ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Thursday, April 14 2011

Monastic chic
By Colleen Carroll Campbell

It's one of the hottest new movies in America today. Film critics from Boston to Los Angeles are calling it a "thrilling adventure" with "magnificent, excruciating, transcendent" scenes that are "staggeringly powerful." So what's the subject matter of this riveting new thriller? In a word: monks.

"Of Gods and Men," the French drama that won the 2010 Cannes Film Festival's Grand Prix before arriving in American theaters two months ago, is based on the true story of Trappist monks in Algeria caught up in a violent conflict between Islamist radicals and a corrupt government. The film chronicles that conflict and the price the Trappists pay for attempting to live peacefully in the midst of it. Yet much of the movie focuses on the quiet, austere daily lives of these men who strictly follow the 1,500-year-old rule of St. Benedict.

"Of Gods and Men" is only the newest of a spate of recent films that focus on monastic life. Their emergence and popularity raise interesting questions about what modern moviegoers are seeking — or fleeing — when we duck into darkened theaters for a vicarious experience of cloistered life.

The most notable of these films is the 2005 documentary "Into Great Silence," a Sundance Film Festival prize winner. It is a nearly three-hour, almost entirely silent film centered on the daily rituals and routines of French Carthusian monks. Other award-winning though lesser-known films in this vein include "No Greater Love," a 2009 British documentary about the Carmelite nuns of London's Notting Hill, and "St. Benedict's Rule," a 2008 documentary by St. Louisan Jay Kanzler that chronicles the serenity of life in Missouri's Conception Abbey, which was interrupted when a gunman stormed the monastery in 2002 and shot four Benedictines at random.

Such plot twists aside, most footage in these films centers on the slow, mundane aspects of life in a monastic community — the very aspects that would seem to be of little interest to attention-deficient modern audiences and the filmmakers eager to attract them. Yet the silence, structure and gentle predictability of the lives that unfold in these films may be the key to their appeal.

Bombarded as we are by so much noise, argument and sensationalism in our news and entertainment today, not to mention our frenetic work and family lives, there is something startling about the peace that pervades these films and their subjects. It seems almost scandalous that while the rest of us scurry to stay on top of our emails and text messages, our online updates and headline scans, our errands and work deadlines and compressed quality time with loved ones — that in the midst of this maelstrom, a few chosen souls have found the nerve to simply opt out.

The veiled lives depicted in these films still simmer with occasional conflicts, many of them struggles to remain attentive to prayer or charitable to an annoying fellow monastic. As any mature monk or nun will tell you, the contemplative vocation is meant not to be an escape from life but a way to live it more deeply, to trade exterior liberties for the interior freedom that arises from following the rhythms of prayer, work and study in community.

Countercultural as this type of life is, studies suggest that its appeal is growing among some young Americans. The National Religious Vocation Conference reported in 2008 that 62 of its member religious communities saw a rise in inquiries from prospective members in the past year and the average Catholic religious community saw a 30-percent jump in the number of new members entering formation that same year. A 2009 study by Georgetown University's Center for the Applied Research in the Apostolate found that the communities attracting young adults were those with the same focus on prayer, communal life and fidelity to Catholic teaching and Christian mission celebrated on screen.

Most moviegoers flocking to these films are not looking to become monks or nuns. They simply crave a taste of the beauty, simplicity and transcendence they see in the hidden lives of these men and women. As the world's two billion Christians prepare for the start of Holy Week, perhaps that's a gift these films can give them and the world: the reassurance that no matter how chaotic our world gets, it is still possible to find oases of peace — both behind monastery walls and within the human heart.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is a St. Louis-based author, former presidential speechwriter and television and radio host of "Faith & Culture" on EWTN. Her website is www.colleen-campbell.com.