There are three guys who started a book club. I asked to join. They reluctantly let me in believing, I think, that I would drop out in a few weeks and leave them alone.
The book that they were discussing was The Benedictine Option by Rod Dreher that traces the decline of faith in the West and suggests that Christians get together and live like monks. I’d never heard of the book, but evidently it’s the rage that everybody knows about but me. Furthermore I didn’t know who Rod Dreher was. Turns out he’s a blogger for The American Conservative. A million people read his blog every month.
These guys are really smart. Somehow the 19th century writer George MacDonald who had a big influence on the Christian apologist C.S. Lewis came up. I told them that I had just purchased all of MacDonald’s 25,000 pages of writings for 99-cents at Kindle. I was pretty impressed with myself that I had knew about MacDonald. Well, they started talking bout Michael Phillips’ condensation of MacDonald’s books. Michael who? And then...Till We Have Faces by Lewis. And Psyche and Cupid, and all that myth stuff. These guys are smart.
Reminds me of the two guys I lift weights with at a dump of a club called “The Weight Room.” How original, but remember I live in Appalachia. It’s a massive, filthy concrete building with weights scattered around and absolutely without any good looking women working out. (I’ll write about lust later.) I call us the “Three Muscleteers.”
These guys are real smart too. I learn about the Higgs Boson. They know all about it and start talking about the physics of measuring mass in the universe. I read about imaginary numbers. They tell me how there wouldn’t be a GPS without imaginary numbers. How do they know about imaginary numbers? Oh, we learned about it in high school. They learned about imaginary numbers in high school? The only imaginary number I knew in high school was a 95 on a math test.  I mention something about Thomas Jefferson and they go into a harangue on the Jefferson Bible. The Jefferson what? And then they tell me that Lewis of Lewis and Clark fame was manic depressive and committed suicide. Oh well…it’s fun learning stuff.
Anyway, back to The Benedictine Option. Dreher came up with a phrase “liquid modernity.” In our modern world information comes so fast it is like liquid passing through our brain. We can’t hold on to it.
There are many more interesting things in the book that I might write about later. But I did come up with a few take-aways.
#1: To improve self-discipline, I am going to write a free association blog daily except maybe Saturday and Sunday. I am not editing it or rewriting. Whatever comes out of my tiny brain is it. Bad grammar, poor sentence construction, misspelled words. Whatever.  So it will probably be a lot of garbage (garbage in, garbage out), but at least when I read what I write I will know what I’m thinking.
#2: I’m going to spend 30-minutes daily in contemplative prayer. Self-disciple again. But also to get closer to God. I need that, especially with earth-time running out.
#3: Dreher wrote we need to spend more time using our hands, getting our hands dirty–planting a garden, building something, painting a picture. So I am going to learn to play the guitar. I can already see myself wavering on this one. That will be a hard discipline for me to keep going. When I was a young man I struggled for two-years just to learn a few basic cords and I never could get the strings to stop vibrating against each other.