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Sunday Morning At The Abbey

A quick note from the 'Idea Of A Village' conference
View From My Table, Saturday night, Clear Creek Abbey (Photo by Rod Dreher)
View From My Table, Saturday night, Clear Creek Abbey (Photo by Rod Dreher)

Good morning! I’m still at Clear Creek Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in eastern Oklahoma, but I just now have wifi for the first time since Friday afternoon. We are in an exurb of the middle of nowhere. No cell phone service, no nothing. It has been quite the ascetic experience, let me tell you. (And, says my wife, good for me.)

The high mass is about to start, and I want to go observe and pray with the monks, so this will be short. After mass, it’s over to Tulsa to catch the flight home (my favorite journey). I have so much to tell you about what happened here this weekend at the Idea Of A Village conference, really exciting Benedict Option stuff. But I will tell all tomorrow — no time right now. Above is a view from the little desk in my guest room at the abbey, taken late last night, before I went to bed. I ate some crazy delicious chocolates a kind Baptist couple from Texas gave me, and my pal Lance Kinzer, a PCA Presbyterian from Olathe, Kansas, gave me a book of Scott Cairns poems, which I began reading last night, and was transported by. Thank you, friends! Perhaps the greater gift to me was the presence of Evangelicals like them (and there were more than a few) here at this conference in the shadow of a Roman Catholic abbey, and among a group that was predominantly Catholic. It revealed to me that the Ben Op really is an ecumenical project. I was so pleased and honored that my Evangelical friend Jake Meador was here from Nebraska, and agreed to share the stage, so to speak, with me for an afternoon talk, which we turned into a discussion of how to think through and embrace the Ben Op as an Evangelical — and how we Christians from Catholic and Orthodox traditions can communicate across ecclesial boundaries, teaching and learning from each other.

Again: more on this tomorrow. And I see that I have 240 comments to approve. When I get back to Starhill tonight, I’ll get on it. Thanks for your patience.

By the way, Ralph Wood was a knockout here, lecturing in part on Walker Percy and “Love In The Ruins” in connection with the Benedict Option. He’s going to be talking Dostoevsky and Percy at the Walker Percy Weekend in two weeks (and Matthew Sitman will be in town to talk about “Love In The Ruins” and our political craziness), so if you haven’t bought your tickets yet, please do — there are still some left. Jake Meador and Ralph Wood are the most articulate and enthusiastic proponents of the Ben Op among Evangelicals, and it is a delight to hear them and to learn from them. Ralph told the crowd yesterday that “Love In The Ruins” is a novel one needs to read to understand the disorders of our time, and what makes the Ben Op necessary. And he was very funny talking about it. If you come to the Walker Percy Weekend, you might seek Ralph out and talk to him about it. Oh, and we’ve definitely added a screening of the great new Wendell Berry documentary “The Seer” for Friday afternoon of the festival, so there’s one more reason for you to come. Walker Percy and Wendell Berry, plus boiled crawfish, beer, and bourbon — how can you stand to miss it? You can’t.

Finally, before I go off to pray, here’s a photo of Mike Lawless, who, with his family, was the original settler of the Catholic agrarian community here (they moved here from San Diego). This morning, he made me a cup of “bulletproof coffee,” which I was very reluctant to try (the thought made me queasy, given that the thing is full of butter), but which, I have to admit, was pretty dang good. Mike was one of the local folks who made me feel so welcome here, and to him and to all the others in the village around Clear Creek Abbey, I am so grateful.

Photo by Rod Dreher
Photo by Rod Dreher
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