A striking example of this shift in communal sedentariness can be seen, right now, in the impact of the Internet on monastic life, particularly in women's convents where, to date, only 25 of France's surviving 270 monasteries are still resistant to using the WEB- despite 'the underhand imposition of a new pace of communication that is slipping into the spirit of monastic time', as a Cistercian monk from Hauterive points out.1
Yet everyone insists on the essential discrimination of each monk: '1he material enclosure is not an absolute; it is a means. 1he main question is rather: how to experience the relationship to the world (to the whole world instantaneously). 1he Internet forces us to have another look at our borders and to internalize that enclosure.'2
1he WEB, in fact, potentially opens all the doors and steps through all the gates of the monastic enclosure. Which is why the Benedictines of Bec-Hellouin Abbey took the initiative of organizing a session on the subject in the autumn of 2009.
As Dom Notker Wolf, primate of the order, noted: 'Detachment, silence and solitude, or else: the cul ture of CONNECTION and EVERYfHING, NOW. lhere is no more space to wait in, no more space in which to desire the infinite. In this cul ture, waiting is always negative. . . . I t means waiting for the end of an operation and not for an encounter.' Apropos the contemplative life of the convent, he concludes: 'We shouldn't so much regulate things based on virtual cul ture, but on monastic cul ture . ' 1
THE GREAT ACCELERATOR
1 <sup>La</sup> <sup>Croix</sup>, 7 <sup>October</sup> 2009.
<sub>2</sub> Ibid.
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