In talking about the movie that's packing in the audiences in Europe, David Warren writes an outstanding essay entitled A truth exposed.
I've always been intrigued about life in a monastery. Silence. Beauty. Loss of self. Greater individuality. Selflessness and deep kindness. Great joy in living.
Entitled Die Grosse Stille -- Into Great Silence -- it is about the life of the monks in Grande Chartreuse, the mother house of the Carthusian monastic order.
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What most interested me, and the person who brought the film to my attention, was a single remark of the filmmaker, about what he had learned from making his documentary. He told the BBC, “When I left the monastery, I was thinking about what exactly had I lived through and it was realizing that I had had the privilege of living with a community of people who live practically without any fears.”
And again: “We tend to say that our society is driven by consumerism or greed but it’s not true. Greed, consumerism, wanting to have a new Porsche, for example, is a disguise of pure fear. It’s a near panicking society and that was difficult to accept.”
This is why the film plays to packed houses. It speaks to people about what they are.
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We cling to things that cannot last, out of our curious panic; to things like Porsches, and the nanny state. We ignore, in this panic, anything that isn’t hard to the touch -- the verities of God, nature, and our nature. Yet in so doing we select what is transient, over what is eternal.
Pain, loss, disappointment, and death, we cannot escape. Each is written unalterably into our fate, as living organisms. But our fear is not so written. It has instead been brought upon ourselves.