CISTERCIAN SALVATION

My memory was that the Cistercian monastic order broke off from the Benedictines as a response to the Black Death.  But when I checked it turned out to pre-exist before the plague arrived.  The movement was uniquely able to respond to the challenge.

"The Black Death was a devastating global epidemic of bubonic plague that struck Europe and Asia in the mid-1300s. The plague arrived in Europe in October 1347, when 12 ships from the Black Sea docked at the Sicilian port of Messina."  It's been suggested that the route that Corvid19 traveled was eerily similar to the Silk Road that Marco Polo and the plague both traveled.

Whatever the accuracy of this idea -- and plagues often trigger a lot of semi-true ideas -- the Black Death cut the population of Europe in half, leaving towns, fields and businesses empty.  It was the end of the "feudalism" system of economic and political order.  It was not truly a "global" pandemic since it didn't affect Africa, the Americas, or Australia, but only the "globe" of a particular culture that persists today.

"Feudalism. Feudalism was the medieval model of government predating the birth of the modern nation-state. Feudal society is a military hierarchy in which a ruler or lord offers mounted fighters a fief (medieval beneficium), a unit of land to control in exchange for a military service."  

Feudalism provoked a lot of war.  The next development was that of "nations."  It's possible that this pandemic today will end "nations" and move to some kind of world order.  It truly IS global, affecting people all over the planet.  

The first time I became aware of Cistercians was an image, a photograph of "night stairs."  The Benedictine way of life was built around a separated community with prayer as its spine, praying being required at intervals both day and night.  At 3AM, the same time that I awake from my "first sleep" in a "two-sleep" night, the monks went down these stairs that led directly from the dormitory to the sanctuary.  They are so old that though they are stone, they are worn to scoops where the feet traveled.

In general, this particular order of religious idealists has worked to return again and again to basics, their vision of Heaven not interfering with their clear aesthetic sense of this world.  Particularly in the beginning they were distinguished by architecture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cistercian_architecture

Their churches were "smooth pale stone" "designed to be witnessed at specific times of the day such as sunrise and sunset to capture the shifting light."  These are the natural times of prayer and contemplation.  Even the ruins stand, often in high places where a stream runs through, with remaining transcendence.  There are none of the monster gargoyles that other churches let crouch and leer over the people.

The order encouraged thought and work together, becoming a source of engineering in the management of water for cleansing and powering machines, which was part of the reason for locating by streams.  Associated with the monastic group were lay people, "serfs" who had no education, who did the raw labor of fields and possibly participated in the manufacture of cheese, mead, bread, and other commodities to sell to the surrounding people.  This formulation was an important part of the recovery of the European land use, which took almost three hundred years.

The Cisterians and their even more strict arm, the Trappists, persist still and aren't always Catholic anymore.  In England they are sometimes Anglican.  Variations of the formula of going apart, studying to be specialists, improving conditions, and supporting an adjunct community can persist today, especially if there is a rich patron.  Reading about them, persistently think about whether this doesn't persist in a secular way.

Science, or at least most of it, admits today's radical vision of existence based on eternity/infinity of knowledge and the humility of realizing how humans arise from it, return to it, but are capable of "knowing things" and therefore are participants.

In the past couple of decades I've had the opportunity to know about secular groups that are pushed together with each other but apart from the mainstream, urged to secrecy because of stigma, sometimes about sexual preference.  I had not known about places that served children, run by gay men almost as families.  I had not heard of coalitions of male sexworkers who took care of each other in a domestic setting like the original "house churches" of orders like the Cistercians.  Their leaders are often murdered by mainstream criminals, as I'm sure happened to religious communities as well.  Fear, rage, and jealousy always sneak around like gargoyle monsters and sometimes kill leaders of environmental or reform groups.

Part of the reason we don't know much about them is that they are endangered by publicity as there are always as many king-killers as there are kings, looking for someone to kill that will get them attention.  These days those tend to be multiple, children, and with religious identities.  In the days of the Cistercian beginnings publicity was word-of-mouth or hand-written and privately carried, so there was not the media constant building up and tearing down that prevents continuity and trust.

Some of us are noting that the elderly white men who have been so careless with their lives (and ours) may be uniquely vulnerable to this Covid19 virus.  It may be that both current and aspiring men may die ironically from their own conviction that they are invulnerable.  If this plague doesn't get them, the next one in what is clearly a procession of viruses may bring them down, making possible a renewal.

The clarity and idealism of people like the Cistercians (which have included nuns) would make the future something "clean pale stone" that arches high for prayer and contemplation at dawn, sundown, and even at 3AM in the night.