OP THE challenge and attractiveness of this film is stark enough: can I accept silence and embrace it or have I lost the sense of what silence is all about? As in no other film I have seen, I think it confronts us with the reality of our misguided need to make noise and be busy when in fact there is a more profound beauty to be found in silence and stillness. Simply too much passes us by every day, unnoticed. This film, without plot or hero, and barely a word of dialogue, might just be the key to a conversation with God.
Bishop John Arnold is an auxiliary bishop of Westminster
THIS unique film allows us to glimpse the hidden life of one of the Church’s spiritual treasures: the Carthusians. To benefit from it, one needs to be prepared to enter a beautiful cinematic experience, leaving behind the noisy utilitarian concerns of our world to be immersed in the tranquility and rhythm of contemplative life. Nothing seems to happen, but everything does in this silence, as grace is powerfully at work in the lives of those who fall in love with the God of love. Thus we perceive through a lens, dimly, God’s sanctifying activity in our own Christian lives.
Lawrence Lew OP is a Dominican student brother at Blackfriars, Oxford