Leah Libresco - Building the Benedict option : a guide to gathering two or three together in His name

LEAH LIBRESCO

A Guide to Gathering Two or Three
Together in His Name

IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from Revised Standard Version of the BibleSecond Catholic Edition (Ignatius Edition) copyright 2006 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Excerpts from the English translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church , Second Edition, 1994, 1997, 2000 by Libreria Editrice VaticanaUnited States Catholic Conference, Washington, D.C. All rights reserved.

Cover images
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Monstrance
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Cover design and stitching by Davin Carlson

2018 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-62164-217-6 (PB)
ISBN 978-1-64229-043-1 (EB)
Library of Congress Control Number 2018931247
Printed in the United States of America

For everyone who has eaten in my home or fed me in theirs
and for Alexi, who cooks things up with me

Benedictine monasteries have priors and abbots. Benedictine lay communities have den mothersor ought to. Leah Libresco is the den mother of the Benedict Option.

I knew this from the moment I met her. Though we did not know each other aside from e-mails, Leah made me feel instantly at ease. By the end of the evening, I was convinced of two things: Leah is one of the sharpest intellectual Catholics I know, and she loves people more than ideas.

In the often-bruising world of Christian apologetics and public debate, that is a rare and beautiful thing, a something worth celebrating, cherishing, and passing on.

Leah Libresco has a special gift for hospitality, that most Benedictine of charisms. This became clear to me when I interviewed her for The Benedict Option . Listening to Leah tell me how she organized Benedict Option events in Washington, D.C., where she lived at the time, I thought that all of this seems so obviously the right and natural thing to do, but so few people do it. In the early 1990s, as a young Catholic professional living in D.C., I was deeply lonely in the faith and longed for connection to other believers, especially fellow single Catholics living so far from our homes in a new city. As Leah and I spoke, I thought about what a difference a Leah Libresco would have made in my life as a Catholic back then.

The amazing thing about Leahs way is that it is so ordinary, so achievable. Like the Rule of Saint Benedict, Leahs wisdom is of the everyday kind, a sort so plain that its easy to overlook. To read this book is not just to encounter good ideas, but also to awaken to ones own gifts for hospitality and community-building.

True story: Last Sunday at coffee hour at my church, I found myself talking to three people who were new in the parish and had become catechumens. I wished I could spend more time with them, but I thought about how busy my familys weekends usually are, how much work it would be to have a dinner party, and how these folksa young couple with a toddler and a single manprobably had plans anyway.

Then it hit me: What would Leah Libresco do? Having just finished reading this book, I applied Leahs advice. I was overthinking the matter. I didnt have to stage a fancy dinner. The point was to get us all around the same table to share a meal, drink some wine, tell stories, and become better friends. Keep it simple. Focus on the people.

After clearing it with my wife, I invited the catechumens to come over on Saturday night. Their faces lit up. Yes, they all said, enthusiastically. Turns out they had been hoping someone would invite them over sometime. We also learned in that conversation that the young couple had been desperate to find a babysitter for their toddler, because they hadnt had a night out alone since he was born. My wife and our three kids love to babysit.

Just like that, our little mission parish became a little less a group of people who go to church together, and a little more of a community, indeed a family. Its a small thing, but its everything. And I would not have found the courage to make that small step if it had not been for the graces in the little book you hold in your hands.

This is what Leah Libresco can do for you. This is what Leah Libresco can do for your community. This is what Leah Libresco can do for the Church.

It shouldnt be the case that people have to relearn what it means to be Christians in community, but we do. We didnt make this world of alienation and fragmentation, but its our responsibility to repair the brokenness wherever we can. This is why Building the Benedict Option is so valuable. Its not a book of abstract theorizing, but rather a book of applied Christianity. Its exactly the kind of thing I was hoping that my book The Benedict Option would engender: imaginative responses from other Christians who bring their distinct gifts to our common project.

Leahs apostolate is an excellent example of what Pope Benedict XVI meant when he called on believers living in the post-Christian West to see themselves and to act as a creative minority. The Church today does not lack for diagnosticians who can tell you whats wrong with the world. What it needs is joy-filled believers who see the crisis for what it is, but who also see what we caught up in it can become, if we try. What it needs are Christians who can see that the world is still, as Russell Kirk said, sunlit despite its vices.

What the world needs is more Leah Libresco. Read this book. Youll see. Read it with your friends. Itll change your life.

Rod Dreher
Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Ive never felt called to imitate Saint Simeon Stylites. Ive never sensed God calling me to build a pillar on top of a tower or a mountain and to live an ascetic life on it, far from other people. But God doesnt need to call stylites anymore. Its easy to become one accidentally.

Although marriage and monasticism would both require me to seek out someone elsehusband or mother superiorto discern with and to guide me, the atomized nature of modern life makes it possible to become a hermit unintentionally. This situation is a big departure from the history of hermits. At the time of the Desert Fathers, a monk who wanted to live alone had to get the permission of his spiritual father, because living alone, just he and God, was not something to undertake lightly. It was an unusual calling that required exceptional spiritual discipline. Living ones faith alone, without preparation, is the religious equivalent of trying to run a marathon without so much as a jogging habit as preparation.

As a convert from atheism, I didnt grow up in a Christian family with Christian traditions, so, when I came into the Church, I knew how badly I needed friends and mentors to depend on as I learned how to live as a Catholic. Fortunately, I had Catholic college friends and Dominican friars who talked to me and introduced me to other twenty-something Catholics they knew. This thick community helped me to begin my new life and, just as importantly, helped me to sustain it.

My need was obvious to everyone who knew that I was a convert, but I found that a number of my Christian friends longed for more of a community, for more opportunities to pray with others, for all the things that everyone had hurried to give me as a new Christian. But cradle Catholics dont always know how to ask for these things or whom to ask for them.

And the problem seemed to be bigger than just my parish. Rod Dreher, an Orthodox layman, on his blog and in his book The Benedict Option , speaks of a crisis of lonely American Christians. He took the name of his book and his project of community creation from the final pages of Alasdair MacIntyres work of moral philosophy After Virtue .