Rod Dreher, Fool for Christ

He did not go unshod in the Russian winter or appear to be insane. He accepted a harsher asceticism: writing about every bit of his life, however humiliating, in a Knausgaardian memoir novel.

St. Alexios of Rome, fool for Christ, was born into a wealthy family but died a beggar on his parents’ doorsteps, unrecognizable in his tatters. St. Xenia of St. Petersburg, fool for Christ, wore her late husband’s military uniform and slept outside year round. St. Basil of Moscow, fool for Christ, went barefoot even in winter. He once looked Ivan the Terrible in the eyes and called him a murderer. Elder Macarius of Novopskov and Starobelsk and Blessed Nun Faina of Novopskov, fools of Christ in the Donbass. Hieroschemamonk Feofil, fool for Christ of the Kiev Caves. Countless are the fools for Christ, saints all.

Then there is the curious case of Rod Dreher. He did not go unshod in the Russian winter or appear to be insane. He accepted a harsher asceticism: writing about every bit of his life, however humiliating, in a Knausgaardian memoir novel published across tens of thousands of blogposts. He developed a readership of millions and was careful not to lessen the self-humiliation by revealing the nature of his writing. None suspected.

As he grew older, Dreher was given the gift of prophetic foresight. He would write and schedule weeks or months of blog posts foretelling his future misfortunes and the misfortunes of his countrymen and then retreat to a simple hermitage in the Kelet-cserháti forest outside Hollókő, Hungary to pray and fast. He became known to locals as a holy man and through his miraculous prayers led many Magyars to Orthodoxy. The hermitage was a rare fact of his life he concealed from blog readers.

The other fact was his death. Before he died he wrote and scheduled years of blog posts, which continue still, day after day, to describe the decline of the West and the various (now fictional) humiliating details about himself and his family. He wrote also two books, never mentioned on the blog, about asceticism and the life of prayer: Callow Man and Beneath Christ.

In the last year of his life a small monastic community formed around his hermitage, and it is the rural Magyars monks of this small, clandestine monastery that today preserve those books.

Decades hence the scheduled blogposts will reveal the truth of his calling. The books will be published and spark a renewal of monasticism in the West. And in the next millennium, his spiritual sons and daughters will end the schism in the Church.