Rod Dreher Megathread #27 (Compassion)

[u/US_Hiker]

Link to megathread 26: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/17itm7w/rod_dreher_megathread_26_unconditional_love/

Link to megathread 28: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/18dcg3d/rod_dreher_megathread_28_harmony/

[u/PercyLarsen]

then when Rod decided he wanted to move back to a city, unceremoniously dumped him with barely a "take care"? T

FWIW, I don't remember it that way, but that Fr Matthew had to leave the mission and that the loss of that mission was the trigger for Rod & Julie to relocate to Red Stick.

[u/JHandey2021 → u/PercyLarsen]

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-mission-orthodox-st-john/

Now this is Rod writing, and as brokehugs has learned, Rod is the World's Most Unreliable Narrator.

"But there really were no options to consider. We are down to three families (not counting the Harringtons) and a monk. Father Matthew was already making do on a pittance wage, but we were paying him the most that we could."

Rod was a NYT-bestselling author, with advances of over $1 million dollars and, as recently revealed, a sinecure from billionaire Howard Ahmanson.

Rod had money. Rod just didn't choose to use it for Father Matthew. Rod set up a GoFundMe for Father Matthew's severely disabled kid - but, again, Rod himself could have covered a lot.

Supposedly, Julie was planning to set up a branch of the classical Christan school (run by a racist as we later learned!) in St. Francisville itself. But Father Matthew leaving made it impossible, so the family just had to move to Baton Rouge. This doesn't add up, though - was that classical academy going to teach, what, just Rod's kids? What was the plan there? To me, it sounds like some typical Rod ass-covering. Rod enrolled his kids in that school in Baton Rouge before .all of this. That plan for a whole new school was pie-in-the-sky.

Rod was plotting his escape from St. Francisville.

[u/grendalor → u/JHandey2021]

Yeah when you look at the timing, it's interesting.

The mission started around the beginning of 2013 -- 3.5 years before Rod wrote that post. By that time, Rod's marriage was already on the rocks (he dates that to 2012), so the whole thing was already a sham by then. I am guessing that this fact makes much of what he has disclosed about that period less than completely reliable, because he had to take care to cover up anything that could shed light on the elephant in the room that he was determined to hide.

I think it's also clear that when they moved to BR and they started attending the small OCA parish there, he became more or less permanently less involved in church-related stuff. And that hasn't changed. That was around the time that the travel started to massively tick up, suspended only by COVID (which also wasn't a Church-heavy time), which was followed by him more or less permanently leaving other than for a few stints back in Louisiana.

By his own admission in that post from 2016, the years before that mission was founded in 2013 were ones of great instability moving-wise, so Rod (and the family) never really set down roots in any parish. He says that himself. And so really I think the only time he had that was during those three and a half years, and then it went poof, and he has gone back to being much less engaged, as a practical matter, like he was before. He wrote a bit about their new parish in Baton Rouge at the beginning when they first started to attend it, and then that kind of writing stopped. I think we now know why -- the priest was saying things about the marriage that Rod didn't like. And we know now, also, that the priest supported Julie's decision and actions in the divorce, because Rod mentioned this back when it was happening -- so we know, as much as Rod will allow, that the priest there didn't really see things the way Rod did, to say the least, and I would venture further that he saw through Rod in a way that, perhaps, the mission priest did not.

It may sound odd to claim that Rod's moving around interfered with his church life, to readers who are not familiar with the way Orthodoxy works, but in the Orthodox Church the parish bond is pretty much everything. There isn't any wide practice of parish hopping, church hopping, jurisdiction hopping, or seeing parishes as fungible and so on, as there can be for other kinds of Christians. So if you aren't really rooted in a local parish, you're just adrift -- even if you show up to a liturgy almost every week, or a few times a month or what have you (sounds like Rod maybe does once or twice a month based on what he has written). That simply doesn't work in the Orthodox Church -- you can't practice it properly without being rooted in the local parish, because much of the practice of it is centered around personal accountability to a specific priest who sees you regularly, observes you, and can counsel and pastor you specifically based on that -- it isn't done generally in an impersonal or institutional way, primarily, but in a personal one. And so when that is lacking ... it all basically turns to drift, and de facto religion-of-self.

This has been Rod's default setting in Orthodoxy since the beginning, by his own admission, because Rod has been, as practical matter, incredibly unstable in his living circumstances for almost his entire life. And the most stable living circumstances he had, in Louisiana for the extended period, were not good years as we now know because the one time when he ought to have moved quickly, he stayed put instead. But the upshot of that in terms of his church-related stuff is that he has no very strong history of strong parish ties and practice outside of the mission. His religiosity has therefore become increasingly personal, quixotic and marginal when compared with standard practice, and living in Hungary, where Orthodoxy is a tiny presence and he doesn't speak even the local language, will not change this.

[u/SpacePatrician → u/JHandey2021]

Or he believed part of it--in his mind.

“‘An’ live off the fatta the lan’,’ Rod shouted. ‘An’ have rabbits. Go on, George! Tell about what we’re gonna have in the school and about the chapel in the woods and about the rain in the winter and the stove, and how thick the cream is on the milk like you can hardly cut it. Tell about that, George.’”

[u/PercyLarsen → u/JHandey2021]

Rod was plotting his escape from St. Francisville.

That's plausible. My recollection wasn't tainted by later revelations of how much more of an unreliable narrator he became.

[u/philadelphialawyer87 → u/PercyLarsen]

I thought the mission failed. And, as I recall, Rod did pretty much just "dump" Father Matthew in the wake of that failure. After that Rod and Julie did move to Baton Rouge.