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    March 2007
    Great Silence

    It may have been the sudden shift into the slowness of the film or the dinner unwisely taken
    before seeing it but I drowsed through the first half hour of Into Great Silence, the three hour
    long portrayal of life in the Carthusian solitude of La Grande Chartreuse. Like the thousands who
    have flocked to it in Europe making it a cinematic prodigy and bizarre success I was drawn by
    many comments and invitations to see for myself how a film without a plot – not even about bird
    migration or penguins but the most enclosed of Christian monks – could have touched the nerve
    of a culture as sensation-driven as ours.

    Seventeen years before it was made the director had approached the abbot to ask permission
    to live in the monastery and film the life. He did not receive a downright refusal but was told they
    were not yet ready. Fifteen years later the abbot called him to say they were now ready. I don’t
    know the abbot’s reasoning but I admired his sense of timing because the community was
    indeed ready to bear witness with remarkable innocence to the mystery of the contemplative
    life and the enigma of the way it is lived in monasteries.

    The camera sits in the solitude of a young monk’s austere cell watching but somehow not
    intruding on his prayer cycles, the fifteen minute sessions on knees and up, his reading, his
    seriously concentrated eating. As a viewer you are made to feel the awkward intimacy of the
    prime medium of this age, the voyeurism of its objectifying eye, the bigbrotherhood of its ability
    to make the mundane engrossing. The film moves as slowly as the life of its subjects and
    makes as little effort as they to justify its existence. There are no stars. No dramas. No
    vocational crises. No lament for the path not taken. It is difficult to say whether or not it has a
    tinge of romanticism. What it omits seems not to exist, not to be concealed. And what is
    revealed is a sparkling emptiness.

    The only uneasy moment in the film is a formal community recreation period but ask any novice
    and he will tell you these can be the most difficult of all monastic moments. The romp and
    sliding in the snow on the community outing seems genuinely boyish and filmed at a discrete
    distance that makes the solitude of their life appear all the more cosmic, like a plantation of
    chosen humanity on a spaceship to a new planet. At generous intervals there are living
    cinematic portraits of the monks who stare silently, with strange ease into the lens. The faces
    are young and eager, old and tired, intelligent and a little stupid. There is no judgement, no
    favouritism. They are as the life is. At the end of the film an old blind monk says how his loss of
    sight has helped him see God better.

    First, I thought, the film is popular because it illustrates an alternative life-style. Unless they have
    chosen to die, which happens, monasteries are usually looking or hoping for vocations. But
    Carthusian life is rarely represented at vocation exhibitions. It is a very unusual life. But for
    many today their unsatisfactory life-styles and the growing sense of horror at what we are
    doing to the planet suggest an entrapment, a loss of freedom in a world of infinite choice. Here
    one sees something really and utterly different. It may not attract many candidates but it shows
    we do have freedom and can use it for happiness.

    Secondly, what is being portrayed is perhaps the only kind of religious experience felt to be
    authentic today. Without proclaimed dogma and yet built on faith and belief, not seeking
    recognition or converts, not moralising or judging, the life of this monastery - at least as it is
    shown in this film - has a zenlike isness. As in many past periods of social crisis and religious
    turmoil it is solitude and silence that appear salvifically on the radar screen of the culture. The
    solitary and silent life – alone together – witnesses most eloquently to the true nature of the God
    whom everyone is fighting over.

    Thirdly, it is about more than religion. It is a love-story. This is the secret of the film. The monks
    seem happy but are not in love with each other. If they love each other it is because they are in
    love with the same invisible yet apparently ever-present person. Unnamed, unseen, even
    unspoken to, God plays in every scene. At first, one assumes it is the visible actors who are the
    lovers. Slowly it dawns that they are mirrors. The love we speak of is not our love for God but
    God’s love for us.





    Much love
    Laurence Freeman OSB
MESSAGE FROM FATHER LAURENCE, 8 March 2007