Rod Dreher's Monastic Vision

A bad Dreher post can be mean-spirited and overwrought, but when he's at his best his posts are unique: deeply confessional, achingly sincere, intellectually searching. The day after Ruthie died, in September, 2011, Dreher wrote a twenty-seven-hundred-word entry describing her funeral. He recalled how, the night before the service, half of St. Francisville had waited in the rain to pay their respects. Her friends sprinkled creek sand over her body, pulled up beach chairs, and sang to her. The next morning, because Ruthie often went barefoot, her daughters stood barefoot in their pew. When the funeral party arrived at the cemetery, Dreher saw that the pallbearers, too, had removed their shoes. The six burly men “carried Ruthie to her grave across the damp cemetery grounds in their bare feet,” Dreher wrote. The love he had seen was “of such intense beauty that it was hard to look upon it and hold yourself together.”