Over the days of Holy Week and Easter, a rather unlikely movie was drawing unexpected numbers of people to a tiny little theatre on Southport Avenue on Chicago?s North Side. The theater is ?The Music Box?. ?Box? is a pretty apt description of the two theatres crammed into this aging building. The theatre we sat in was not much bigger than many living rooms, and seated possibly 100 patrons, squeezed hip-to-hip in old theater seats.

The theatre however is not nearly as remarkable as the movie we saw there. It was called ? in its English translation ? ?Into Great Silence.? A German film-maker had received permission from the Carthusian monks who live at the Abbey of the Grand Chartreuse in France to live with them for six months and to film their life. They were remarkably open to his presence and shared very intimate aspects of their lives. He, in turn, produced a profoundly reverent film..

The movie however is not so much about the monks as about a remarkable aspect of their lives - silence. These monks do not talk much. They only eat together once a week ? Sundays ? and then typically they don?t talk. The cell of each monk is a little silent chapel and world unto itself, where God is met in the quiet. And the film reflects this. It is two and a half hours long, and it is not till well beyond the half way point that you hear any conversation. Nor is there any commentary. You simply watch. Indeed, the very first human words coming from a monk is addressed to a little pride of cats in the abbey basement. Total time in which the monks are heard talking to each other is about 5 minutes, which seems pretty much the ratio of time devoted to human conversation in their life.

This, of course, is the point of the movie. It is about silence and quiet. Hence the title. A mantra that seeks to capture the reason for this stillness is regularly flashed on the screen in German, French and English. It is taken from Jeremiah 20.7: ?You seduced me, O Lord, and I allowed myself to be seduced.? God has so fascinated the souls of these men that they have little time for anyone but him. They take good care of each other, but one gets the feeling that they are always eager to get back to romancing their true Lover. God wants them and they want God.

Because God has so bewitched their souls, these men are able to live largely without the comforts we are so accustomed to. There is no TV or newspaper or radio in sight. Their cells are roughly furnished. Their food seems to be a lot of soup, vegetables and fruit ? there are no fat monks. Their dinner ware is tin plates and rough cutlery. They wear voluminous white robes that remind you of certain kinds of Arabs, and sandals without socks. They spend a lot of time in Church, chanting the divine office (in Latin) and celebrating the Eucharist. The old stone buildings look very cold, especially in the winter scenes ? the abbey is up in a valley near the Swiss Alps - and each monk has a little stove of some kind (not electrical) to heat his cell. The only hint of modernity is a couple shots of a jet flying overhead, and the prior sitting at an untidy deskful of what look like bills, pecking away at his laptop.

What was perhaps as impressive as the movie was the audience. We had maybe 60 people at our screening, and I have never, not even at Orchestra Hall, been in the presence of such a quiet group. Someone who paid attention to such things told me that even those who had brought popcorn into the theatre ate it not at all or very quietly! It was two and a half hours of the most intense movie watching I have ever experienced. And everybody left the theater quietly. We went to a bar and eatery next door for a bite to eat, and it was a cold drench of modernity to walk into an establishment that was rocking with the big screen TV, music, and loud conversation so typical of the bustling and youthful North Side.

The audience response apparently surprised the owners of the theatre. It was supposed to close after a brief engagement on Holy Thursday. I saw it a week later and it was still being held over from day to day.

Although the film was too long for me and could have used some heavy editing, and although I would not want to live that kind of life any more (my life as a novice Franciscan had many parallels with that of these monks), I am grateful for several things: first, that a professional film maker would even try to undertake a project that honored a virtue increasingly ignored in today?s society (including the religious!); second, that he would make a film with such great reverence for this very non cool life style ? there were no cutesy asides or snickers behind the hand; and finally, that so many people would fork out 8-9 dollars for nearly three hours of an uncomfortable seat at a movie that had no story line, violence, sex, or special effects.

Thomas Keating, Trappist monk and founder of the modern centering prayer movement, has said: ?Silence is the language God speaks, and everything else is a bad translation?. Sadly, silence is a value that only the counter-cultural appreciate, so we are proud that here at Mayslake Ministries it is one of our foundation stones. We are encouraged that even in a remote corner of the electronic media, this is still valued.

The film may have moved on by the time you read this, but it is showing in other major cities, and they tell me there will be a DVD ? two, given its length.