Some place between 40 and Death
AM watching Into Great Silence. I’ve managed to make it about 45 mins into the film. It’s beautiful. I’ve wept…
But - as perhaps a mark of my own ineptitude in the monastic life, I have trouble staying focused on it. So I’ll come back to it later.
» Not being a jerk about it...:
- #» Still desperate for any attention at all (The Queen City, that is... although Queen of the what? That's the real question.)
- #» Papercraft CCTV: Be Yer own Big Brother!
- #» T-shirt gets Van Nuys woman kicked out of federal building: DHS Rent-a-Brownshirt gets in serious trouble.
- #» Priest cancels nun beauty contest. Damn. I was hoping the next stage would be the "Father What-a-Waste" Hunky Priest contest!
- #
The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 by Eamon Duffy
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Wonder if you wept like I did when the novice was conducted to his cell, prayed for, and then left in the care of the novice-master.
Beautiful, precious film. I think I read that the director “didn’t want to make a film about a monastery, but a film that IS a monastery.” Indeed.
Enjoy the rest of it…I’m halfway through a re-watch of it myself.
I wept when they were hugging the novices.
It really is a beautiful film-but I had the same problem-I watched it in three segments instead of all the way through in one setting.
I watched it in a cinema, so I could not really ask them to stop it: but I do recall being restless a few times. I wouldn’t survive a day in a place like that, as much as I like to think it may be for me.
And yes: a “beautiful, precious film” is a great way to describe it.
A good book to read about Carthusian life is An Infinity of Little Hours. Follows five men as they enter St. Hugh’s Charterhouse in Parkminster, England. Very detailed about Carthusian life, buildings, liturgy, and the experience of leaving one’s life behind (one guy was from the neighborhood I’m sitting in, here in Chicago) and either staying or eventually dropping out of the monastery.
A story is told in that book (I think) of a novice who disappeared after his first night in his cell. They found a note that said, “Please send my things to Edinburgh.” :)
Oh, I love this movie. It’s a rich contemplative masterpiece. Though I’ve yet to be able to watch the whole thing in one sitting (restless soul that I am).
I also watched it in the theater, which has the virtue of compelling a non-stop experience (and for some, the vice of doing so in a dark room). I think I just told myself before it started that, OK, this is just going to be really, really slow. And then I was fine with it.