The Bearable Balance of Discipleship: A review of Rebecca Reynolds’s Courage, Dear Heart

Among the complaints made about Jane Austen’s novels is that her characters’ romances are too rational. Rather than getting swept away by whirlwinds of emotion, they take time to evaluate character, discuss tastes, consider family situations, observe good manners, even check incomes.

But dozens of Austen scenes, and several whole Austen plotlines, demonstrate that neither she nor her novels suffered from hyper-cerebral insensibility. One of the small examples is an exchange in Pride and Prejudice where Caroline Bingley says a ball would be “much more rational if conversation instead of dancing made the order of the day.”

“Much more rational, I dare say,” answers her brother Charles, “but not nearly so much like a ball.”

At the heart of Christian discipleship stands a twofold command, not new in the days of Jesus of Nazareth but made new by him: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and your neighbor as yourself. The command does not admit an ounce of Caroline Bingley’s reductionism: it demands vigorous love for neighbors we have seen as well as for God whom we have not; and it requires full spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and bodily engagement.

The great virtue of Rebecca Reynolds’s Courage, Dear Heart is its vigor and vigilance in maintaining this balance and wholeness — its stern refusal to sever any of the virtues from the others and let it run wild at the other virtues’ expense. In these pages (sometimes on a single page) the reader encounters deep feeling and lucid analysis, irresistible tenderness and uncompromising moral judgment. The book isn’t so much an exposition of the wholeness of Christian life as an enactment of it, and an invitation to the reader to participate in it. And when we glimpse the beauty in the book’s pages the invitation is a relief. For we grow tired of virtues swollen to madness in isolation or atrophied through neglect, sick from infidelities, numb from hearing trials answered with trite words, weary of finding the dozens of ways to crash the bicycle or run it into the ditch. Riding, on the other hand — maintaining forward momentum and balance even when the going is strenuous or we have to steer around or surmount obstacles — is bearable.

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Gunking it up as few gunks can

Michael Wear’s Reclaiming Hope is a fascinating read — in large part because the author is one of the few surviving members of the Obama 2008 campaign. Not that many of the other members have died, of course, but the vast majority either (a) revealed subsequently that they had never believed the unifying, third-way rhetoric that featured in the famous 2004 DNC Convention speech and the Obama 2008 campaign, or (b) ceased to believe it. Michael Wear is a true believer, and the best kind of true believer: a chastened one. He can see expedient shifts, cynicism, and outright treachery, and still believe.

One of Mr. Wear’s most helpful statements in the book, about the contrast between a healthy political party and an unhealthy one, is badly needed today: a healthy party seeks converts, while an unhealthy one hunts heretics. And heresy-hunting — which gunks up political discourse as few gunks can — is now a thoroughly bipartisan phenomenon.

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The Benedict Option and its Critics (part II): Make Love, not (Culture) War

Having dispensed yesterday with the idea that Donald Trump’s election made The Benedict Option moot, I turn in this post to the book’s actual content.

The Benedict Option addresses how American Christians should face two pressing challenges today. The first challenge is external hostility toward traditionalist Christians and Christian institutions. This hostility has burrowed into powerful institutions in business, education, media, entertainment, politics, and law. Once upon a time, upon lands not far away, the Christian strategy for dealing with this hostility was a national culture war, waged chiefly through the Republican Party and an assortment of national political and legal organizations. The Benedict Option‘s assessment of the culture war’s outcome is simple: Christians lost. It’s time to move on from the business of trying to gain the world — because it’s futile, and because the consuming intensity of national culture war campaign has for too long distracted us from cultivating our own souls, homes, churches, personal relationships, and local organizations.

Which leads to the second challenge facing American Christians addressed in The Benedict Option: internal rot in teaching and practice. That Mr. Dreher recognizes this as the graver threat is evident by the relative space he devotes to it. In doctrine, too many Christians and churches are given to a watery deism that holds that God wants us to be good and to be happy — with the definitions of “good” and “happy” left vague enough to be filled in with definitions from the broader culture. As far as the churches’ practice, too often their members are given to the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, and pride in possessions, rather than to the application, adornment, and spread of the Christian Gospel. Where The Benedict Option really comes into its own is in its proposals for how American Christians should act to clear the rot out of their houses and replace it with sound, firm timber.(1)

In taking on the American churches’ internal problem, The Benedict Option is consistently practical. The book’s emphasis on consistent, ordered, local practices is characteristically Benedictine. The prescribed practices require discipline and re-orientation toward more uniquely Christian goals, but they are within the layperson’s reach. In this, the spirit of The Benedict Option very much aligns with what Fr. Robert Hart wrote of the Anglican Common Prayer tradition:

The average working man or woman, or the average child in school or young person in college, can read daily Morning Prayer and daily Evening Prayer and at least keep up with the schedule of scripture reading. It is true that the Prayer Book contains services for the Church, sacramental rites for Baptism, for Confirmation, for marriage, and the Ordinal added in 1550. It contains a funeral rite. Yes, the book is the book for all public services. But, it is more than that. It is also a simplified Benedictine Rule for the common man (emphasis added), and this is the tradition of English prayer that has been made available to everyone through the Anglican Common Prayer tradition.

The Benedict Option is not itself “a simplified Benedictine Rule for the common man,” (2) but it is an earnest exhortation to Christians and churches to adopt and practice such a Rule, and a collection of practical proposals for how to make it happen. Fittingly, the book (mostly) arranges these around the same principles that appear in St. Benedict’s Rule: ordered prayer, work (especially labor with hands), community, stability (i.e. commitment to one community), and hospitality to outsiders (“let everyone that comes be received as Christ”). In these proposals and principles, one can see reflected the practice of the Jerusalem Church in the Book of Acts — “they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” — and the fulfillment of Jesus’s Great Commandment.

The end of The Benedict Option‘s proposals, including the proposed “strategic withdrawal from public life,” is focus upon forming a culture whose members may better love God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength, and their neighbors as their selves. As in the first century, however, such ends, and the means prescribed for achieving them, are apt to arouse critics. The next post will address them.

 

Notes:

(1) For a helpful index of The Benedict Option‘s practical propositions, see Brad Littlejohn’s summary and collection here.

(2) The reason The Benedict Option couldn’t itself be a Rule: the book is intentionally ecumenical in the sense that it’s addressed to all “small-o orthodox” Christians — Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant. Each of those traditions has distinct resources for practicing some form of the Benedict Option, but the forms that may grow in each branch of the Church will look quite different.

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