91Èȱ¬

From Rev’d Richard Coles, cleric and broadcaster:

I was talking to a friend the other day about ‘Breaking Bad’, the American TV series about a chemistry teacher turned drug dealer in Albuquerque - nothing unusual, except my friend is Mother Superior of a convent of nuns, and not perhaps in the programme-makers’ target demographic. 

The occasion was a conference for the leaders of religious communities about the challenges of the digital age. It was socks, it was sandals, it was smartphones. Perhaps it seems odd that monks and nuns living according to the Rule of St Benedict, written fifteen hundred years ago, should be much bothered by Open Source code, horizontal scaling, and Twitter?

It shouldn’t. Christian communities have always been early adopters of new communications technology. The invention of the book, the invention of printing, were milestones both in the history of the church, and the history of human civilisation. The invention of the internet perhaps even more significant. We have only just begun to understand the impact it has had - and will continue to have - on our lives.

This was what most interested the monks and nuns. Living alongside each other, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, until they die (a life sentence without parole) requires immense reserves of patience and forbearance. And so they wondered how living in the internet age, when we’re at each other on-line all day, affects the way we relate to one another?

Not always nicely, I suggested. There are many things I love about social media, but it has its ASBO aspects - trolling, blocking, unfriending. 

None of that for them, because they’re stuck there with each other, face to face, nowhere to hide. And so they’ve learnt some basic disciplines about being a decent human. It’s what the Rule of St Benedict is all about. 

None of us lives in a computer game. We are more than ones and noughts, more than pulses in super fast fibre optic cables; we are complex, paradoxical, mysterious creatures, who might find in ancient wisdom a better way of living now.