-Buy this book.-About the editor.
I'm copying out below, two selections from this volume in full, because: 1) they are short, and 2) I like them...a lot.
-About the author of the 1st selection: Brian Doyle.
-Rod Dreher's BeliefNet Blog
1) Introduction -Brian Doyle
"Some time ago I gave a characteristically rambling talk to a group of Benedictine nuns at their monastery in Oregon. As usual I set out to tell stories and sing prayers and tell jokes and draw tears and foment cheerful chaos and try to connect at some deep, inexplicable level that has everything to do with laughing and weeping, and as usual I was granted more epiphany and delight than I could ever have delivered, which happens to me all the time, which is one of the reasons why I feel like the richest man on the earth, even though my back is sore all the time and my wife is a confusing country and my children never make their beds and it rains so much here that everyone gets a little mossy come winter.
Anyway, I arrived early at the monastery and wondered around the grounds for a couple of hours, out of respect for my hosts, trying to see and sense something of their lives and loves: their salty days, the way the wind slid through their fir trees, the geometry of the gravestones in their tiny cemetery, the way the hop fields and vineyards stretched away in corduroy rows beneath their little hill, the keening of hawks overhead, the secret words that dragonflies and damselflies spelled in the air among the old stone buildings. I wandered and wondered. I walked the simple stations of the cross that someone had carved in trees along a path. I examined the old washhouse, where millions of prayers had been murmured over socks and frocks during the last century. I sat in the tall grass and prayed quietly for all sorts of things, even for the one-eyed cat glaring at me balefully from the brambles, and then I went to give my talk.
First there was a meal, of course, and before the meal were prayers, and the three nuns offering prayers were a microcosm of the monastery. One was very old and bent and grinning and calm. The second, the prioress, was tall and strong and commanding and gentle. The third was tiny and lithe and exuberant and looked to be about twenty years old. Each was terse and eloquent, and all three were funny, joking about making and selling thousands of jars of their legendary mustard, joking about the monestary's legendary basketball team in the old days, joking about their eternal battles with blackberry brambles, which they fought valiantly even while thanking the merciful Lord for the berries - the black honey of summer, as the great poet Mary Oliver says.
During dinner I talked to all sorts of nuns - postulants and novices, sisters who had taken their first vows, sisters who had taken perpetual vows. I talked for a long while with a cheerful woman who when young had been a sister at the monastery but had finally stepped away to spend her life as a teacher, yet she had never stopped visiting or supporting the monastery and in fact had been crucial in raising a million dollars for the new chapel. I talked to one young woman who was, as she said, an inquirer, a formal designation given to a woman who wishes to acquaint herself with the Benedictine monastic community on the off chance that she might join up. Each of these women was quick-witted and humorous, but there was a calm about them, a direct ease, a warm dignity that seemed to me, thinking about it later, best captured by the word grace.
Finally I gave my talk, singing and roaring, spinning stories, making jokes. I told them about barking "Point it down!" at my toddler twin sons when I was teaching them Guy Rules years ago, and about the puppy who knew a hundred words but just could not seem to get her head around the word no; and I told them about my friend Tommy, who was roasted to white ash on September 11, and my theory that every story I tell about Tommy is a prayer for his brilliant soul and a dart to the heart of the coward in the cave in Afghanistan; and I told stories of priests and firemen and dads and other brave men, and ospreys and daughters and rivers and other miracles, and I tried to make those nuns and their friends laugh and cry, because laughter and tears are prayers too; and finally I concluded my burble and rant by telling them about my mama, the salt sea from whom I come.
She never turned aside a poor or hungry soul, did my mama, and she patiently taught children at home and in school for years and years, and she has the sharpest and quickest of wits and tongues, does my mama, the deft storyteller, my mother with her fingers in the deep, holy loam and skin of the earth; my mother who loves the smokey, magical theater and miracle of the Mass; my mother with the memory of twenty elephants and a mind far quicker and more capacious than those of all her children put together; my mother with a ferocious commitment to peace and justice and honest talk, especially in the political and religious arenas, where lies kill people and bleed souls, my mother who has not a jot or an iota of pious nonsense in her; my mother who thinks that the divisions among Christian faiths are silly and stupid; my mother who knows more about the New Testament than I ever will and is fond of quoting the line wherein children are told to care for their fathers even when their minds go, which used to make my dad laugh in the other room; my mother stubborn as ten mules; my mother who took all her stunning talents and bent them toward love; and my mother celebrating and living the wildly improbable message of the Christ, a message she thought could and should change the world, my mother who devoted her whole life to the possibility of that mad idea; my mother now near the end of her time on this, God's earth; my mother soon to sift to dust; my mother more bent and fragile by the minute; my mother whose warm, salty voice was the first thing that I ever heard, and I cannot imagine a world without that grinning voice, a world without my mama in it...
And I stood there at the lectern, in that cavernous room in that lovely old monastery, with its cedarn air like music in the nose, the extraordinary faces of the nuns held up to me in the twilight, and I tried to imagine or articulate or conceive a world without my mother in it, and I started to cry, and I could not stop. Forty-nine years old, and still sobbing in front of nuns.
No one spoke.
After a couple of minutes I got a grip and looked out at those women, and in the sweet silence, the brilliant shine of tears flashing here or there, I saw them for who they really are. I swear I did. I was granted and vouchsafed a vision: these sisters, and all sisters, are the sinews that hold the Church together. Their prayers hold us like hands. The Church, has for centuries rested on their thin, bony shoulders. They are brave beyond words and we take them for granted and we should get down on our creaky knees and clasp our hands in prayer and speak to the dust and say, "Lord, we thank you for these women; for their grace we thank you, for their sacrifices and sweat we thank you, for their hearts in which we swim we thank you."
Look, I am not an idiot all the time, and I know full well, all too well, that the story of the world is struggle and sad, loneliness and loss, but to my mind there is no way to stay sad as long as there are thin, bony, brave women like these nuns, like my mom, like your mom, in the world. It just cannot be done. We cannot let ourselves despair at the greed and cruelty of the world, and sometimes of our Church, because the sisters do not despair; they fight the brambles all day and night for us, and they are lodestars and compasses and prisms and leaders of the world that will come, the world of joy and light, where no child weeps from fear, where no one huddles in hopelessness.
If we are to properly honor and celebrate the legacy of such graceful and strong people as the sisters at Mt. Angel, who have bent their whole lives to the promise that love will defeat darkness, then we must march into our days with rage and song, with hammers in our hands and prayers in our mouths, and build us a new Church and a new world and a new, roaring poem, with all the grace and strength and sweet, wild magic we can muster. It can be done. It's being done as I write these words and as you read them.These brave women bet their lives on that premise. My mama bet her life on that premise. Are we to tell them that they were wrong, and the task is too big? I don't have the courage to tell my mother such a thing, for she is a tart, tough, tiny Irish Catholic woman from New York City, and even my brothers, strapping men far taller and broader than I , quail at the thought of telling our mum what cannot be done; and it would take a far braver man than I to stand up to tiny Sister Alicia and tell her that the work she has chosen to do is a bust. She would laugh in my face, and she would be right.
So let us go, the, you and I, and forge a new thing. We do not know its shape, but we know the astounding idea at its heart, the idea that has driven the Catholic clan through two thousand years, the idea that remains, I believe, the key to the moral evolution of the human race, the idea that fell again and again from the lips of the gaunt, dusty man with starlight in his veins: love, love, love, love, love."
2) The Amish Way: "Imitation of Christ at Its Most naked"
- Rod Dreher ( from The Dallas Morning News )
"Is there any place on earth that more bespeaks peace, restfulness, and sanctuary from the demons of modern life than a one-room Amish schoolhouse? That fact is no doubt why so many of us felt so defiled - there is no more precise word - by news of the mass murders that took place there this week. If you are not safe in an Amish schoolhouse....And yet, as unspeakable as those killings were, they were not the most shocking news to come out of Lancaster County this week.
No, that would be the revelation that the Amish community, which buried five of its little girls this week, is collecting money to help the widow and children of Charles Carl Roberts IV, the man who executed their own children before taking his own life. A serene Amish midwife told NBC News on Tuesday that this is normal for them. It's what Jesus would have them do.
"This is imitation of Christ at its most naked," journalist Tom Shachtman, who has chronicled Amish life, told the New York Times. "If anybody is going to turn the other cheeeck in our society, it's going to be the Amish. I don't want to denigrate anybody else who says that they are imitating Christ, but the Amish walk the walk as much as they talk the talk."
I don't know about you, but that kind of faith is beyond comprehension. I'm the kind of guy that will curse under my breath at the jerk who cuts me off in traffic on the way home from church. And look at those humble farmers, putting Christians like me to shame.
It is not that the Amish are Anabaptists hobbits, living a pure pastoral life uncorrupted by the evils of modernity. So much of the coverage has dwelled on the "innocence lost" aspect, but I doubt that the Amish would agree.They have their own sins and tragedies. Nobody who lives in a small town can live under the illusion that it is a haven from evil. To paraphrase Gulag survivor Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the line between good and evil does not run along the boundaries of lancaster County, but through every human heart.
What sets hearts apart is how they deal with sins and tragedies. In his suicide note, Mr. Roberts said that he did what he did partly out of anger at God for the death of his infant daughter in 1997. Wouldn't any parent wonder why God would allow such a thing to happen? Mr. Roberts held on to his hatred, purifying it under pressure until it exploded in infamy. That's one way to deal with anger.
Another is the Amish way. If Mr. Robert's rage at God over the death of his baby girl was in some sense understandable, how much more comprehensible would be the rage of those Amish mothers and fathers whose children perished by his hand? Had my child suffered and died that way, I cannot imagine what would have become of me, for all my pretenses of piety. And yet, the Amish do not rage. They do not return evil for evil. In fact, they embody peace and love beyond all human understanding.
In our time, religion makes the front pages usually in the ghastliest ways. In the name of God, the faithful fly planes into buildings, blow themselves up to murder the innocent, burn down rival houses of worship, insult and condemn and cry out to heaven for vengeance. The wicked Rev. Fred Phelps and his crazy brood of fundamentalist vipers even planned to protest at teh Amish children's funeral, until Dallas-based radio talker Mike Gallagher, bless him, gave them an hour of his program if they would only let those poor people bury their dead in peace.
But sometimes, faith helps ordinary men and women do the humanly impossible: forgive, love, heal, and redeem. It makes no sense. It is the most sensible thing in the world. The Amish have turned this occasion of spectacular evil into a bright witness to hope. Despite everything, a light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it."
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