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All-Nighter

I love to tell the Story ... but how?
Father Matthew, blessing the Mississippi River on Theophany (Photo by Rod Dreher)
Father Matthew, blessing the Mississippi River on Theophany (Photo by Rod Dreher)

Please forgive me for no posting this morning. I pulled an all-nighter, and very nearly finished the final chapter of the Benedict Option book. (That’s not as good as it seems; I have two more inside chapters to go.) Went to bed at 5 a.m., and was awakened just now by the oncoming train of a caffeine headache.

The first chapter of the book is a “Gathering Storm” introduction, laying out the problem. The final chapter of the book is a short recap of what has come before, but then one that explores the higher reasons for being a small-o orthodox Christian — what Chesterton would have called the romance of orthodoxy. If people come to the Benedict Option out of fear, that’s … well, that’s not necessarily wrong, because there is a lot to be worried about. But it’s not going to last if it’s not motivated above all by love. What I need to do in this chapter is convey a sense of the love of the historic faith, with the Christ of the Bible and the ages at its center.

The late film critic Roger Ebert held that the difficulty of writing a film review existed in inverse proportion to the quality of the film under review. The better the movie is, the harder it is to write a review of it. As a former professional film critic, I can tell you that that’s absolutely true. It’s easy to pick out what’s wrong with a film that fails, but one that is a true work of art defies easy description.

It’s that way for me in talking about my faith. Writing this final chapter has made me understand more deeply the point Pope Benedict made about the best arguments for Christianity being the art and the saints that come out of it — that is to say, the Beauty and the Goodness that bear witness to the Gospel Truth. Last night, thinking through all the ways God brought me to Himself by drawing my love towards Him, I couldn’t think of a single argument that was primary. It started with love: the love of things and people that captured the Light, and refracted it. That Light made it possible for me to grasp the arguments. But it was never about an argument. It was about seeing something there that was greater than myself, and wanting to know it, and coming to believe that that something was a Someone, and He was love itself.

This took years of slow growth, with many ups and downs and trials and tribulations, but it became my reality. I find that trying to explain why I’m a Christian is like trying to explain why I love my wife. I mean, I believe that Christianity is true, but that is only part of it.

I’m going to return to last night’s chapter this afternoon and try to finish it. When I finally crashed last night, I had fallen into telling stories of theophanies — moments when God broke into the world, and I knew I was in the presence of the sacred. Very few of them happened in church. In all those moments, I knew in my bones that I was in the presence of something realer than real, and that the only proper response was to say inside, My Lord and my God. 

That’s not a narrative that persuades others, but when I think that these events in my life are pages in a big book that tells the Story of the universe, from Creation to the End of All Things, and that they are pages in a book that includes Moses and the Exodus, David and Goliath, the Hebrew Prophets, the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Passion and Resurrection and Pentecost, Paul’s journeys, St. Polycarp’s pilgrimage to martyrdom, the Cappadocian fathers (imagine growing up with St. Macrina as your mother), Constantine’s conversion, the Martyrs of Lyon, St. Augustine pondering the collapse of Rome, the Celtic fathers clinging to rocks in the sea, St. Benedict founding his order, the conversion of Prince Vladimir, the agony of the Great Schism, Thomas Aquinas’s “everything is straw” vision, Dante (Dante!), the Fall of Constantinople … well, I could go on, all the way up to my waking up at noon and sitting here writing this blog. My own story only has meaning as part of the Great Story, the one that starts with the words, “In the beginning.”

I have found no better way to describe what it’s like to be a pilgrim in this story than the Divine Comedy. The farther one goes into the story, the more one loves, and the more one knows. The capacity to know and to love is infinite. Near the beginning of Dante’s Paradiso, the poet describes the experience as akin to a Greek myth in which a fisherman tastes a magic herb that makes it possible for him to become one with the sea. That’s the Christian life of theosis, of making this lifelong pilgrimage towards total and eternal union with God. To be part of the same pilgrimage with so many others — not only the saints of old, but Christian men and women like the monks of Norcia, like Marco Sermarini and the Tipi Loschi, like Barronelle Stutzman and Chief Kelvin Cochran, and Evgeny Vodolazkin, and Father Matthew Harrington, my own priest, is a privilege and an adventure and … well, it’s overwhelming to imagine, much less put into words.

But I’m going to have to make an attempt, because I am a writer, and this is my next book.

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