The leader of the Cistercian order worldwide reflects that this period of anxiety, confinement and stillness might also be a time of new awareness of the presence of God

Perhaps our first task as Christians, and as monks and nuns in particular, is to find a way of investing what is going on with sense. At heart, the drama society is currently living through is not so much, or not only, the pandemic, but the pandemic’s consequences for daily life.

The world has stopped. Enterprise, finance, politics, travel, entertainment, sport: all have stopped, as if for a universal Lent. But that is not all. Public religious life has also stopped. There is no public celebration of Mass, no church assemblies or gatherings, at any rate none at which the faithful meet in person. It is like a great fast, a great universal abstinence.
The lockdown dictated by the risk of contagion is presented and experienced as a necessary evil. We have lost the ability to stand still. We stop only if someone stops us. To come freely to a halt has become near impossible in Western (or for that matter, globalised) culture. We do not really stop even when on holiday. Only unwelcome accidents stop our breathless race to draw ever more out of life, out of time and, more often than not, out of others. Now, though, this epidemic has stopped us all, pretty much. All our projects and plans have been cancelled for God knows how long. And have not we, monks and nuns, got used to rushing around like everyone else, ever thinking about our life in terms of future projections?