The Second Mark of a New Monasticism
Sharing economic resources with fellow community members and the needy among us
Understand Physical Realities
Accept and Adapt
Live within Gaia
As the Fossil Fuel Age winds down to its confusing but inevitable end it is likely that there will be a monastic revival. In this series of posts we explore this possibility using the ideas presented in the Posbury St. Francis Annual Lecture given by Dr. Bethany Sollereder. The lecture’s title was Radical Hope: the roots of courage in inevitable climate change.
Dr. Sollereder talked about how monasticism is one response to ‘inevitable climate change’. A screen shot of one of her slides is shown below. In it she identifies ‘12 Marks of New Monasticism’. We discuss each of these 12 marks in the context of an Age of Limits.
The first post in this series was The First Mark of a New Monasticism. It considered the possibility that monastic communities will relocate to ‘abandoned places of Empire’.
The second ‘Mark’ is,
Sharing economic resources with fellow community members and the needy among us.
One of the central tenets of monasticism is that resources are shared among all members. They live a communal lifestyle where personal ownership is limited or non-existent. Food, shelter and clothing are provided by the monastery for the collective benefit of its members.
Within broader society, monastic communities offer hospitality to travelers and pilgrims. They also provide food, education, shelter and medical care to people in the local area. (Some monastic community members, such as the Vinaya Buddhists, receive food from the local community.)
As the world’s population resets from its current level of 8.5 billion people to the less than 1 billion of Biblical times, there will be no shortage of people looking for help. However, the monastic communities themselves will face their own challenges, including the following.
Climate change will make it difficult to grow crops because the weather will be uncertain and highly variable from year to year.
Large parts of the world will be uninhabitable because wet bulb temperatures will be so high.
Heritage problems such as loss of topsoil and the disposal of nuclear waste will remain.
Monasteries will be seen as a source of wealth, and so be subject to attacks and raids. (The prosperous monasteries of north-eastern England in the eighth century CE were repeatedly attacked by Viking pirates.)
But the biggest challenge that the monks and nuns will face is likely to be with their own world view. They will have grown up in a time of material abundance and advanced technology. They, like everyone else, will find it very difficult to shed the expectation that technology will provide a solution to the wide range of problems.
