Into the Great Silence 
Fr Kevin Hegarty One of the best-attended films this year at the Irish Film Institute in Dublin was ‘Into the Great Silence’, a two-and-a-half hour silent documentary on the enclosed Carthusian monks at Grande Chartreuse in France. It was such a box office success that it returns to the Institute from March 16 to 22. I hope that our film clubs will take the opportunity of showing it in Mayo.
In 1987 the film director Philippe Groning asked the abbot of Grande Chartreuse for permission to do a documentary on the life of the monastery. The abbot replied that they were not ready. He said that he would contact him when they were.
Thirteen years later he invited him to film. There were certain conditions. No crew and no lights would be permitted, nor was the director allowed to interrupt the Brothers’ devotions. He would, instead, have to live with them as they live.
In the documentary we share their life of candlelit Masses and cloistered study. We enter their daily round of contemplation, worship and silence. There is a recurring device, throughout the documentary, whereby the monks stare wordlessly into the lens, reminding us that their pathway to the divine is a lonely and arduous route.
Why has this documentary attracted such interest? Maybe some of it is voyeuristic. Some people may be fascinated by a lifestyle which they consider eccentric.
I think, however, there is a deeper reason. John Moriarity, the Kerry philosopher, tells a story that is apposite. In the late 19th century in Africa there was a white plunderer explorer who had gathered a vast fortune in saleable goods. He wanted to transport the goods to the coast for shipping to England. He hired a number of African porters who worked hard to carry out his instructions. One day, inexplicably, they refused to move.
The explorer was angry and he threatened them. Still they refused to budge. Eventually he sat down and talked with them. He asked them what was the problem. “We are waiting,” they said “for our souls to catch up.”
We live in a hectic and noisy world. There is 24-hour television and radio. Cars, with double exhausts and aggressive music systems, scream through out streets. Mobile phones and video links have their uses. Their existence helps create, however, an insistence that we are always available. TS Eliot was right. We are distracted from distraction by distraction.
We need space to allow our souls to catch up. There is a desire for what Wordsworth called ‘the bliss of solitude’. The American writer John Shea has said that ‘humans require a space beyond hassle to hang a sanctuary lamp and consult all there is about who they are’.
My reflections on this topic are inspired by the gospel of the Transfiguration, read on the second Sunday of Lent. Peter, James and John accompanied Jesus on a trip up the mountain, away from the stresses of the everyday, where they experienced an intense presence of the divine. Peter summed up the experience by saying it was ‘wonderful to be here’.
We cannot expect a similar experience. We are not barred, however, from the landscape of transcendence; I believe we can sense God’s presence in quiet contemplation on the ‘bits and pieces of everyday’. Patrick Kavanagh understood this well:
The One Green, blue, yellow and red – God is down in the swamps and marshes,
Sensational as April and almost incredible the flowering of our catharsis.
A humble scene in a backward place
Where no one important ever looked;
The raving flowers looked up in the face
Of the One and the Endless, the Mind that has baulked
The profoundest of mortals. A primrose, a violet,
A violent wild iris – but mostly anonymous performers,
Yet an important occasion as the Muse at her toilet
Prepared to inform the local farmers
That beautiful, beautiful, beautiful God
Was breathing His love by a cut-away bog.
It just so happens that the Mayo-based artist Chris Doris is observing a 30-day silence at his studio in Carrowmore-Lacken, near Killala. He started the project on February 12. It concludes on March 23. I look forward to his reflection on the experience.
May he and all who search for meaning in life be blessed. In the words of John O’Donohue’s ‘Beauty Blessing’, ‘may the dawn anoint your eyes with wonder’.
