Monasticisms, Modern and Ancient

 Today is the feast day of Bernard of Clairvaux.  In the summer of 2005, I went to France with my parents, and as we drove from the Alsace region back to Paris, I saw a sign for Clairvaux.  I vaguely remembered Bernard of Clairvaux, but I couldn't remember what he did or why I remembered him.  That was before any of us had a smart phone, so we couldn't Google his name.  If you want to know more about him, I wrote this post for my theology blog.

That time of going to France with my mom and dad seems like another lifetime ago.  Back then, my grandmother was still alive, and any big trip was made with the worry that something might happen to her that would mean we needed to go to her.  We always traveled with trip insurance.

This has been a week where we've seen universities that had just opened close right back up again--and by close, I mean going virtual.  One of my spouse's young cousins moved to the university in Tennessee where she had planned to start class.  When the move to virtual was announced, she withdrew, moved back home to Indiana, and came up with a whole different life plan.

Ah, youth.

I'd been thinking that I've been glad that I didn't have an alternate life planned just before the pandemic--one less thing to grieve.  Of course, creating an alternate life plan now seems even harder, since I'm so very unsure of what post-pandemic life will look like, or when we'll be there.

It's that time of year, the doldrums of August, where I long for a mountain cabin and cooler weather.  My longing is particularly intense this year.  I even made this sketch last week:

I'm sure it's the news stories about spikes of cases on freshly opened university campuses that also accounts for my mood of anxiety about gathering gloom.  Plus, I keep track of all the contact tracing paperwork, so I'm aware of how many people are coming to campus.  I'm not near any of them for a long enough time to have much risk, and we're all wearing masks.

Of course, that's according to what we know now, that I can say I don't have much risk.

I wish I had a clever way to end this post, some way to circle back to Saint Bernard.  My brain goes to rescue dogs (the breed of a st. bernard) and the saint who saved the church from schism.  He's also given credit for helping monasticism flourish.

When historians write about this age, who will be our Bernard of Clairvaux?  Who will do the rescue work?  Who will walk us back from schism?