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20 August 2026  Sirach 15:1-6

Memorial of St. Bernard, Abbot and Doctor of the Church

“…he who is practiced in the law will come to wisdom.”  (Sirach 15:1-6)  

St. Bernard of Clairvaux was the source of much of the energy of the so-called Renaissnce of the Twelfth Century. Monasticism in those days was losing its mojo, in large degree because of its entanglements with wealth. Monasteries had acquired massive amounts of land, and the rents, tithes and taxes that went with it. As a result, monks were eliminating manual labor from their responsibilities, outsourcing it to local peasants. The monks themselves lived the comfortable lives of the landed nobility. To facilitate this life, monasteries were built near trade routes and cities – places where commerce was near at hand, and monks could fund their easy living.

We need to move away from the ersatz “comfort” of the screens we park ourselves in front of, and into the more wild places of love, beauty, faith and truth, where there are no apps to help us, no equations to reassure us, and no fellow tech-junkies to tell us we’re OK

St. Bernard led a return to a more austere form of the monastic life, as it had been at the beginning, emphasizing a life of poverty, stability, chastity and obedience. Monasteries were built in wild, secluded areas where monks would have to work hard daily to tame the landscape, and achieve true solitary contemplation.

Modern life pushes us to consider all problems as technical, with technological solutions, while neglecting the non-technical, non-technological places where meaning, purpose and deep human connection live. The ubiquitous sign of this preoccupation is people who are made nervous, panicky, or angry if they are separated from their cell phones. Already frustrated by their inability to answer life’s big questions of meaning with technical/technological solutions, young people especially try to alleviate their boredom and sadness by distraction with addictive technology, like cell phones, which only increases the sense that they are living not authentic life but some kind of simulation. This has been aptly called a “doom loop” in which happiness degrades little by little, and then crashes into terminal boredom and depression.

Arthur Brooks’ 2026 The Meaning of Your Life, suggests that the situation we are facing in our time, and the situation faced by St. Bernard are similar. We are looking for meaning in the wrong places, and hoping too much in technological solutions to give us peace:

Instead, to escape, we need to put the complicated parts of life in their proper place, unlearning a bunch of bad habits that have made the search for meaning frustrating and fruitless. Then we need to give our attention to skills that can develop our capacity to find meaning in the mysterious spaces of life. (The Meaning of Your Life, p. 57)

In the same way that St. Bernard sought to move his monasteries away from trade routes and commercial cities, and into wild places where monks had to struggle night and day to tame nature, so we need to move away from the ersatz “comfort” of the screens we park ourselves in front of, and into the more wild places of love, beauty, faith and truth, where there are no apps to help us, no equations to reassure us, and no fellow tech-junkies to tell us we’re OK. A good way to seek these places is the discipline that started the Renaissance of the 12th century, the Renaissance of the 15th/16th century, the Enlightenment of the 17th century, and pretty much every other movement that has lifted our species, viz., reading. Reading is attributing meaning to small lines – the lines are not the meaning we give them, but they point to it. We cannot see the meaning in the lines, but we know it is there. Reading, by its very nature, therefore, transports us to a place that “eye hath not seen and ear hath not heard,” a place where technology is no help to find our way. That’s just the kind of place where all meaning lives.

That’s why reading is a good place to start.