Ireland and the Benedict Option: a talk by Rod Dreher

thank you all so much for coming out tonight and welcoming welcoming me here to Dublin it's my first time in Ireland and I was told before I came here that a man could find a drink in this town and I want to tell you about this wonderful thing I've discovered in Ireland called Guinness it's fantastic and to have one in Dublin it was just a real it's a small thing for you but for me as someone who's admired Irish culture and Ireland from afar for a long time it means a lot and just to have spent a couple of days here was really it really fed my soul just before we came over tonight I spent about an hour talking with two young Catholic guys readers of my blog and we just talked about the future of the faith the future of the West their future our future what we can do to support each other in this time of great trial and you know I find whenever I come to Europe to talk about the Benedict option I go always go home with so much hope even though things are pretty gloomy here and I go home with hope because I meet young Catholics who are completely aware of the situation but they want Christ anyway they want the faith anyway and they don't want to compromise about it and to me as as an elderly person who can get cynical at times as a journalist for almost 30 years it just is a good reminder to to have hope that as long as we as I see young people young men and women who have that kind of passion and who really want to do good and and love God and serve others it's just I go home even though I've worked really hard here but in Spain for eight days I go home energized so Thank You Ireland and thank you Thank You Ryan and Ben for for what you gave me this afternoon I'd like to say that you've made me feel right at home here in Dublin but that seems to be a strange sentiment given what believing Christians are living through in this country I've been in Dublin as I said for a couple of days and I've heard several times some version of this sentiment Ireland doesn't feel like home anymore certainly it's not the Ireland that I as a sympathetic American observer long thought it was I watched over the past decade or so as the sex abuse scandal poleaxed Irish Catholicism despite these events I hope that fortress Ireland would be able to come through with its faith largely intact for so long theologically Orthodox American Catholics many of course with Irish roots look to Ireland as an impregnable stronghold of faith but the abortion vote confirmed my worst fears and since arriving here on this trip Catholics have told me story after story about the feebleness of the faith in Ireland and the demoralization of the faithful one well-placed priest said to me on my first day the whole thing is going to collapse maybe out of the ruins we can build something that lives but I don't know if we can close quote well I'm here to tell you tonight that yes the whole thing probably will collapse because it's collapsing all over the West even in the United States at a slower rate and I'm here to tell you as a fellow Christian that you that we can and must build something that lives I know that we can it has happened before there's no reason to be optimistic for the short-term but for the Christian hope is not the same thing as optimism I'm going to explain tonight why there is reason for hope well let me be clear about one thing I wrote the Benedict option as an American Christian for American Christians struggling in American circumstances I've been startled and but deeply gratified to it to have discovered audiences for the book throughout Europe the book is now in nine languages though some of the benedict option will make particular sense only to an American audience by far the greater part of the book resonates with the experience of Christian believers living all across Western Europe and my travels meeting and talking with Catholics on the continent I've observed that it is easier for them to read the signs of the times because they have lived through anti-clericalism and D Christianisation for a couple of generations now at least sometimes more the awareness of this is much more recent for the Christians of Ireland you woke up one day to discover that your country was well and truly post Christian in America this we are slow to wake up to what's really happening in our country but every single day with new passing developments like the thing John was talking about with the Catholic school boys in Washington it is becoming impossible to deny that the United States is a post Christian nation and becoming not just post Christian but anti-christian but there is a blessing in this there really is it's better to deal with the world as it is than to stagger on in a narcotic fog of cultural Christianity I have a southern baptist friend in the States pastor Russell Moore who has said that he would rather live in what we have now knowing where we really stand that in the comfortable cultural Christianity at the past that served as more of a vaccination against taking the gospel seriously than a spur to conversion it is as I said it's better to deal with the world as it really is rather than live by comforting lives now we believers all of us have the opportunity for deeper conversion for those with eyes to see the battle lines are much clearer now and the insufficiency of half-measures impossible to deny in Ireland the abuse scandals have badly damaged perhaps even destroyed the moral authority of the church that we've suffered through this in the US as well but even if you had not had these scandals if we had not had these scandals we would all still be in a grave crisis as in America the scandals have only revealed how weak the faith had become behind the facade of cultural Christianity to prepare for what is to come faithful Christians must radically and fundamentally change the way we live the old conformist cultural approach to the faith it's worthless now if you are not actively and intentionally Christian and living your life in a more disciplined way your faith is going to die simple as that there's no alternative left I believe that Benedictine monasticism offers practical help for us Christians who are living in the world I call the choice facing all Christians today the Benedict option the Benedict of the option is st. Benedict of Nursia an Italian monk regarded by the church as the founder of Western monasticism a claim that Celts will wish to dispute but we will gingerly pass that by tonight voter addictive Nursia was a Christian Roman born four years after the final Roman Emperor in the West had abdicated around the Year 500 Benedict's parents sent him down from their village in the mountains of central Italy to the city of Rome to finish his studies Benedict was so shocked by the chaos and the decadence of the formerly glorious imperial city that he retreated to a cave in the countryside in Subiaco he lived there for three years praying and fasting and seeking the will of God for him in his time and in his place when Benedict emerged he became an abbot in time he wrote what we now call the rule of Saint Benedict a guide for living in the monastery Benedict calls in his rule the monastery quote a school for the service of the Lord when he died in the year 547 the Saint left behind twelve or thirteen monasteries in Italy not bad but there was no way to know what was coming next over the next few the Benedictine monastic movement grew like wildfire across Western Europe which was then and what we now call unfairly I would say the Dark Ages but it was a time of an amazing deprivation and chaos but and young and men flocked to the monasteries to take up the monastic life Benedictine monks played a central role in preserving faith and knowledge within their monasteries and passing it on to the people in the areas they settled Cardinal Newman has a great quote an observation about how slowly slowly slowly without people noticing what happened the Benedictine monks spread and they began to risa ville eyes the places where they lived just by following out the rule of st. Benedict and serving God with all their heart souls and minds over the next few centuries they would be key architects and laying the foundation for the rebuilding of civilization in the West now to be clear Saint Benedict did not set out to save Roman civilization our to make Rome great again he only wanted to search for God Ferrari Deum and to establish the conditions under which monks and nuns could carry out this search in their own lives the rebirth of civilization in the West was an effect of that search but it wasn't the cause of the search in the same way if our civilization in the West is to recover I sincerely believe it will be because we Christians who keep the faith put the search for God above every other goal the concept of civilizational collapse is hard for most of us to conceive especially living among amid the relative peace and prosperity of contemporary Europe and North America but that's what's happening we can point to a number of factors including the Steep population decline the migration crisis in Europe gender ideology and other manifestations let's st. john paul ii condemned as a culture of death all these things add up to a widespread loss of meaning of purpose and of cohesion note well that the steep decline of religious belief in Western society is not an isolated phenomenon it is connected to a general disintegration of institutions and traditions within our societies you could say well how was this worse than what the West faced in the 20th century we always adapt somehow don't we you'd be correct to a point however bad the past was the West still had a common spiritual and moral basis to return to we could judge ourselves by how far we had fallen from the Christian ideal the the Bible the narrative of the Bible was a story by which we understood ourselves by which we understood who we were and what we were to do what we are to do now we no longer have that ideal we have lost our sacred story the post Christian West moves closer to the abyss without having any means to measure its descent towards disaster the polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman had a great phrase to describe the condition of being alive today in late modernity he calls it liquid modernity in solid modernity that is to say from around the time of the Reformation until the Industrial Revolution people knew things were changing and that the old truths did not hold as they once had done but these truths worse in these institutions and these ways of living were still present in the imaginations of Western people and the rate of change was slow enough for people to adjust but at some point in the 19th century the rate of change became so fast that as Karl Marx put it everything that is solid melts into air that may be the only time Karl Marx has ever been favorably quoted in this church but and it may be the last time but but Marx saw something that was true even if he was good man thanks to technology and globalism this process has only gotten more intense more fevered everything around us is in flux there's no solid ground no anchors and no reliable map to help us navigate or so we think liquid modernity is of course closely related to relativism that's another way to think about relativism and the dictatorship of relativism that Pope Benedict the 16th are accurately denounced we think that we're free to do anything we want but in fact it is a dictatorship because we don't know what we should do we have nothing to strive for except satisfying the desires of the autonomous self without roots to anchor it firmly and solid ground a tree will be carried away by the raging waters of liquid modernity in my book the Benedict option I compare liquid modernity to the great flood of the Bible and I say that the church ought to be an ark not only for Christians but for everyone lost in the flood and at risk for drowning the problem is that the church itself is drowning in these same floodwaters the art has become leaky and is in danger of capsizing in too many places now by the church I don't mean only the institutional Roman Catholic Church I'm talking about all Christians and all churches in the Western world and our institutions like Christian schools Christian Smith an American sociologists of religion who teaches at Notre Dame funds in his research that the true faith of Americans is what he calls moralistic therapeutic deism that's a big phrase but it carries a lot of meaning moralistic therapeutic deism this is a pseudo religion that a shallow self-help philosophy masquerading as Christianity and in fact parasitic on Christianity MTD basically teaches that the point of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself and to be nice to others everybody goes to heaven except maybe Hitler and we should only ever consult God when we need something he's like a cosmic Butler who is there to cater to our needs this vague spirituality is the ideal religion for liquid modernity because it amounts to a worship of the self MTV Christianity is soft it cannot withstand liquid modernity it will sink beneath the waves it's happening now everywhere we cannot recover the meaning that we as Christians want and need without a return to a more authentic Christianity a solid Christianity and the Christianity were offered in so many places today is too weak and compromised by spiritual mediocrity and compromise with the world that hates us to make a difference it is vitally important to learn and to live according to traditional Christianity not just a set of doctrines but primarily as a way of life primarily as a way of life there is no alternative now by traditional Christianity I'm speaking very broadly a pre-modern Christianity though there are meaningful and important differences among Catholics Eastern Orthodox and Protestant Christians today the most important division is not between the churches but within them the basic difference is this traditionalist or as I call them small o Orthodox Christians believe in the authority of Scripture and except for the Protestants in the authority of sacred tradition there is something outside of ourselves - what that teach us how to understand ourselves and which is an objective reality to which we must conform modernist on the other hand believe that authority rests primarily with the individual and the faith can be changed as we need to to conform to our perceived needs in in modern times this is why in the u.s. you'll find traditional Catholics traditional in the way I mean I'm not speaking simply of Latin Mass Catholics do you'll find traditional small Orthodox Catholics small Orthodox Protestants and Eastern Orthodox on the same side of issues like gay marriage and abortion and modernist within our churches together on the opposite side it's I don't know if this has ever happened in the history of the church well the life of a Benedictine monk is one of order and structure in his famous rules st. Benedict as I said earlier called a monastery a school for the service of the Lord the purpose of the monks life is to restore the brokenness within himself and in the world by growing in unity with Christ and with his brothers this is what in the Eastern Orthodox tradition is called theosis sort of in guarding the more we die to ourselves or more we live in Christ and this is not an abstract ideal this is something we accomplish every single day by the grace of God through prayer through the reception of the sacraments through repentance and so on and are in the same in this way our lives must be constant spiritual training conversion is not something that happens once it's a way of life pre-modern Christianity teaches that all reality is ordered and given meaning by Jesus Christ the logos we must order our own lives to that reality as revealed to us in Scripture and most of all in the life of Jesus Christ Christ entered human life in order to regenerate it and to bring it back in harmony with sacred order and so that we could live forever in the presence of our Creator in writing this book I spent a week at the Benedictine monastery in Norcia the birthplace of st. Benedict father basil a monk who lives there told me that quote a monk enters the monastery knowing that finding order doesn't come easily you have to fight for it you have to work for it and you have to be patient to achieve it but it's worth it because that order because it comes from God gives us peace the monks discover that order through regular prayer through the spiritual discipline of worship of fasting and of reading scriptures they consecrate their daily work to Christ and live in true devotion to their brothers in the community I remember talking to to brother Augustine they're an American monk is a big guy young guy with a big red Viking beard and he said that the first couple of years two or three years for him there at the monastery was really tough because he had to get his own rough edges sanded off of him through learning to live in community but he said this was a means of conversion for him learning the disciplines of life and community which is a radical thing for for certainly for Americans who live in such an individualistic society well we Christians who live in the world cannot live in a monastery but we do need to be closer to each other geographically and otherwise it's in human nature we're made for God and for each other no social network on your smartphone can substitute for the face the voice and a touch of other people we also need close-knit communities in which to raise our children social science findings teach that no matter what a child's home culture is like as children grow older they are far more likely to adopt the culture of their peer group socialization to religious norms as a child plays a key role in determining whether people whether or not people retain their faith and adulthood if we fail to live out our faith in a faithful community we will likely condemn our children and of course their children and future generations to the de-facto atheism of the dominant culture so basic cultural Christianity in the way I'm talking here is necessary but it's not sufficient as we can all see about what's happened to the church today the Cambridge University social anthropologist Paul connerton has found that commute the communities that are most successful at preserving their faith and their traditions in modernity make their sacred story a matter of what he calls habit memory to speak plainly this means that Christians must make our faith not simply a set of disembodied abstract ideas as a matter of election are something we do only on Sundays and holy days but we have to make it an entire lifestyle all the traditional Christian practices of prayer worship and life and Christian life the festivals we undertake everything we do as families family meals all of it serve the deep purpose of making our faith incarnate we have to recover them if we're to survive as a Christian people these traditional practices constitute a kind of Liturgy of everyday life the liturgy is not only what we attend on Sunday in church broadly speaking a liturgy is a set of practices that train us to desire what is good in this sense Benedictine monks make their entire lives explicitly liturgical the monks have never lost that connection between the body and the spirit in my book I talk about how the basic Benedict option idea applies to various areas of life including politics education work and family life how would you change your life if you believe that the pursuit of holiness without compromise was the most important thing in your life and everything else had to come second to that that's what the Benedict option asked us all to think about and to act on again we Christians who live in the world we're not monks we're not called to the monastery but we are going to have to live more spiritually disciplined and in fact yes more monastic lives if we want to live as Christians and want our children to live and our children's children to have a chance we can't create heaven on earth or recreate the Garden of Eden put out of your mind any idea of recreating utopia or this false nostalgia it's not going to happen but we're gonna have to live lives that in some in some real sense are separate from the mainstream and ordered by a different vision and older vision a sacred vision a vision that nurtures a culture of life not of death I believe that we Christians can best serve the world in the current crisis by showing it a better way to live a more humane way to live charitable way to live Pope Francis says that Christians have to go into the world and serve it he's absolutely right about that but we cannot offer the world what we do not have before we can go into the world as missionaries and evangelists effectively we Christians must go much deeper into the mystery and the truth of our faith into contemplation to recover our roots and to relearn the practices of everyday discipleship I gave a talk once at an evangelical University in the u.s. really conservative University had a full room it was it was a wonderful crowd and I was given a series of lectures about the Benedict option and in the first one I talked about the importance of spiritual practices of habits in informing ourselves as believers in the Q&A a young woman stood up and said sir I don't understand what you mean about practices why isn't it enough just to love love our Lord with all our hearts like our parents taught us I said to her oh we absolutely have to love our Lord with all our hearts but if that love is gonna mean anything it has to take concrete form we we we can't just hold that emotion there and make faith about our feelings only it has to have form and that's where the habits come in the disciplines come in of the Christian life I talked a little bit more about that but she didn't really understand what I was saying after the lecture a professor at the college came to me and said you know the way that young woman feels that's the way ninety-nine percent of these kids here at this conservative evangelical college that's the way they think they're the products of youth group culture and of course American culture where everything is about emotion everything is about relational your relations with other people everything is about Jesus is my best friend and they when they go out into the real world the first time somebody says to them what Christians believe is mean they collapse because they have not been trained intellectually or formed by spiritual disciplines to give an answer for why they believe what what they do I am discovering though that young Christians like the Catholics I mentioned earlier are not willing to surrender to the dead culture of materialism and selfishness around us but they want to find a way to go against the mainstream of liquid modernity I'm finding too that many of them more and more of them are sick and tired of the spiritual mediocrity all around us Pope Benedict the 16th the second benedict of the benedict option has warned he's warned us that the church in the West will suffer greatly and shrink to a small number of truly convinced believers what he called a creative minority that has to figure out how to keep the light of Christ shining in the darkness we have to fundamentally and creatively reconceive our role as Christians in society and that includes rethinking our ways of making the faith resilient in our own lives for the Cask in folsom the former prior of the Benedictine monastery in north john told me back in 2015 that any Christian family that wants to make it through what's coming with their faith intact has to take some form of the Benedict option some form of intentional disciplined living in community he told me to go over the mountains from Nora from the monastery to visit a group of Catholic families living on the Adriatic he told me that that community is living out these ideas in an extraordinary way the monk was right I found there in this small city san benedetto del tronto city of about 50,000 on the Adriatic probably never heard of it it's off the beaten track I found there a group of about 20-25 Catholic families who are living and thriving as joy feel joy filled Orthodox Catholic believers they call themselves the tip in loose key tip elos key italian for the usual suspects which gives you an idea of their sense of humor they were founded in the 1990s by a group of young Catholic men just graduated from college who wanted something more out of the Christian life than the bland conformist Catholicism their parishes eventually they married their girlfriends and put together a real fellowship they started a school the Scala GK Chesterton they have a clubhouse that they use as a meeting place for Bible study for catechesis for festivals for gardening for feast and all kinds of activities that build up their community they also serve the people outside the community in their town and acts of charity and service they all live in normal apartments around the city they don't live in like a house together normal apartments they go to the normal parishes for Sunday Mass but the tipple oh ski and their families all know that they need each other and they're committed to that to their fellowship again they're quite Orthodox and their Catholicism a 100% except the Magisterium of the church and they are completely undeceived about the crisis in the church and in the post Christian world but guess what they're not angry about it they're not bitter they are the happiest Christians I know Marco cerini one of their founders told me that the tip ELO's key they didn't discover anything new they only rediscovered traditions within the church that had been hidden away and forgotten I was interviewed once on French Catholic television and the presenter asked me who is your hero I started to say benedict xvi but I gave frankly a more truthful answer Marco sir morena why Marco because this ordinary middle-aged Catholic man living in a small city kind of in the middle of nowhere shows what any one of us can accomplish with faith and love applied creatively to our own circumstances I think of Marco as a kind of Saint Benedict of our own time and I know if he were here right now he would slap me in the head and call me but so well so what does a Benedict option look like for Ireland that's for you Christians you Irish Christians to work out for yourselves but the Iona Institute itself is one manifestation of it it seeks to keep visible another way of thinking about the world especially with regard to such matters as marriage the right to life church and state religion and society and other things that the elites who rule us when rather than everyone forgot about we have to keep bearing witness no matter what it costs us and the Iona Institute does that in my book I do offer practical suggestions based on principles in the rule of Saint Benedict this is not just an airy-fairy book of theory but I went around the u.s. and even to some places in Europe to get real-life examples of what people like you and you and I can actually do and I'll give examples drawn from the experiences of contemporary Christians not just monks of the 6th century people like the tip Ellis key but I don't offer a detailed program or a formula I'm more interested in provoking creative discussions among communities of Christians local communities of Christians in particular places the Benedict option proposal is not so much an answer as it is a framework within which local communities of Christians can talk about their own particular challenges within the framework of the crisis engulfing all of Western civilization and talk among themselves how they can meet them right where they live you and Ireland know from bitter experience that the institutions of the church cannot be relied on to teach to defend and evangelize for the Catholic faith it would be a fatal mistake to sit back and wait for the institution and its leaders to get their act together let's pray that they do and support them when they do the right thing and make the difficult choices but in the meantime faithful Catholics must act themselves to catalyze themselves and learn themselves about the faith and their children they must act themselves to deepen their experience of faith through prayer through the sacraments to going on pilgrimages through Bible reading and embracing the traditional spiritual disciplines and they must act create small groups and even local institutions of their own through networking with other convinced believers within which the faith can thrive in these difficult times think of all the information available to us all of us online today think of all the books we can now get through Amazon and all the opportunities the internet affords affords us to find each other on my first day in Dublin I met an American expatriate who lives here in County Kildare Brian collar he's an Orthodox Catholic who writes a great blog called restoring Mayberry it's about learning how to live in rural Ireland embracing its traditions and celebrating them I've been reading and learning from Brian's blog for years even though we never met until this past Saturday I think Brian is in the room tonight he said he was going to come come tonight if he's here I hope when we finish that some of you will get to know him there are marvelous opportunities for friendship and collaboration with people in our own backyard that we may not have ever heard of we can get together and build new things together I was thrilled to learn just last night that homeschooling is a phenomenon in Ireland homeschooling families can come together to create coops and to share the teaching load and to build communities for the kids my wife used to be a full-time home schooler and now she teaches at a hybrid Christian school that combines classroom instruction in the morning with home instruction in the afternoon and this school in its vision makes a point of giving the kids a deep grounding in the tradition of Western literature and culture it's part of our shared civilizational heritage as men and women of the West our kids and we parents are undertaking the quest for God in the classroom together and going on pilgrimage through the great books in the Christian tradition it's a marvelous thing to see Irish oh I got burrito Brian a photo and her kids a photo of my daughter Nora it's 12 years old walking out the door on her first day of the spring semester I said stop honey let me take a picture of you she was carrying under her arm the Odyssey all with with little note stuck all through it because she's really wrapped up in the Odyssey with her class of 12 year olds I'm considered well-educated and by American standards I never read The Odyssey I never read Homer it was never given to me and I was never told that it was important I read it for the first time when Nora's older brother at 12 started this school and I read it with him the classical Christian education has also been an education for me that I never received well again my book Benedict option is not meant to settle debates or to be a strict blueprint but rather to open creative discussion about our present and our future the Benedict option is going to look different in Ireland because it has to be adopted to adapt it to Irish conditions by Irish Christians you have so much depth and goodness in beauty in this country through your Christian legacy I know I know the times are very very hard right now for Irish believers and I've got to get any easier especially as elites who hate the church use her sins and failings in an attempt to discredit everything about Irish Christianity it is a lie introspection and the light of the abuse scandal is good and necessary absolutely a wreck there has to be a reckoning but please do not allow the church's critics to drive you all to self-hatred in the u.s. the other day as John Waters said a bunch of Catholic high school boys were completely defamed on social media and in the mainstream media and what was in fact a set up at the March for Life they were made to look like they were abusing an elderly Native American turns out it wasn't it didn't happen that way at all despite what some selectively edited camera camerawork indicated but before all the facts were in not only had these boys been widely condemned in the media on social media and threatened violence threatened against them but even their Bishop and their school had apologized to the world for the terrible behavior of these boys even though those kids had in fact done nothing wrong this is a sign of dhimmitude the second class status that Christian living under Islamic law had to embrace our bishops and our other leaders may want to be Demi's in front of the anti-christian secular world and an effort to win their goodwill I've seen this so often among Christians who are my age I'm 52 and older we we want so badly to hold on to our middle-class comforts and our status in society that we're far too willing to keep our heads down and to apologize but things we don't have any business apologizing for apologize for the realsense the real crimes but don't apologize for being a believer don't apologize for being a Catholic you and I should refuse that cowardly way out again when I can't emphasize this strongly enough and Christians do wrong we should admit it and repents but we should not go along with the world's plan to demonize all of us and the good the true the beautiful things that the Christian faith has brought and continues to bring to this world I'll close tonight and then we can have some questions I'll close with a story a year and a half ago I was in France for the publication of the Benedict option in that country and had the chance to have offi have coffee with a well-known atheist philosopher we started off talking about how France is in fact in steep decline and how this decline was also manifesting itself in other countries after a bit of back and forth I asked him so where's your hope he looked at me and said very gently I have no hope I told him I do have hope my hope is in Jesus Christ but please don't think that I'm coming to you with that like a sentimental American TV evangelist type I'm not optimistic I told him but I am hopeful I went on to explain to him that for Christians hope is the assurance that God is with us always that he will not abandon us and that our suffering has meaning if we unite our suffering to our Lord and his suffering our suffering will be redemptive it will bring life and resurrection our heroes of the church include martyr who paid the ultimate price for their faith just the other day in Spain I was in the cathedral of Valencia saw the of relic the hand and arm of st. Vincent the first martyr of Spain martyred under the Diocletian persecution in the year 305 he is present there with us still in the flesh and for me as an American that's an extraordinary thing anyway st. Vincent is a hero of ours who died for his faith he died because he refused to throw the scriptures on the fire as the Romans wanted him to do anyway back with the professor the Atheist professor I went on to tell him that my own conversion to Christianity began when I was a teenager 17 years old thought I knew everything and while on vacation in France stumbled into the great medieval cathedral of Chakra near Paris again I thought I knew everything back then and one thing I knew above all things was that Christianity was dull middle-class conformity and had no answers for anybody's problems and then there I was standing in the middle of that Cathedral that medieval cathedral struck hard with all nothing in my life as a kid growing up in late twentieth century America prepared me for the grandeur of God made manifest in the beauty of that temple in the stone and the glass and the lines and the order from that moment on I knew in my heart that God existed and that he wanted me for himself I wanted to know the God that inspired men to build something so beautiful to his glory was this really Christianity this was not any Christianity I had ever been exposed to but here was the evidence that there had once been a Christian faith and men who believed in it so such that they had a record a temple like this to the glory of the Christian God I did not walk out of that church as a Christian let me say but I did leave there searching for God I was on a quest it was a long wind quest through University and it brought me to a full conversion a few years later it started though with the shocking manifestation the life-changing manifestation of God at a French Cathedral of all places God is all around us if we only train our eyes to see I told this to the philosopher that day he looked at me thoughtfully and in fact I think with compassion and then he said that's good for you Americans but here in France we believe that this world is all there is when you die you die and that was the end of that conversation that man has one of the most intelligent and sophisticated minds and all of Western civilization but he has no hope I do have hope and so do you because of Jesus Christ there is nothing that the world offers that can compare nothing let's build on that shared hope on that shared vision a man can live through almost anything if he has a reason to live we all brothers and sisters have a reason to live because every generation before us no matter how much they suffered persecution no matter how much they suffered hardship and starvation they kept the faith that's why we're all sitting here today because they kept the faith so must we I bring up the story about Chartres because of this yesterday I went to the library to see the book of kells standing there before that incomparable manuscript under the display case I had the same feeling that I did at Chartres a sense of being overwhelmed by wonder and a desire to know the God that inspired men in the distant past to create something so beautiful to his glory to tell the world about who God was to proclaim the Lord in Word and in drawing and in beauty that happened to me right here in Dublin yesterday just down the street through this great gift passed down to you Irish Catholics and to Christians the world over by Irish monks open your eyes and your hearts to this treasure that has been hiding in plain sight not just the book of kells but the treasure God has given us it points the way to God and it points the way to the future thank you very much [Applause] thank you

Channel: Iona Institute

Views: 6,910

Keywords: Christianity, Ireland, Catholic Church, Iona Institute, Rod Dreher, Notre Dame Centre for Faith and Reason, Benedict Option

Id: mwFPcTvRE4A

Length: 44min 57sec (2697 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 25 2019