Into Great Silence

Into Great Silence
A Film by Philip Gröning
Zeitgeist Video, 2005
Review by Carl McColman

Into Great Silence finally opened in Atlanta last night. And while advance buzz and personal anticipation for an upcoming film can lead to disappointment (anyone remember the collective horror that descended across America the summer of 1999 when The Phantom Menace turned out to be so mediocre?), I am pleased to report that this is a film that exceeded my expectations. In fact, at the risk of being a tad overblown, I would suggest that Into Great Silence can stand on its own as a significant document of Christian contemplative experience, alongside the best work of Thomas Merton or even The Cloud of Unknowing. Granted, this is a film that inspires many questions and provides few if any answers. But that’s part of its genius.

It would be quite a stretch to say this movie was “hyped,” but it did have its share of advance publicity, which was helpful in preparing me for how singularly quiet a film it is. Basically a one-man production, Into Great Silence documents the life of monks at the Grande Chartreuse in the French Alps. German filmmaker Philip Gröning lived in the monastery for several months in 2002-3, shooting over 120 hours of footage, nearly all without any dialogue in accordance with the monks’ vow of silence. He distilled this treasure down into a two and a half hour “documentary” on the experience of being a monk in the third millennium, living a life of silence, of time at the edge of eternity. I put quotation marks around the word “documentary” because he broke several rules of conventional documentary filmmaking: no narration, no soundtrack (other than the monks chanting or tolling their bells or the ambient noises of their daily lives), no discernible storyline. Just 164 minutes of life in a Carthusian monastery, mostly presented in silence.

Such a film could go horribly wrong in so many ways. It could be boring (I suppose many people in our guava-and-ephedra crazed culure would think it is anyway, but for anyone who can meditate for half an hour, this film works). As an arthouse film about Christian monasticism, it could easily come across as dismissive of religion or, even worse, as sanctimonious. Its artiness could sink under its own self-consciousness. Thankfully Gröning dodges all these bullets, by deftly weaving together a succession of striking, beautifully photographed images with equally memorable moments of lightness, even playfulness, as the monks go about the ordinary rhythms of their extraordinary lives. We see water dripping off a dish as it rocks slowly back and forth, after being washed following the monk’s meal taken in solitude and silence. The darkness of the church during the midnight nocturn prayers gets punctuated by the distant glimmer of the single sanctuary candle. An elderly monk crunches unsteadily across the snow to begin preparing his garden for the upcoming spring planting time. But then we see another monk playfully calling the monastery’s thriving cat population to their dinner; a rare moment of conversation (permitted on Sundays when they take a communal walk) includes musing on the power of symbols and noting that a member of the community is leaving the next day for Seoul; and in the movie’s most lighthearted moment, a group of monks playfully slide down a snowy/icy hill like a group of enthusiastic schoolboys.

This is a movie about time and rhythm. The tolling of the church bells seems almost omnipresent, while Gröning makes a point to bring the viewers back again and again to the repetitive rounds of life: delivering food to the monks in their private cells; a visit to the in-house barber; and of course, the perpetual cycle of study and prayer. Like bookends to the little, obscure, laborious lives that these men lead, Gröning presents on the one hand the splendors of the Alps and the surrounding forests, on the other the rich textures of their shared liturgical life: the admission of a new novice, a Eucharistic procession, reading from their rule in the chapterhouse, and of course, the ubiquitous bells calling the men to their knees or back into the church for yet another of the day’s offices. Other rhythms in the film are more artificial, yet work nonetheless: “portraits” of various monks as they gaze silently into the camera, one after another; and a handful of Bible verses (most notably Jeremiah 20:7, poorly translated as “You have seduced me Lord, and I was seduced”), the same few verses repeated again and again.

Toward the end of the movie, Gröning finally presents one monk who speaks for himself. Elderly and blind, he comments on his faith in the goodness of God, his docility even at having lost his sight, and his serenity in regard to his impending death. Other critics have sniffed that this is the film’s major mis-step, but I disagree. Nothing the monk says is theologically earth-shattering or artistically memorable — but that’s the point. Undergirding the texture of silence and simplicity is, of course, a simplicity of faith that might seem naive or even laughable in another context (at least, to the arthouse crowd who will see this film). But after the leavening of more than two hours of near-total silence, the monk’s childlike faith has a luminous quality that I, for one, found both satisfying and deeply consistent with the rest of the film’s “story,” if such a word could be used to describe the randomness and subtlety of the wordless narrative. The blind monk’s confession functions almost like a colophon, a momentary acknowledgement that, yes, there really is a message in this otherwise messageless experience.

After the blind monk speaks, the film revisits images that it opened with. And so, like Finnegans Wake or Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Into Great Silence does not so much end as merely cycle back to where it began. A monk prays silently. Another tolls the bell. And they all gather in the darkness, punctuated only by the sanctuary light, where again they chant for half the night.

• • •

Click here to see if you’re one of the lucky ones who will have Into Great Silence playing at a theater near you. If so, go see it. The beauty of its imagery, even though much of the footage was shot with less than ideal lighting and sometimes is overly grainy as a result, is worth the money spent to be seen on a big screen. Otherwise, the U.S. release of the film on DVD will be out in October. It’s worth the wait.

Static

Static: Tune Out the “Christian Noise” and Experience the Real Message of Jesus
By Ron Martoia
Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2007
Review by Carl McColman

Kind of an inverse Screwtape Letters, this book is built around a charming story line in which author Martoia, an evangelical preacher and Bible teacher, counsels his good friends Jess and Phil on the art of Christian witnessing here in the colorful wilderness of the thoroughly postmodern twenty-first century. What quickly emerges (er, pardon the pun) is a mandate to deconstruct (oops, I did it again) the classic “If you died tonight, do you know where you’ll spend eternity?” approach to spreading the gospel.

Martoia unpacks a simple truth that Catholics and all the other sacramental/liturgical types have known for quite some time now: that the take-no-prisoners, repent-or-be-damned approach to evangelism is, far from being an effective strategy for boosting church attendance, actually a chief contributing factor to why so many non-believers have such a low opinion of Christianity (and why so many non-evangelical Christians resent how the born again crowd have given the entire religion such a bad name). The author patiently recounts foible after foible as Jess and Phil blunder their way through attempts to witness to Marty, a secular co-worker of Phil’s; by the end of the book, I was wondering why Marty still even bothered to hang out with these two. But the juice in Static is not the humor in its depictions of how old-style evangelism no longer works (if it ever did), but rather in Martoia’s thoughtful exploration of key Biblical and cultural themes in his quest to articulate a vision of Christianity that remains scripturally-grounded, Christ-centered, orthodox (in the best sense of the word—think Brian McLaren), and entirely relevant to today’s world.

Why “static”? Because, as Martoia sees it, many of the buzzwords of contemporary evangelical Christianity: gospel, sin, salvation, being born again, repentance, and so forth—have accrued so much cultural baggage and stereotypical connotations over the years that to the average person (both inside and outside the church), the meaning of these words and their theological power has been lost, like a weak radio signal submerged beneath the hiss and crackle of airwave interference. The signal-to-noise ratio between the radical power of Christ’s liberating message, and the stultifying, stick-in-the-mud theology of repression that has come to characterize too much repentance-based religiosity, has reached a tipping point in the postmodern world: all but the most theologically naive are, simply put, immediately turned off to a religious message that is seen as controlling, manipulative, superficial, and insincere.

Into this morass wades Martoia, who clearly loves the Christian message and wants to find new ways to share it with people, even if that means slaughtering decades- or even centuries-old sacred cows in the process. For example, he provides a brilliantly simple reading of the story of Jesus and Nicodemus (John 3) to argue that conversion is really a process much more than a one-moment decision. Granted, for those whose experience of Christianity is eucharistic rather than propositional, this will hardly be anything new. But what a delicious treat it has been for me to “listen in” as the Bible-believing characters in this enjoyable tale marvel at the discovery of a deeper, more nuanced spirituality—one that cannot be reduced to a formula, but for that very reason is so truly, truly freeing.

Red and Blue God, Black and Blue Church

Red and Blue God, Black and Blue Church: Eyewitness Accounts of How American Churches are Hijacking Jesus, Bagging the Beatitudes, and Worshiping the Almighty Dollar
By Becky Garrison
San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2006
Review by Carl McColman

During my sophomore year of college in one of my literature classes, my professor, Dr. Cohen, gave out an optional assignment: we were reading Jonathan Swift, and so the assignment was to write a satire. But, he warned: composing a worthy satire is no easy feat. “So I’m only going to give an A to papers that truly deserve it. No B’s will be awarded. Either your satire will display excellence, or it will be average or worse. Your grade will reflect this. You have been warned.” I couldn’t resist the gauntlet, and turned in a paper detailing how the Moral Majority was conspiring to sterilize all non-Christian men as a way of stopping the creeping secularization of our society. Of course, since only the few righteous Christian men would be left to repopulate the entire nation, each one would be “duty-bound” to impregnate multiple women with their righteous seed…

At the time I thought the paper was brilliant. Dr. Cohen was not quite so impressed, but he did grant it an A- (and read it out loud to the class, which I’m sure inspired most of my evangelical/fundamentalist fellow students to heartily pray for my soul).

A quarter century later, I realize the main thing I learned from that lesson was not how to make fun of the religious right, but, rather more broadly, just how right Professor Cohen was: it’s just plain hard to write satire well. And I think the challenge of writing religious satire is just even more daunting. All of which makes Becky Garrison’s book a remarkable tour de force. Here, my friends, is a bona fide work of religious satire. Like my undergraduate paper, I think it doesn’t deserve a grade higher than an A- (in other words, it has its share of minor flaws). But given just how tough it is to satirize religion, it’s an imperfect book that’s well worth reading.

Garrison is a senior editor for The Wittenburg Door (“the world’s pretty much only religious satire magazine”), so her satire creds are entirely top-drawer. The daughter of an old-left Episcopal Priest who paid her dues in the Reagan youth, her knowledge of both the conservative and liberal dimensions of American Christianity seems as balanced as it is thorough. The same could be said for her gleeful willingness to skewer both sides of the theo-political aisle. No sacred cow is safe in Garrison’s world, which makes reading this book a jarring experience: again and again, when her rants concerned something I agreed with, I would be lulled into the lazy position of just nodding my head in agreement with her as I uncritically followed along with her train of thought, until — BAM! — she turned her satirical rifle and aimed it straight between the eyes of my cherished beliefs. She covers plenty of ground in this book, ranging from gun control to prayer in public schools to the wacky world of George W. Bush, to abortion, homosexuality, and other hotbutton issues. She shows no mercy for pomposity, or arrogance, or jingoism, or hypocrisy, or political correctness, and she has an uncanny ability to point out how these same character-flaws manifest among both lefties and righties. Because of the topical nature of much of her material, this book will probably feel dated sooner rather than later (so read it now). As a satirist, she spends more time cursing the darkness than lighting candles, although she makes it clear that her ultimate goal is simple: to have Christians detach from all their political nonsense so that we can get down to the difficult challenge of, well, being disciples. Which means learning to love and forgive, and finding ways to create communities that can bridge political and social divides.

Like I said, I think the book has its share of flat notes. A couple of jokes wore thin way too fast (the most obvious being the repeated cheap shots at pedophile priests); the chapter on homosexuality is so short and diffuse that its possibly-promising message seemed stillborn; and some chapters (like the one on September 11) seemed to be paralyzed by a conflicting impulse to be funny while also prophetic. I don’t think the concept of marrying satirical writing with thoughtful spiritual prose is in itself flawed, especially given how wonderful the chapter on abortion and other “life” issues is (indeed, Garrison’s perceptive commentary on the abortion debate is something that I think every Christian, of every political persuasion, should prayerfully read). But the satiric/prophetic tension goes back to just how tough it is to write good satire, and therefore how extra-tough it is to write good religious satire. At times, Garrison sounds shrill and bitchy; at other times, her jokes just fall flat. But these problems only show up some of the time. Thankfully, she has more hits than misses. So when you pick this book up, keep reading even when her attempts to make you laugh seem way off-target. She’ll get back to the bulls-eye soon enough. But just beware: before you know it, she’ll be taking aim at your favorite political or theological position. And it won’t be long before she’ll score a direct hit.