By Lies that the Europeans are farther "advanced" in their understanding of the post-Christian world we now live in and are beginning to form real communities to counter the storm. Americans, unfortunately, are still debating whether this situation simply is a temporary setback. As such, the Europeans should be watched as the real leading lights (a truly contrarian thought, but one that repeats in history).
Regarding the BO and Political Option (PO), it seems to me at a very high level that the two concepts are coming at the "problem" from different perspectives: The PO is coming from a top-down perspective (working on ways to create the appropriate operating environment) and BO is coming from a bottom-up perspective (creative minorities working out the small-scale experiments that might be scaled to a broader landscape). As such, you need both to reimagine and rebuild society. One without the other will not work. Both groups need to recognize this symbiotic relationship. Unfortunately, the folks that would naturally occupy both camps do not talk the same language and thus tend to work against each other. In the Hungarian case, the PO clearly is in place but the BO appears to be in a very early stage of development. Attracting BO entrepreneurs into the Hungarian sandbox is the key to fully leveraging the PO heavy lifting to date...
This is so exciting! Thank you for sharing the story in France inspired by The Benedict Option. I have to go there someday. France has a very special place in my heart because it was in Sacre Couer the Holy Spirit opened my heart and called me into the Catholic Church. I grew up Church of Christ in Arkansas and was very much lower middle class and the last place I ever expected to ever actually get to be standing one day would be in a church in Paris. And the very last thing I ever expected to be doing was weeping there after knowing the Lord had called me to become Catholic after walking in strictly as a somewhat anti-Catholic tourist and not even understanding a word that was being said.
Beautiful.
Thank you for this. With the news about the bishops inviting a schism in Germany, France Belgium, this is welcomed. Can’t wait to share.