Last night I went to see “Into Great Silence,” which, if you haven’t heard, is a 162-minute, almost-silent film about the Carthusian monks in the French Alps. Dennis thought I was crazy to spend a rare night out sitting in a movie theater watching monks eat and pray and, once in a very blue moon, speak a sentence or two in French. I, on the other hand, was trying to approach it not as entertainment but as meditation.

As the mother of three active young children, the thought of vicariously living a life of extended silence and solitude, even for only three hours, had major appeal. I’ve always been intrigued by people who are so singularly committed to God that they remove themselves from the world completely. Theirs is a brand of spirituality that most of us will never achieve. When I went into the theater my attitude was one of awe. I imagined how much holier their lives must be because they can dedicate every moment, every action to God.

What happened over the course of the movie was unexpected. I assumed I would leave the theater looking for the nearest retreat house. Instead, I walked away with a better appreciation of my own spirituality lived out in the world. Yes, these monks have been called to a particularly deep kind of spirituality, but what I realized is that just as I probably wouldn’t survive one week in their life, they wouldn’t survive one afternoon in mine.

We are all called to different vocations. For most of us, our callings take us out into the world, often with children and spouses in tow. We do not have the “luxury” – and if you saw the monks’ living quarters you would realize that word is a very big stretch – of withdrawing into the silence of our cells each day. We must find our silence in the midst of chaos. We must learn to bow our heads in prayer maybe not at the sound of a monastery bell ringing but perhaps at the sound of a car horn honking or a baby crying.

At one point in the film, the monks were eating their only communal meal of the week in order to have a “family experience.” In the silence of the sparsely populated movie theater, I chuckled out loud. Their notion of a family dining experience was clearly as off base as my notion of monastic life. There was no one whining that he didn’t like kale. There was no one standing on a chair begging for waffles instead of soup. There was no one sulking at the end of the table because he couldn’t cut his food.

As I drove home from the theater with my friend Robyn, the only friend willing to sit through such an entertainment endurance test, we wondered aloud about the complete isolation of the monks’ lives. Neither of us could imagine choosing to be so shut off from other people. Then again, we are both mothers and writers and talkers, so for us God must be found around our dinner tables or in the early morning hours before the children are awake or over a cup of coffee with a friend.

I still want to go on a retreat some time soon and I’d still like to find even 10 minutes of silence in each day, but today I am trying to focus on the fact that I, too, am called to dedicate every moment, every action to God, even when those moments occur in a crowded post office with a toddler in full tantrum mode on the ground or at home with the kids bickering and the dog barking and the phone ringing.

Regardless of which path we take, we are all called to follow God in a singular way. Maybe my path is more like a circus parade than a quiet walk in the woods, but it still leads to my spiritual home.

2008 Copyright Mary DeTurris Poust. All Rights Reserved.