Now There's a Man

I just read the chapter in David Brooks's The Road to Character on George C. Marshall, the ubiquitous mid-twentieth century general, chief of staff, secretary of state, diplomat and Red Cross president. Marshall is best known for his work as Roosevelt's, and then Truman's, chief of staff during the Second World War. That's about all I knew; that and the work of the Marshall Plan in reshaping Europe after the war's conclusion.

Each of Brooks's chapters focuses on a different virtue on the road to character. Marshall's virtue was self-mastery. And, boy, was he good at it. One of the more inspiring examples of this came when he refused to ask for control of the Operation Overlord (D-Day) plan when everyone on both sides of the Atlantic assumed command would be his. It is clear that he could have had it if he wished, and he wished, but he refused to advocate for himself. He wanted Roosevelt to do what he felt he needed to do and not bend to popular support or a feeling of indebtedness to Marshall. Freed by Marshall's reticence, Roosevelt tapped Dwight Eisenhower for command of Overlord. 

This same reticence that prevented Marshall from sounding his own drum in an epochal military event colored his life. No biographer has been able to find evidence of major moral failure throughout his life. An unexceptional student, Marshall worked hard to control what he could control. What he could control was how he carried himself. So he worked and mastered the art of carrying himself with dignity and gravity. More than fifty years after his death, he is still an exemplar of these qualities. 

After I finished reading--the last anecdote from Brooks is about Marshall's refusal of a state funeral; he was buried with only close friends and family in attendance, with the standard Prayer Book funeral service, and no eulogy--I put the book down and muttered under my breath, "Now there's a man."

This is not a feeling I get a lot these days, and most particularly not from myself. I can think of one or two people in my life that I would say something like this about. We don't cultivate this type of manhood in our culture today. To be sure, large parts of our culture are busy denying manhood at all as some sort of virtuous undertaking. We are men without chests in our culture. Men without backbones. Men without self-control. 

Self-mastery, self-control. We don't think of these things very often. And if we do we tend to atomize them. A pastor might show great self-control in reading Scripture, but he eats whatever he wants. An athlete might show great control in diet and training, but he gives vent to anger or has no control of his sexual urges. We need to return to thinking about these things comprehensively. Especially as Christians. The fruit of the spirit includes self-control. God has given us a spirit of power and love and self-control. We resist Satan if we practice self-control. These things are all littered through the New Testament. 

I wonder what would happen if we took this more seriously. If we stopped forgiving ourselves for our infractions and took with grave solemnity the injunction to control ourselves. I imagine more of us would elicit the response, "Now there's a man." And in a world without men that makes for a good testimony.  

A Good Word on Worship

"We live in what one writer has called the 'age of sensation.' We think that if we don't feel something there can be no authenticity in doing it. But the wisdom of God says something different: that we can act ourselves into a new way of feeling much quicker than we can feel ourselves into a new way of acting. Worship is an act that develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God that is expressed in an act of worship. When we obey the command to praise God in worship, our deep, essential need to be in relationship with God is nurtured."

Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction

The U-Curve or Why You Need Failure

In the introduction to The Road to Character, Brooks notes that the lives of each of the people he profiles within the book have a similar trajectory. He calls it the U-Curve. He writes, "They had to go down to go up. They had to descend into the valley of humility to climb to the heights of character." 

True character development seems impossible without this valley of humility. Brooks quotes Kierkegaard: "Only the one who descends into the underworld rescues the beloved." The self-emptying that takes place in the valley enables us to be of use when we climb back out, to rescue the beloved. Brooks calls this process "quieting the self." I like that metaphor. We become less through humility and then are able to exemplify the virtues only available through humility. We block out the internal noise telling us that we're great or this suffering isn't worth it or no one understands us or whatever junk is being piped into our brains and we are finally free to experience calm and tranquility. Moreover, we are finally free to actually provide purposeful aid to those around us who suffer and need to learn how to suffer. Tim Keller, in Counterfeit Gods, asserts that "people who have never suffered in life have less empathy for others, little knowledge of their own shortcomings and limitations, no endurance in the face of hardship, and unrealistic expectations for life." These valleys of humility are schools for obedience to God and usefulness to men. 

Brooks argues, and I mostly agree here, that we've "left this moral tradition behind. Over the last several decades, we've lost this language, this way of organizing life. We're not bad. But we're morally inarticulate. We're not more selfish or venal than people in other times, but we've lost the understanding of how character is built." I would quibble with the claim that "we're not bad." We are. We're awful. But I do think he is right that for most of us this transition has been unintentional or unwitting. We did not intend to create a culture that fears precisely the valleys of humility that allow us to be men and women of deep character. We did not intend to make it the goal of our lives to obviate suffering. We did not intend to create a culture of narcissistic, spoiled know-nothings. But, here we are.

A few months ago I wrote that one of my goals for the new year was to fail more. This is what I mean. I want to experience these valleys and embrace them. Not because they are pleasant or easy, but because they are not. I took a group of kids backpacking a couple of weeks ago. It is always illuminating to me to put kids in that position and see how they do. You can tell the ones who have experienced suffering and embraced it and those who shy away every time something gets difficult. 

We confuse ourselves easily on this score, too. I was talking with one of the kids who embraced suffering on the trip about this and we decided that there is a basic deceit at work in these situations: the people at the back of the pack are convinced that they are suffering more than the people at the front. This might be true, but it is not logically necessary. Take me, a 32 year-old suburban dad who has done virtually no cardio for the past eight months due to plantar fasciitis. Yet, I was slaying those kids who work out three hours a day. I don't say this to toot my own horn, but to point out that the ability to suffer can make up for all other sorts of defects. I am overweight and out-of-shape, but I don't mind the feeling of screaming lungs and burning quads. I like it, actually. It invigorates me and makes me feel alive.

And I know this because I have trained myself to know it. I have walked into those physical valleys time and again and kept going. There is something wonderfully democratic about this. Are there variances in talent? Of course. But, for those willing to put their heads down, grit their teeth, and quiet the self, a lot of ground can be made up. Our world tells us we can shortcut the valley and go straight to the mountaintop. Our world is a liar.

A Poem for Easter

Here is the poem I have kept coming back to during this Lenten season. This is John Updike's poem, "Seven Stanzas at Easter." I will avoid the temptation to perform a line-by-line analysis of the poem (you're welcome). In lieu of that, I will simply make some larger comments and mostly trust the poem to speak for itself. So, here it is.

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.

The subordinating conjunction "if" in line one might cause us to think that Updike is expressing doubt here about the reality of the resurrection. I don't think he is. I am basing that on the rest of the poem, which doesn't really strike me as doubtful in tone. After that, Updike focuses on the utter physicality of the resurrection, a physicality we can lose sight of all too often. This is a problem, I think, for any person or culture saturated in Christian imagery. We are so used to seeing mangers and crosses that the monstrosity of the incarnation and resurrection eludes us. Updike will have none of that. At the resurrection a real body was reanimated, molecules reknitted, amino acids rekindled, the strength of that pierced heart regathered. 

Updike wrote this poem when he was younger to be read during his church service at Easter. Considering this audience, it is clear that he is addressing believers here. Believers for whom, perhaps, the stark reality of the resurrection has turned into a cold fact, even a metaphor, as he says in the fourth stanza. I do this. I don't think I square with the reality of the faith very often. Not really. Not deeply. Every week I repeat the words of the creed and declare my belief in the hard physicality of the resurrection. Every night when I tuck my kids into bed I end our prayer telling our Lord that we long for his return and his eternal kingship over the earth. 

But I still miss it. I still twist it in order to suit my own sense of beauty. I still escape the event through transcendence, not through denial. I make it esoteric, spiritual, almost gnostic. And I avoid that rock hard reality of the "monstrous" nature of a man coming back from the dead.

Updike's warning in the final stanza alludes to Christ's eventual return. I was talking with one of my classes last week about end times' prophecy. They are not growing up in the heyday of Left Behind nonsense like I did, but they are growing up still with people trying to make everything apocalyptic. We talked, though, about how in the teachings of Jesus the whole point is that we don't know and can't know when this will happen. He tells us that he doesn't even know. His warnings are consistently that we be prepared at all times because we do not and cannot know. We must be vigilant, lest he returns and finds us unprepared. For Updike here, the concern is that those of us who considered ourselves faithful (another theme of Christ's) will ultimately be embarrassed when we realize how much we have short-sold the miracle at the center of our faith. 

This Easter my prayer is that the concrete reality of the event would not elude us. Let us, together, walk through the door.

A Poem for Holy Saturday

Holy Saturday is a strange day in the church calendar. There is really no Scripture that applies; the Gospels are silent on this day. It was a day of rest, a day of fasting, a day of remembrance. And so it should be. Christian tradition says that Jesus descended into hell on this day, when Christ victorious emptied hell of those who had been waiting salvation. Whatever you believe about this day, it is one that must be approached soberly. We are not yet at the triumphalism of Easter. The image most indelible for me on this day is that of the tomb. The real, rock structure that housed the murdered God. Today's poem is George Herbert's "Sepulchre." 

O Blessed bodie!  Whither art thou thrown?
No lodging for thee, but a cold hard stone?
So many hearts on earth, and yet not one
                                                Receive thee?

Sure there is room within our hearts good store;
For they can lodge transgressions by the score:
Thousands of toyes dwell there, yet out of doore
                                                They leave thee.

But that which shews them large, shews them unfit.
What ever sinne did this pure rock commit,
Which holds thee now?  Who hath indited it
                                                Of murder?

Where our hard hearts have took up stones to braine thee,
And missing this, most falsly did arraigne thee;
Onely these stones in quiet entertain thee,
                                                And order.

And as of old the Law by heav’nly art
Was writ in stone; so thou, which also art
The letter of the word, find’st no fit heart 
                                                To hold thee.

Yet do we still persist as we began,
And so should perish, but that nothing can, 
Though it be cold, hard, foul, from loving man
                                                Withhold thee.

Again, I will keep the commentary brief and mostly trust the poem to speak for itself. The poem I have chosen for tomorrow's Easter post is similar to this in its focus on the hard physicality of the event. Herbert is astonished here at the ease with which we discarded Christ, throwing him into a "cold hard stone." Our hearts are, too, like the stone that entombed our murdered Lord. The miraculous fact, though, is that in the same way the cold hard stone in which Christ was laid and which was rolled across the entrance to his tomb proved incapable of preventing his triumph over death, so our own hard hearts are capable of softening. Not because we are good, but because nothing can withhold the love of Christ from turning the heart of stone into a heart of flesh. 

As we sit in the darkness and the waiting of this day, let's not miss this fact. The tomb was real, the rock was heavy and immovable, yet it rolled away at the merest whisper of the being who spoke it into existence. It recognized his voice. May we hear his voice as well. May the heavy and immovable rock covering our hearts be moved aside at a glance.

A Poem for Good Friday

In order to honor Easter weekend, I though it would be good to have a poem each day for Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. Today's poem is John Donne's "Good Friday, 1613: Riding Westward." I offer it with (blessedly) little commentary.

Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this, 

The intelligence that moves, devotion is, 

And as the other Spheares, by being growne 

Subject to forraigne motion, lose their owne, 

And being by others hurried every day, 

Scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey: 

Pleasure or businesse, so, our Soules admit 

For their first mover, and are whirld by it. 

Hence is't, that I am carryed towards the West 

This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East. 

There I should see a Sunne, by rising set, 

And by that setting endlesse day beget; 

But that Christ on this Crosse, did rise and fall, 

Sinne had eternally benighted all. 

Yet dare I'almost be glad, I do not see 

That spectacle of too much weight for mee. 

Who sees Gods face, that is selfe life, must dye; 

What a death were it then to see God dye? 

It made his owne Lieutenant Nature shrinke, 

It made his footstoole crack, and the Sunne winke. 

Could I behold those hands which span the Poles, 

And tune all spheares at once peirc'd with those holes? 

Could I behold that endlesse height which is 

Zenith to us, and our Antipodes, 

Humbled below us? or that blood which is 

The seat of all our Soules, if not of his, 

Made durt of dust, or that flesh which was worne 

By God, for his apparell, rag'd, and torne? 

If on these things I durst not looke, durst I 

Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye, 

Who was Gods partner here, and furnish'd thus 

Halfe of that Sacrifice, which ransom'd us? 

Though these things, as I ride, be from mine eye, 

They'are present yet unto my memory, 

For that looks towards them; and thou look'st towards mee, 

O Saviour, as thou hang'st upon the tree; 

I turne my backe to thee, but to receive 

Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave. 

O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee, 

Burne off my rusts, and my deformity, 

Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace, 

That thou may'st know mee, and I'll turne my face. 

The conceit at the poem's beginning (and Donne was all about poetic conceits) is that he is like a heavenly body that is out of sync with the motion it should follow, being instead "subject to foreign motions." So, too, Donne, whose thoughts are focused to the east (presumably Jerusalem and the site of the crucifixion) is riding west and away from the place his motions ought to take him. He then moves into a paradox of the place of the sun's rising being linked to Christ's rising and falling and the now "endless day" that we get to live through on the other side of the cross. 

One of my problems with Donne as a poet is that he often feels cold to me. It is all very well and good, immensely talented poetically speaking, but his poetry often feels less like an expression of deep sentiment and more like a guy good at faking it and being awesome. The initial conceit and the paradox of the rising and falling fit into that for me. The poem shifts once Donne moves beyond this and begins reflecting on what it must have been to see God die. The two best lines in the poem, per my preference, are "Who sees God's face, that is self life, must die; / What a death were it then to see God die?". There is no relief for the eye in beholding this scene of death and therefore the poet looks away. The rest of the poem focuses on this averted gaze. 

Donne's characteristic strong language returns in the final ten lines as the poet demands God's overwhelming intervention in order that he can turn back and view Christ. Donne turns his back to "receive corrections," to be whipped. He wants to be worthy of God's chastisement, to be burned of his dross, to have his deformed image restored to its intended perfection, and be able to turn and face his Savior. Donne is utterly aware that this is all a matter of grace. It is grace, after all, to receive discipline from the Lord (Hebrews 12:4-12). 

It is a beautiful poem that finds its heart as it goes on. I couldn't help but thinking of the Mel Gibson movie The Passion of the Christ as I read it this year. The desire to look away. Part of this impulse is obviously due to the fact that the act of crucifixion is revolting and horrific to behold. But part of the impulse stems from the fact of our complicity in this act. We look away because our own impurity is exposed. And since to look on and believe in the Savior as he is lifted up is to be saved, so by grace we need to be cleansed in order to turn back our ashamed eyes and gaze upon our Savior.

Have a blessed Good Friday.

Resume vs Eulogy Virtues

We are redesigning some of the curriculum for our junior level English class at my school. One component that we are going to add next year is an independent reading book that the students will work through mostly outside of class time and then write about and present to the class on. As such, I have been working through some popular-level nonfiction choices that I thought might be enriching for the students. One such book is David Brooks's The Road to Character. Brooks is the right-leaning pundit who writes a bi-weekly column for The New York Times. I have benefited a lot from his work as an editorialist over the years, but this is the first time I have actually read one of his books.

The premise of this book is that there is a notable dearth of character in contemporary America. We are selfish, morally lazy, and egotistical. Part of the reason for this is the distinction between what can be called the resume virtues and the eulogy virtues. Our culture accommodates the resume virtues--the things that stand out while we apply for jobs--while it has seemingly little time (or notion of what to say, I would argue) about the deeper eulogy virtues. Brooks is not arguing that we should cast aside resume virtues entirely and withdraw from the world, but that we need to put these two competing poles of virtue back in tension with one another. The goal of the book, then, is to emphasize people throughout history who have excelled in the eulogy virtues to act as a counterweight to our near constant glorification of the resume set. 

Brooks's introduction fleshes out what the distinction between these two ideas of virtue looks like: in large part it seems to boil down to humility. One statistic is worth noting here. In 1950, responding to a Gallup poll that asked high school seniors "if they considered themselves to be a very important person," 12 percent of the survey population responded in the affirmative. In 2005, that number was 80 percent. This lack of humility manifests itself in the utter narcissism of our culture. Brooks notes that out individual greatness is hammered home into young people through every medium available: television, movies, teachers, parents, broader cultural authorities. 

Brooks argues that this turn toward narcissism has prevented us from cultivating the eulogy virtues that our culture so desperately lacks. It prevents this cultivation by convincing us that there is really nothing wrong with us in the first place that requires cultivation to fix. In order to put ourselves on the path of eulogy virtue development, we need to willingly engage in moral struggle and often harsh self-reflection. Brooks quotes the British writer Henry Carlie on the subject: "If we acknowledge that our inclination to sin is part of our natures, and that we will never wholly eradicate it, there is at least something for us to do in our lives that will not in the end seem just futile and absurd." There is a definite paradox lurking in that comment. Our futile and absurd battle over ineradicable sin prevents our lives from being futile and absurd. 

Resume virtues can be accomplished; eulogy virtues cannot be accomplished in the same way. We can grow in humility, self-sacrifice, love, obedience, etc. but our grasp of such things is always tenuous, always subject to change and deterioration if we slacken our pursuit. Resume virtues are easier, in a very real sense. Eulogy virtues demand our whole self. I think it is fairly evident at this point which path conforms most to the Christian faith. As an educator, it is my prayer that I train students to desire, pursue, and fix their eyes upon the resume virtues. In our credentialing culture, we need people who cultivate the inner self. 

Literary Humility

One of the harder things about trying to be a writer is that so often it seems like I am shouting into a void. Who actually reads this thing? This site is starting to get quite a bit of traffic, but for all I know it's a bunch of Russian hackers. Or, even think of something like the recent publication of Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option. The book seems like it's making quite the stir--and for a religious nonfiction book, I think it is--but I imagine I could walk into the bar down the street from my house and no one inside would have heard of the book, the author, or the controversy swirling around it. Even a work that is in the top ten of the New York Times bestseller list is barely going to make a splash outside of the small niche of people interested in such things. Which is kind of bleak, especially for someone like me who will likely never be read much outside of a loving circle of friends and family.

But, worry not, modern writers. This problem is fairly old. I'm reading The Scarlet Letter which I haven't read since I was a junior in high school (which, let's be honest, likely means that I've never read it). The opening chapter, I guess you'd call it, is autobiographical, focusing on a period in Hawthorne's life when he worked as the chief officer at a customs house in Salem, Massachusetts. He had achieved some degree of literary merit before his employment there, mostly riding the coattails of the transcendentalists from what I can tell, but no one in his sphere of influence at the Customs House knew the first thing about his literary career or gave one fig about it if they did know.

Hawthorne took this as an encouragement to humility, which it definitely is. He writes:

It is a good lesson--though it may often be a hard one--for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world's dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieve, and all he aims at.

As dour as that can seem, I think it is a good warning to writers to not overestimate our influence. This doesn't mean that writers should stop writing, or that the work is ultimately meaningless. Hawthorne has been dead for a century and a half and he's still outselling most contemporary novelists, after all. But it is proper to recognize that for the vast majority of people the act of writing is superfluous to a meaningful engagement with the world. In the invocation to Book VII of Paradise Lost, Milton prays that his work would "fit audience find, though few." This is the prayer, I think, for every writer. That we find the audience that is ready and open to what we have to say. The humility that inheres in the recognition that such a group is likely small is good for one who sets pen to paper or fingers to keys.

I am by no means a Stoic when it comes to life, but I do appreciate their insights on many things. Epictetus once wrote that "to live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals, that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him." Equanimity is a valuable goal for all people, but maybe especially important for the one who, in the words of the philosopher, lives in the presence of great truths and eternal laws. 

Such a rarefied experience of life can easily lead to pomposity, but if we remember that very few people actually give a crap about what we're doing we can be brought back to a level of humility that might actually make us useful both to the people who don't give a crap about us and the very small number that do.

Benedict Option 3: Should Christians Opt Out of Public Education?

The chapter in The Benedict Option on education ("Education as Christian Formation") is certain to elicit negative reaction. Indeed, at times it almost seems calibrated to do so. Dreher is here inclined to make absolutizing statements that alienate an audience. 

Here is one: "Because public education in America is neither rightly ordered, nor religiously informed, nor able to form an imagination devoted to Western civilization, it is time for all Christians to pull their children out of the public school system." Apparently you can take your nuance and shove it. And I say this is as one who does not necessarily disagree with Dreher on this point. We, personally, have chosen to opt out of the very good public school system in our neighborhood in favor of home education. I think that most public schools in our country are a flaming pile of garbage. However, I do not think we are at the place where all Christians everywhere need to abandon the system. Indeed, given that 40% of public school teachers are Christian and that your tax money is being funneled into these institutions whether you like it or not, such a wholesale abandonment does not seem to be in the spirit of charity or integrity. Also, I don't know that the notion that the public school system is somehow unredeemable is proven. Dreher is unfortunately data-deficient in this chapter. Such a total claim requires more than anecdote for justification.

But maybe such an absolutist claim is required to drive an audience to think. Here are some questions I am asking: 

• What are the teleological values of the public school system and do they conform to the faith I am trying to form within my children? And, maybe as importantly, do we even know?
• What is the nature of the influence of peers and the social values of the school on children? How do you measure such a thing? Formation is a long-term game; not something as simple as whether or not they are smoking behind the gym.
• Can you count on the few hours you get with them in the evening to act as an antidote to the secularizing impulse of public education? 
• Are they actually learning anything in that building worthwhile or is this more functionally a daycare facility than a place of education? This is a big question.
• Are kids really cut out to be mini-evangelists in the walls of their schools?

These are all questions we ought to ask. They are questions I struggle to answer in the public school system as it currently stands. So, I am going to lay out what I think on the issue with some Dreher sprinkled in.

In an earlier post on the book I noted that Dreher feels strongly that strict media avoidance is a two-pronged need: one, for content; the other for the dependence it provokes. I think the same principle applies to education. It is not merely the content of the public educational system that I object to (though I do object in large measure to the sequencing--kids love facts and memorization, but we run away from this--and basic utilitarianism of the whole endeavor--gotta compete with China! STEM, STEM, STEM), but the sort of dependence on government institutions and the farming out of education to the caprice of the government that is implicit in the system.

Still, I think this decision ought to be left to the judgment of discerning parents. And we ought to be free to disagree, and maybe we should try to do that with charity. Parents don't enroll their kids in Christian schools because they don't care about the lost; parents don't enroll their kids in public schools because they don't care about the spiritual formation of their children.

But I will say something in response to one of the critiques of Christian schools and homeschooling that I have heard in the past that Dreher addresses here: Some critics of home/private schooling say that it is necessary for Christian students to be embedded within these schools to act as salt and light. Here is Dreher's response:

As popular culture continues its downward slide, however, this rationale begins to sound like rationalization. It brings to mind a father who tosses his child into a whitewater river in hopes that she'll save another drowning child.

Your mileage may vary on the chosen metaphor, but I think his point is basically this: the system is so inimical to our values as believers we can hardly expect our kids to do more than simply survive the onslaught they face within that system. To expect them to subsequently act as church bait is naive. Especially given the poor job the church in general does at equipping young believers and training them in the faith. There are ways of having the same endgame of outreach, putting your children in sports or arts programs, that allow the level of meaningful interaction with peers and help you get to know other parents that don't involve giving your children over to the government for 40 hours per week.

In a following post on the same chapter I will address the issues confronting Christian schools.

Benedict Option, 2B: The Domestic Monastery & The Monastery Effect

My last post on what Dreher calls the Domestic Monastery of the home got me thinking about the Neil Postman book The Disappearance of Childhood that I read last fall. I actually emailed Dreher a passage from that book that he posted to his blog. It's buried deep in that post if you're interested. But I thought I would dust off Postman a bit to interact with Dreher here.

Dreher's central metaphor for the family is that we ought to function within our homes like little monasteries, with fathers as abbots and mothers as abbesses. The goal is to create a rule of life for our families similar to what exists within the walls of a monastery. I really like that metaphor as a way of thinking about passing down meaning and truth to my children. 

Postman's concerns are not as religiously motivated as Dreher's own, but the result of each man's diagnosis of culture is remarkably similar. Postman's concern is that the ideal of childhood, created by the inception of mass literacy, is being steadily and perhaps irreversibly denuded by our technopoly. In his concluding chapter, Postman floats a hypothetical question: Is the individual able to resist the techification of all things. His response is beautifully articulated and very Benedict-y.

The answer to this, in my opinion, is "No." But, as with all resistance, there is a price to pay. Specifically, resistance entails conceiving of parenting as an act of rebellion against American culture. For example, for parents merely to remain married is itself an act of disobedience and an insult to the spirit of a throwaway culture in which continuity has little value. It is also at least ninety percent un-American to remain in close proximity to one's extended family so that children can experience, daily, the meaning of kinship and the value of deference and responsibility to elders. Similarly, to insist that one's children learn the discipline of delayed gratification, or modesty in sexuality, or self-restraint in manners, language, and style is to place oneself in opposition to almost every social trend. Even further, to ensure that one's children work hard at becoming literate is extraordinarily time-consuming and even expensive. But most rebellious of all is the attempt to control the media's access to one's children. There are, in fact, two ways to do this. The first is to limit the amount of exposure children have to media. The second is to monitor carefully what they are exposed to, and to provide them with a continuously running critique of the themes and values of the media's content. Both are very difficult to do and require a level of attention that most parents are not prepared to give to child-rearing.  

Nonetheless, there are parents who are committed to doing all of these things, who are in effect defying the directives of their culture. Such parents are not only helping their children to have a childhood but are, at the same time, creating a sort of intellectual elite. Certainly in the short run the children who grow up in such homes will, as adults, be much favored by business, the professions, and the media themselves. What can we say of the long run? Only this: Those parents who resist the spirit of the age will contribute to what might be called the Monastery Effect, for they will help to keep alive a humane tradition. It is not conceivable that our culture will forget that it needs children. But it is halfway toward forgetting that children need childhood. Those who insist on remembering shall perform a noble service.

I concluded my post last fall by saying the following in response (sorry to quote myself; that seems weird): 

This is the solution Postman denied in the introduction he would give. And the solution must begin at the individual level, expand to communities of faith who unite together to maintain and reclaim what is humane in our tradition, and only then can it ever expand to enact mass change. All other paths of resistance are Luddites smashing the machines. That will not work as long as the majority love the machines. We have to restore a vision of the world that makes the machines superfluous. That will be extremely difficult. But if we value not only our children but childhood itself we will put our hand to the plow. 

This, I take it, is the goal of the Benedict Option. Not to fully extricate ourselves from modernity, but to resist its dehumanizing impulses for the good of modernity. To help people see beyond the immediate and the pleasurable and find joy. To drink from the well that quenches our thirst eternally. It is a large and monumental task. But the evangelization of the world has always been the mission of the church. And I don't think it was ever meant to be easy.

Benedict Option, 2: A Domestic Monastery

Chapter 6 of Dreher's book is called "The Idea of a Christian Village." Here Dreher mostly looks beyond the walls of the church to the type of Christian community necessary to foster the type of spiritual formation we long both for our lives and the lives of our children. 

He begins in an interesting, and perhaps counterintuitive, place: the family. One of the faults of conservative evangelicalism, at least as I've seen it, is the often insular view of the family we are tempted to hold. I've known parents who won't let their kids play a sport because they are concerned about allowing any other influencer into their children's lives. And while a myopic view of formation as family alone is wrong, it is undeniable that the family is of monumental importance for shaping the life of everyone in what Edmund Burke called the "little platoons." Therefore, it is an ultimately appropriate place to begin the chapter. Our greater life in the broader Christian community will emanate out from the life we live in our homes.

Here is how the section of the chapter on family, "Turn Your Home into a Domestic Monastery," begins: 

Just as the monastery's life is oriented toward God, so must the family home be. Every Christian family likes to think they put God first, but this is not always how we live. (I plead guilty.) If we are the abbot and abbess of our domestic monastery, we will see to it that our family's life is structured in such a way as to make the mission of knowing and serving God clear to all its members.

The negation at the beginning is important. Most Christian families would say that "God comes first in this family," but when this claim is weighed in the scales it is often found wanting. We just need to acknowledge this. Such a claim is not something confirmed verbally but something borne out in our practices in the world and within our home. Are we bearing this out in the way we orient our home life? 

But the affirmation is even more important: we are the abbots and abbesses of our houses. This is an ultimately positive view of what goes on within the home. In this role it is incumbent upon us to structure the lives of our families in a way that makes our familial mission clear. This instantly reminded me of Martin Luther's famous "priesthood of all believers" claim. As parents we are not merely passive vehicles in the formation of our children, but clergymen and women within our homes. How differently such a vision would shape our lives together. The practical applications abound. I will end with the one given by Dreher.  

Dreher's concluding paragraph for this short section keeps the metaphor of the home-as-monastery intact. He advises: 

A monastery keeps outside its walls people and things that are inimical to its purpose, which is to form its members in Christ. For families, this means strictly limiting media, especially television and online media, both to keep unsuitable content out and to prevent dependence on electronic media. (emphasis mine)

I love the double edge of Dreher's reasoning: we don't limit media consumption simply because there is unsuitable content involved. This as a sole standard lets parents off the hook. And I often hear modest content used as justification. "Well, they're not watching Game of Thrones so it's fine. This show is about pirates, and stuff. It's a cartoon, chill out. Daddy needs some me-time." However, according to Dreher we don't merely limit for considerations of content; we also limit our media consumption because we want to prevent dependence on electronic media. This is every bit as important to the actual content of what we watch or allow our children to watch.

Sometimes I feel like I bash on media and technology too often. I know my students get tired of hearing it from me. But then I think about how deeply addictive and worldview shaping my average student's consumption of media is and I just stop caring. The media we consume shapes us. The media we implicitly or explicitly endorse within our homes shapes our children. That's the content angle. But the way we lean on media to provide a break or quiet the kids down for a few minutes shows our dependence on a very capricious god. Which might in the end be an even bigger problem. Every time we lazy out and hand over the iPad or let Netflix cycle through episodes while we do our own thing we are willfully abdicating our influence over our children. We are training them to go to the glowing screen for relief and joy. We are selling out the job we've been given for 22 minutes of free time (that, using myself as a case study, most of us squander). 

If we want our homes to be different, we need to conceive of our task in a different way.