Did you read The Benedict Option and like it, but have been stumped by how to get started living it? Cameron Thompson is a trained psychologist and American Catholic thinker who has spent a lot of time pondering the challenges of the Ben Op. On Saturday September 12, Dr. Thompson will offer a three-hour online seminar titled, “Benedict’s Rule & Modern Society: A Guide for Living The Benedict Option.”

The seminar will take place from 9 am till noon. Cost of admission: $25. This week, I had an e-mail exchange with Dr. Thompson about the course, and why he’s offering it:

RD: Tell us the basics of this online course you’re offering.

CT: The online course/seminar, entitled “Benedict’s Rule and Modern Society: A Guide for Living the Benedict Option,” essentially presents a deep dive into the Rule of St. Benedict, looking at how we as Christians in modern society might apply Benedict’s own wisdom to the needs of our time, especially in the light of the present crises we are facing. The course is structured around three central themes:

1. Bringing God’s Divine Order into our relationship with creation (Benedictine Economics)
2. Bringing Divine Order into our relationships with one another (Benedictine Organizational Principles and Governance), and
3. Bringing Divine Order into our relationship with God (Benedictine Spirituality).

Participants will learn about the practical principles that can be derived from Benedict’s Rule (which is, as you mentioned in The Benedict Option, essentially a political constitution for Christian community life) and what we can learn from them to guide our own BenOp communities and initiatives. Emphasis will be given to practical application, and include open discussion time throughout the three-hour course to address specific questions and challenges that participants have encountered or are facing in their own experience of (or aspirations for) BenOp living.

The basic idea is this: If we want to follow the way of St. Benedict as an Option for surviving as Christians, what are some of the key things we need to learn from Benedict himself about how to successfully put this into practice? Thanks be to God, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel here – Benedict himself can guide us with the wisdom of his “constitution” that has been around for over 1,400 years, and outlasted countless dark ages, crises, and civilizational collapses.

Who is it for?

The people who would benefit the most from this course would be folks who are familiar with the Benedict Option — at least the idea, if not the book — and are trying to live seriously as (“little o”) orthodox Christians in the midst of an increasingly anti-Christian societal context. I know a bunch of people who are trying to carve out a path forward toward BenOp living, but face very real and practical challenges in day-to-day experience and are seeking for concrete solutions to address those challenges. This course is specifically designed for them.

I’ve also seen a lot of people who encounter the same challenges we all do, but maybe have some misconceptions about what the BenOp is all about, and could put their uncertainties to rest by participating in this course and seeing what Benedict himself has to say about it.

Why is this important for Christians right now?

This is important for Christians right now because we are living in times where it is hard to be a faithful Christian, and increasingly it is difficult (frankly, I’d say in many cases impossible) to authentically live the Gospel while completely embedded in structures and systems at best unhelpful and often inimical to Christian life.

But it’s obvious that we can’t do this alone as individuals; it’s essential to form Christian communities within which we can create the parallel structures necessary to be free to live the Gospel — communities where, frankly, it’s easier to orient our life on Christ. And of course, with this comes a whole host of questions and challenges: How do we actually build such a community? What are the key roles people need to take on? What are the guiding principles for finding the right balance between community life and personal freedom? How do we rediscover the basics of forming a Christian community of prayer?

There are a host of practical questions that need to be addressed in order to do this successfully, and not merely be blown like chaff in the wind when difficulties come our way. Thankfully, Benedict himself offers some important insights into how to solve these challenges.

I understand that you and your family are looking to make a fairly radical move into a Benedict Option community. Tell us about that, and how you all discerned this path.

We have found it increasingly difficult (like Christ said in the sermon on the mount) to serve both God and Mammon (spoiler alert: it’s impossible). By Mammon, of course, we don’t mean pursuing wealth and success, but rather the reality that modern consumerist society shapes us to live in a certain way and become a certain kind of thing, whether or not we recognize it. We’ve discovered that it’s not merely enough to make interiorly the resolve to live the Gospel somehow while still embedded within all this, but that it’s vital to form and participate in communities wherein we can be more free to love and serve God.

St. Benedict says “if you would have life and desire to see good days, you must keep your tongue from evil and your lips from deceit, turn away from evil and do good, and seek after peace and pursue it.” As we’ve gone forward on the path toward trying to authentically live the Gospel, we’ve found that at least for our own selves, being honest about our needs and human weaknesses, that in order to “seek after peace” we need to live in a context where it’s frankly more possible to live a life centered around worship of God, at peace with God, ourselves, and the created order, than what we’ve been able to do in modern urban USA. One of the key things that drives us is the need to return to a more human scale of social organization and a more human pace of life. For us, at any rate, to keep our tongues from evil and lips from deceit (i.e. “to live not by lies”) means to move to a place where we believe God to be leading us, which possibility really opened up a little over a year ago.

I read your blog post last year about Giovanni Zennaro and the Cascina San Benedetto, and our interview with him where he rightly identified a core aspect of the problem we face in modern society being the spiritual/mental bourgeoisification of society (cf. “The Bourgeois Mind” by Nicolai Berdyaev). This articulation of the problem has been a key theme for my family, as we’ve identified it. Anyway, this resonated so strongly with me that I immediately reached out to him and said we’ve in fact been trying to move to Italy and live on a more human scale and pace of life, why don’t we get to know one another and see what comes of it? I ended up in Europe on business last fall and stayed with the lovely Zennaro family, and met many of the people involved in their project, and we’ve kept in touch since.

We tried at some point to pursue here in rural USA what they are doing in Italy, but found that at least in our circumstances this would not be possible, and not God’s will for our family. We’ve discovered that for us the path is pointing toward returning to our ancestral home of Europe, and seeking God there. Currently the Cascina San Benedetto project is moving forward toward living in a hamlet outside of Norcia, which won’t be an immediate possibility for us, but we do hope to be moving to Italy from the USA very soon, and from there we can continue to discern a path together.

What are some of the things that prevent American Christians from grasping the need for a Benedict Option way of life? In other words, what blinds us?

Now that would be telling, wouldn’t it? I honestly think there are a number of things that contribute to that, but I think the key thing that prevents American Christians from grasping the need for a BenOp way of life is the fact that Americans — or at least those living in the USA, which is a very different religious-cultural reality than Latin America — have been formed under such a hyper-individualistic sense of what it means to be a human being, let alone a Christian.

The cultural reality of the USA is one that idealizes the rugged individual actor, to the detriment of the ecclesial (that is community) aspect of Christian life. This stems from among other things, the pre-eminence of what we can call the “bourgeois spirit” or “bourgeois mind” in the USA. Without getting too much into it (you can read a great essay on this by Christopher Dawson), the USA uniquely in many ways among the nations is founded from the beginning very much with this kind of social-religious sensibility of the bourgeois mindset, that really blinds us both to the need for Christian community as the essential and primary context for human living (rather than the market or the liberal nation-state, for example). It also to blinds us to the urgency of our situation — namely, that American society has already gone so far down a certain path that Christians here have not even noticed until recently the increasing incompatibility of living the gospel within the ordinary structures of modern life.

In the book, Father Cassian Folsom, then the prior of the Norcia community, said that any Christian that doesn’t do the Benedict Option is not going to have what it takes to survive what’s coming. What does that remark mean to you?

Honestly, I think he’s right. I think it means that the only thing resilient, or robust, enough to withstand massively tectonic civilizational/social change are smaller, human-scale, tight-knit communities. History itself speaks to this. And I sincerely believe, and current events are only confirming this, that we are living through a period now of massive change transitioning in many ways from one era to another. It’s not the first time in history, and it won’t be the last, but once we recognize that it’s “another one of those” moments in history, then we can know what we need to do to not only survive, but come out the other side actually heading toward a true renaissance.

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For more information about the life and work of Cameron Thompson, check out his website. Here is a link to the Eventbrite page for Dr. Thompson’s “Benedict’s Rule & Modern Society: A Guide To Living The Benedict Option.” The details for the online seminar are:

If you have not read The Benedict Option, but are curious about it, why not check out the seminar to see if it’s something that fires your imagination?