In July of this year, the parody news network The Onion ran an article titled "Unambitious Loser with Happy, Fulfilling Life Still Lives in Hometown." It was a marvelous piece of satirical journalism focusing on society's disdain for people who "settle" for a "boring" life of meaningful relationships and healthy work-life balance. As someone who has spent a fair amount of time voicing her own disdain for "ordinary" lifestyles, it was a good jab at my own ideas of success and significance’an experience slightly akin to what Rod Dreher describes in his book, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming.
Rod and his sister, Ruthie Dreher Leming, were the fifth generation of their family to be born in Starhill, Louisiana, a tiny town just outside of Baton Rouge. While Rod spent much of his time with his well-traveled aunts, reading books, and learning about Europe, Ruthie spent her time with her father fishing and hunting. While they do love one another, their personality differences make communicating that love very difficult, and when Rod leaves home for boarding school, and ultimately for New York to begin a career as a journalist, it marks a definitive transition in his relationship with his sister and father, both of whom feel rejected by his move.
While Ruthie chooses to marry her high school sweetheart, stay at home, and raise a family, Rod is living in metropolitan areas writing for The New York Post and making a name for himself in journalism. As time passes, they maintain their relationship, but on a superficial level. Although she does not want to discuss it, Ruthie resents Rod's abandonment of their hometown.
Dreher's relationship with his family comes to a head when he and his wife Julie find out that Ruthie has malignant carcinoma’a form of lung cancer so advanced that she has only months left to live. During the remaining two years of her life, he and his young family fly back and forth to Louisiana, ostensibly to support his dying sister and her family, but ultimately to attempt to heal the breach. The resolution never comes during his sister's lifetime’his attempts at genuine reconciliation are acknowledged and appreciated, but never fully realized. Yet in spite of their inability to move forward, their time together and his re-acquaintance with his hometown allow him to see her and their neighbors in a new light. The monotonous, plodding community he ran away from is galvanized by his sister's illness, and the community rallies to raise $43,000 to help the Lemings with Ruthie's medical bills. The narrow-minded people who bullied him show up in droves to clean their home, help their aging parents, and take care of their children. In the wake of her untimely death, he comes to see his sister's mundane, unremarkable life as something genuinely extraordinary and meaningful. She wasn't brilliant, won no awards, and never walked a red carpet, but her life as a wife, mother, teacher, and friend impacted more people in a more profound way than Rod with his high-powered, public career:
The love that had sustained Ruthie through her cancer…came from somewhere. Like Ruthie, my mother and father have cultivated it, in this little patch of ground, all their lives. They had no grand gestures of philanthropy or goodness to their name, but rather they were always faithful in small things.
As he reflects on the vast effects of simple fidelity to common responsibilities, he begins to question his own priorities and the life he's built with his family in Philadelphia. His wife shares his concerns, and while they agree that the opportunities for themselves and their children are greater on the East Coast, they don't compare with the value of living with their family and building on the strong roots of Starhill. Preparing himself for jibes about toothless, cousin-marrying relatives in the Appalachian Mountains, he breaks the news to his friends that he's moving his family back home. The almost universal response is one of approval and encouragement, even envy. One friend writes:
"Everything I've done has been for career advancement. Go for the money, the good jobs. And we have done well. But we are alone in the world," he said. "Almost everybody we know is like that. My family is all over the country. My kids only call if they want something. People like us, when we get old, our kids can't move back to care for us if they wanted to because we all go off to some golf resort to retire. This is the world we have made for ourselves. I envy you that you get to escape it."
Of course, it's not all love and barbecue under the pecan groves. Rod's complicated relationship with his family has consequences, and they bear themselves out in the transition to Louisiana. He has a hard time comforting his nieces who, due to their mother's oft-voiced disapproval, don't trust or like him. His father begins to drink and give way to melancholy, hurting both his son and his wife, and Rod begins to see the same destructive patterns that dominated his and Ruthie's childhood emerging in his own sons. But there is also intimacy and reconciliation, particularly with his father, who after a while speaks openly about his own deep regrets of sacrificing his wife's happiness and his own dreams in order to stay in Starhill. As much as Dreher writes about the value of domestic stability and generational community, he is careful to articulate the danger in idolizing home and family. It was here that my admiration and respect for him as a writer grew’he paints accurate portraits of his family, but with loving strokes. He's open about his own sins, but not unrestrained. He gives us a careful, nuanced story of his journey home, and I was grateful for the kindly, respectful manner in which he told it.
Christians today are every bit as likely to feel the call of the big city and great aspirations. Joel Osteen, Oprah, and Tony Robbins tell us that God didn't create us to be average but that he wants us to make our mark on this generation. While there's nothing wrong with aiming high, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming encourages us to take a careful look at our definition of "high," and to bear in mind that what is enduring is not always glamorous’that success does not always mean celebrity.
