Ireland is a country where the old Catholic world is never entirely out of sight. It lingers in holy wells, ruined monasteries, pilgrim paths, roadside shrines, Mass cards, family prayers, sacred caves and the ever-present Breastplate of St Patrick. For many, these are fragments of a culture past its prime rather than signs of something alive.
For American author Rod Dreher, this fragmentation is not simply a cultural loss but a spiritual emergency.
Mr Dreher, known as a commentator and for his bestselling books Live Not by Lies and The Benedict Option, spoke to The Irish Catholic about his most recent book Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age. He said the modern West is not suffering only from secularism, but from a loss of the Christian imagination – the sense that the world is charged with meaning.
“I didn’t conceive of this as a trilogy, but many people have pointed out that it actually kind of is,” he said, reflecting on these three most recent books.
“It gets to the heart of what being a Christian is: how to live with a constant awareness, or near-constant awareness, of the presence of God, and to allow that to illuminate all of our life, our material life too.”
Mr Dreher’s own journey towards Christianity began not with an argument, but with an encounter with astounding beauty when at 17, he walked into Chartres Cathedral. “There was nothing in my life growing up in small-town America in the late 20th century that prepared me for the glory of God made manifest there, and I was just totally overcome by wonder,” he said.
Later, as a young reporter in Louisiana, he met an elderly Catholic priest who seemed to embody holiness. Reading Joseph Ratzinger years later, he recognised what had happened to him.
That’s what I wanted to do with Living in Wonder: to help people today, not just unbelievers, but believers whose faith has gone dry”
“The best arguments for the faith today are not rational, propositional arguments, but rather the beauty that comes from the Church and the saints, which is a form of moral beauty,” Mr Dreher said. “I realised, my God, that’s true. That’s how I became a Christian.”
This is the main current behind Living in Wonder: that doctrine alone is not enough to sustain a Christian imagination in a disenchanted age.
“That’s what I wanted to do with Living in Wonder: to help people today, not just unbelievers, but believers whose faith has gone dry, to realise that we have within the Christian tradition all we need to re-enchant the world. We just have to learn how to open our eyes to it.”
This question of re-enchantment has become increasingly present across the Christian world. The challenge is no longer simply whether people believe in God or not. The spiritual hunger, or restlessness, of which St Augustine speaks still remains. However, the danger is that having turned from the Church, many people now seek transcendence elsewhere.
An idea which Mr Dreher said was planted during a conversation with an Anglican seminarian:
“He said, ‘I bet you think the greatest threat to the Church is atheism and secularism.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘It’s true for your generation, but not mine.’ I said, ‘So what is it for your generation?’ He said, ‘The occult.’”
In Ireland, that hunger for mystery has often outlived the old Catholic structures that once shaped it. When asked about the Irish spiritual landscape, Mr Dreher said the search for enchantment must not become detached from Christ. “The danger there is that the Irish, in searching for spiritual experience, will turn to the pagan gods,” he said.
At the same time, he believes Ireland has deep resources for renewal. “Ireland has so many saints, wild saints, like St Colman,” he said, recalling a visit to St Colman’s Cave with writer Paul Kingsnorth.
Mr Kingsnorth has argued that any revival of Christianity here may come through what Mr Dreher called the “wild saints” of ancient Irish Christianity.
“The story of the West can be told as how Christianity was received and developed by particular peoples over time, in particular places,” Mr Dreher said. “Of course, Irish and Celtic Christianity is a central part of that. It’s there. All you have to do is open your eyes, look past the corruption of the 20th and early 21st century in the institutional Church, and realise that it is still there, just waiting to be recovered.”
The reference to corruption and scandal is not random either. Mr Dreher entered the Catholic Church as a convert but later became Orthodox after years of reporting on clerical abuse. That makes his words to Irish Catholics complicated, but also direct.
“As someone who did lose his Catholicism because of the scandal that many Irish have, I would just encourage them: don’t leave the faith but realise that the faith is so much greater than the institution itself,” he said. “If you go to places like St Colman’s Cave and holy wells and recover that ancient Christianity, which is your patrimony, do not let failed clerics and bishops take that away from you.”
In recent months, Mr Dreher has begun praying St Patrick’s Breastplate every morning, saying he loves the prayer because it takes that old Celtic sense of the enchanted world and places it under Christ.
“They bring in the Celtic pagan understanding of the enchantment of the environment, but they Christianise it and invoke Christ as the protector against all of these things that may destroy the body or the soul,” he said. “I have found that to be so powerful, and it’s become part of my daily prayer life.”
Re-enchantment, for Mr Dreher, is not a matter of nostalgia or romanticising some ideal past. It requires a recovery of those practices which tie us to the here and now, but also to God: prayer, fasting, ritual, attention, Scripture, beauty and the consecration of ordinary life.
Don’t do it in opposition to what the Church says, but in communion with the Church. But be an entrepreneur about it”
“What we pay attention to is what is real for us,” he said. “If we are on our phones all the time, or on the internet all the time, which becomes our reality.”
The answer, he believes, must be embodied. He urged Catholics to recover older disciplines which once shaped ordinary Christian life, including fasting, sacramentality, and an understanding that even the body is to be consecrated to the worship of Christ.
Nor does he believe Catholics should wait passively for renewal to come from above: “Anybody can do this. You don’t have to wait for permission to do it. Don’t do it in opposition to what the Church says, but in communion with the Church. But be an entrepreneur about it.”
For Irish Catholics discouraged by scandal, secularisation or weak leadership, Mr Dreher’s message is not despair but responsibility. “It’s your Church too,” he said.
And in a culture still searching for transcendence, he believes Christians have more to offer than they often realise. “For all of the oppression and darkness and confusion that we’re living with as Christians today,” he said, “we also have tremendous opportunities to make something beautiful for God.”
