Last year I had some rambling words about the Benedict Option and Dominican Option in the Church. I've been thinking about it some more lately and I'm starting to tilt a bit towards the Benedict Option. Here are my reasons.
1) There needs to be a community to maintain tradition. In the light of history, this is obvious. Like-minded people live together. Read your Old Testament. When the Assyrians and Babylonians conquered the Jewish states, the first thing they did was scatter the Jews. In the case of the Assyrians, they scattered them so effectively that eventually the Israelites were assimilated out of existence. In the case of the Babylonians, the Jews were apparently able to maintain enough cohesion to keep their identity, but they also were "only" in exile for a generation before a more tolerant regime took over.
The Jews were enslaved in Egypt for a long time, but lived in a tight community and were able to maintain at least a semblance of identity. When Moses showed up, they needed to be re-instructed in the faith and were in a sad shape. Hundreds of years of slavery will do that to a people. But what if they didn't live in a community? What if they were broken up and scattered across the Egyptian kingdom? Surely they wouldn't have even remembered they were Jews.
Today the faithful find themselves atomized. After eight years of Barack Obama, I think it's safe to say that the United States is a secular post-Christian country. Faithful Christians find themselves surrounded by nominal Christians, post-Christians, atheists, agnostics, Nones, do-it-yourself spiritualists, and increasingly Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims. And with every generation, the culture waters down the convictions of the faithful even more. The faithful are being assimilated out of existence.
2) The era of rational dialog is over. Jonathan Swift famously said "It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into." We've seen over and over again the irrational protests sweeping the universities, Occupy Wall Street, protests over perceived racism, sexism, "privilege" of every sort. These people cannot be reasoned with. Even the thought of a conservative speaker on campus is enough to send people to their safe space. If they won't even let the conservative talk, how is the conservative going to persuade anyone?
We are not dealing with ideas or philosophies that are arrived at by logic, trial and error, open discussion of experience with how said ideas have been implemented in the past. We're dealing with emotional, irrational outbursts based on tribalism and populism ("Our people are great! You people suck!") You can't break that with Aristotle or Aquinas. You can't break it at all. You just have to wait for the storm to blow over.
And if you do try to break through with your morality based on your traditions, you will do it alone. None of the major political parties will stand up to the LGBT community. None will take meaningful steps to reduce abortion. No significant network on TV will promote virtue. Conservative talk show hosts on the radio are typically on their 2nd or 3rd wives and are neutral at best towards gay marriage.
No help is coming from within the Church, either. The Catholic Bishops in the US are famously squeamish about cultural issues. And when they do pull their cumberbunds up to give a talk on social issues, they cloak them behind morally neutral language. We are told to speak of "religious liberty" when speaking about Church entities being forced to provide contraception. But ... why is contraception coverage a violation of religious liberty? Does that mean the Church thinks contraception is a sin? You'd never know, listening to our leaders, who strenuously avoid the "s" word. That may be a good legal strategy, but it doesn't help the faithful if morality is ignored. It just makes the Church look legalistic -- possibly even narrow and rigid and pharisaical -- because it focuses on legality instead of morality. Why not focus on both?
I have other reasons, but they are subcategories of the two above. Against those problems I offer a number of benefits of a close community of faithful.
1) Mutual reinforcement. We all go through cycles of optimism and pessimism. Getting people together lets the people in their optimist phase cheer up those in their pessimist phase.
2) Respectful engagement. Since we all go through cycles of optimism and pessimism, having everyone together lets the pessimists bring some realism to the optimist point of view. But beyond some vague mutual enrichment, it enables people who are on the same side to disagree with each other. You can speak your mind among friends. To borrow a spoiled phrase from the liberals, it's a "safe space". I attend meetings of the Readers of First Things, and that's the experience. The discussions are intense, but we're all on the same side, so at the end of the evening, we're still friends and there are no hard feelings.
So what do to? In my previous post, I linked to a talk by Father Eric Bergman where he advocates physically moving close to the parish. Of course, you'll have to have the rest of the parishioners do the same. But I would amend that. In the year since I wrote that post I've come around to the idea of parish shopping. If the primary interaction you get with your parish priest is a seven to ten minute homily once per week, then it had better be a good one, or at least not a bad one. I mentioned that the faithful today are atomized, surrounded by a lot of lukewarm Christians and non-Christians. Some of them will be in your parish, which is as it should be: they are being saved just like you. But if one of them is your parish priest or music director or other minister that can make your life miserable, then that's not the community you should be in. Don't waste your time there. It's too dangerous to your soul.
In the extreme case you might have to change dioceses, if one of the lukewarm types is your bishop.
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