The Value of Stability

Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy-Cons and a cultural commentator now working for the John Templeton Foundation on the online magazine "In Character", shared a piece yesterday (via his Blog) about his sister Ruthie Leming, who was recently diagnosed with Stage Four cancer. He described her "little way" of virtue, and commended the outpouring of generosity and support from people in St. Francisville, Louisiana, where Ruthie and her family live, and where Ruthie has lived all of her life.

Dreher went on to reflect on the "role of place" in the support Ruthie is receiving from her community. Excerpt:

I'm not talking about the virtues of our hometown, though those are present. Nor am I talking about the virtues of a small town, necessarily, because what I'm interested in can be present just as well in a big city. No, what interests me is the part taken by what the Benedictines would call stability.

Monks of the Benedictine order take vows of "stability," meaning that they promise to remain in the monastery where they took their vows until the end of their lives, barring an extraordinary intervention. The idea is critical to the Benedictine way, because it commits the monks to living with, celebrating with, and suffering with, each other, in community, and in turn with the community of laypeople they serve. In my sister's case, she chose to stay in our hometown (indeed, she and Mike are raising their girls right across the field from our parents' house, where we grew up), not out of a sense of duty, but because she loved it there. It always felt like home to her. With the exception of the four years she was in Baton Rouge at college (only 30 miles away), she's lived in St. Francisville all her life. People know her there; they always have. They've seen her character show itself over the course of 40 years. They know who she is; in most ways, I think, they know who she is better than her own brother, who is not (he hopes) a bad person, but who simply hasn't been there to see all the little acts of charity and kindness that amount, over a lifetime, to the habit of virtue.

Now, had Ruthie lived in New York City, and developed through her church and neighborhood institutions a web of friendship, she might be in the same situation today: surrounded by a dense network of people showing her and her family love, and carrying them through this dark period in their lives. So it's not just a small-town thing, at least I don't think it is. What it is, however, is a matter of stability. We are such a hyper-mobile society, and think nothing of picking up and moving all over the place for the sake of career. I am a perfect example of this. Because of this, though, we cannot develop the kinds of thickly and deeply rooted relationships that we might if we had stayed in one place. Some of us lie to ourselves about this, in the same way that working parents tell themselves that they can adequately compensate for time away from their children by making sure the time they do spend with the kids is "quality time." But in truth, there is no substitute for being there.

What a revelation it is to watch the community care for Ruthie and her family! One day, when this drama is done, I'm going to write more about this. I am only sorry that I can't see it every day, because it's a beautiful thing. I expected Julie to return sad from her four- day trip down there, and she was, but it was that bright sadness I wrote about -- sorrowful over Ruthie's suffering, but also glowing from the radiant love surrounding my sister and all those attending her. You can't easily generate that spontaneously. It takes time, and stillness, and patience.

The entirety of Dreher's beautiful reflection is worth a read.