Peak into a Stunning Film

Of Gods and Men

Recently posted my comment regarding this moving film. Here is a link to a segment from the PBS program "Religion and Ethics" in which Fr. James Martin, SJ reviews the film and essential clips are shown. His words and the visual images are a rare treat.

http://video.pbs.org/video/1865884343

For those who missed the first post, this French film is about a small community of Trappists who lived in Algeria and were kidnapped and murdered in the course of the Algerian uprising in 1996. How timely today when the Middle East is in such turmoil.

"Of Gods and Men"

Cinema as Lenten
Meditation

Rarely have big screen film images so persistantly returned to mind, not to mention heart, as those seen in the film "Of Gods and Men", directed by Xavier Beauvois. For months we have been reading uniformly fine reviews of in publications like the New York Times, America Magazine and The New Yorker.

The film tells the true story of eight Trappist monks caught in the middle of a brutal and protracted civil war between government forces and an Islamist insurgency in Algeria during the 1990s. The French monks who had come to enjoy an integral and highly respected relationship with the Moslems surrounding them, were ultimately drawn into the violence. In 1996 they were kidnapped and beheaded. The insurgency claimed responsibility at the time but more recent revelations in previously secret documents indicate some governmental involvement.

This film is appropriate material for Lenten meditation.  Witnessing the rising level of brutal violence around them and feeling pressure from both Islamist extremists who suspect all foreigners and local military presence resentful of care given to members of the insurgency in the monastery clinic, the monks must decide whether to heed official warnings and leave the country or to remain and continue to give witness to the Christian message of God's love. Particularly affecting is depiction of the interior process of each man reconsidering the meaning of his call and that of the web of relationship and commitment which creates and sustains the monatsic community. Each monk has to come to grips with the decision to remain in place, living in the charity taught by Jesus Christ or leaving in order to escape almost certain death. The passage through faith of each man is imaged on the screen as he moves even deeper into the Passion of Jesus.

Beneath the surface features of a life played out among 'the other' (Algerian Muslim culture) and later in the presence of unpredictable and horrible violence, there excisted the unchageable, the essential, the law of love embodied in the person of Jesus Christ. This was love for the self, their small monastic community and the people among whom they lived. The monks are seen discussing matters of faith and ethics with local Muslim teachers; healing children and treating the elderly in their clinic; and celebrating cultural rites of passage with their Moslem neighbors. Neither hardship nor harsh reality could sway them because they are able in prayer and in discussion with each other to move once again to the deeper place within; the place where ultimate truth, ultimate love reside.

One last observation from one who lives in monastic community. The film is particularly effective in communicating subtle interactions between community members, those non-verbal looks, gestures and actions which express fraternal love and respect, the quality of inter-relationship that should typify the monastic community. Watch for these expressions of love among men who have lived together for a long time in the day to day of contemplative life.

Another Contemplative CD

Stefan at Jade Music out in California has sent me another CD; one that could be called 'Sounds for Contemplation.' Jade produced the CD of the soundtrack of the documentary film Into Great Silence by the German film maker Philip Groning which was such a hit last year. This new CD is a recording of Sunday Matins, three Nocturnes and Lauds (Offices of the Liturgy of the Hours). The monks enter the choir at quarter past midnight to chant this Office of the Night. Absent is the sanitized purity of studio recordings. The sound of foot steps, coughs, creaking floor boards, and knees hitting wood are the ambient noises accompanying the other worldly Latin chant of the Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse monastery in France. Close your eyes and you are in their midst. It is a sound not just for the souls of contemplative nuns and monks but for those who wish to be transported into another world designed only to support the search for God.

Along with the CD comes a booklet in which all the of Psalms, hymns and readings appear in Latin and English should one wish to pray along. An introduction entitled "Who Is a Monk?" concludes with these words:

Because of his small but significant part, the Carthusian monk

is a canal of life: a very thin artery that has the capacity

to spread the spiritual energy of the divine grace

all over the surface of the earth and even in the whole body of Creation.

Visualizing the Heart of Contemplative Monastic Life

Philip Groning's Film

Into Great Silence

Feast for the Eyes

and

Balm for the Soul

An experience can be 'made' in the waiting or destroyed by inflated anticipation. In speaking of the film Into Great Silence, the period of long expectation, hearing the reactions of others and reading reviews did nothing to lessen enjoyment of the experience and the impact of its images. I am not qualified to comment on the technical achievements of the film nor do I wish to spoil the experience of seeing it by offering too many specifics concerning details and images that remain with me so powerfully. However, I do want to share my reaction and give my hearty recommendation.

Our community of contemplative nuns does not, in any way, live the austere style of hermit life within community for which the Carthusians are known. Theirs is a most ascetic life, which is lived within the monastic collective, but with each day spent almost exclusively within the confines of one's cell (a small 'apartment' of rooms with a garden) devoted to prayer, meditation, work, study and rest. The monastery of the Grande Chartreuse is a huge medieval appearing complex perched on a mountainside in eastern France. Because we interpret and live our rules of enclosure in a different manner, five of us were able to go to a local cinema to see the film on the big screen. This is not typical for us at all. We approached this film as a source of spiritual enrichment, as a mediation on the values that lie at the heart of the life embraced by Christian contemplative monks and nuns all over world and their counterparts in every major religious tradition.

That is exactly what the gifted and patient Philip Groning provided for those who see his film. It was an experience, I believe, very much enhanced by viewing it on a large screen which paid fitting homage to spectacular panoramas of mountains and sky. Sitting in the dark silence of the theater provided the ambiance of setting and tone conducive to entering into such a contemplative meditation. It is testimony to the magnetism of the film that its extreme length, a necessary feature communicating the call to perseverance for a lifetime, is quickly forgotten as one is completely drawn into the pace, the visuals and the portent of the documentary. And, oddly enough in our age of extreme bombardment by sound of every kind, the silence is soon appreciated as gift - less interference with the message.

The message at hand is the mystery that lies at the heart of such a life - total, utter, exclusive surrender to the presence of God. If this film were one's only source of solid information about the Carthusian way of life, the viewer would remain quite ignorant. The film does not indicate how many times a day they pray together or alone; how the house is run; how assignments are made; who can come and who can go; whether or not they attend Mass every day; how they elect their abbot. Although the film visually carries the viewer from one winter through the year to the next winter, it gives no account of the events of the Liturgical Year. The only rituals observed are the Communion part of a Mass and a procession with adoration of the Blessed Sacrament for the Feast of Corpus Christi. It may be that Groning saw these as merely externals which do not speak of the nature of the contemplative imperative within the individual. It was this matter of the heart, this mystery that his images communicated. In this he succeeds totally. Visualized in image, repetition, composition, occasional sound and brief interspersed quotes from scripture and spiritual works is the heart of the matter - utter devotion to a life of being present to God, simplicity in all things, and surrender to God's will in loving charity. How one 'does' this is not the point. The Carthusians do it this way. We Redemptoristines do it another way. The Carmelites and the Trappists in still other ways, each to their own charismatic insight, emphasizing solitude here, or silence there, or, for some, community life as the locus for individual transformation. But, in the heart, lie the same values, the same interior movement, the same desire for God, the same effort, although differently expressed, to become 'walled about by God.'

I found the movie to be a visual feast for the eyes; sometimes one Renaissance or Dutch master's rendering of a scene after the other; sometimes an elongated impressionist image moving and changing shape before the eyes; a newly washed tin plate leaning against a stone wall dripping rinse water one slow drop at a time or the play of raindrops on the surface of a pool of water creating a multitude of endless and unique rippled patterns.

Enough words! After all, there a few words in the film. I will close with one of the quotations periodically appearing across the screen in the film.

You shall seek me and because you seek me with all your heart, I will let myself be found.