While the film is nearly wordless it is hardly silent. Ambient sounds of dripping water, a cart rolling along a stone floor, and wooden spoons against metal bowls move from background to foreground due to a heightened sense of perception. Images are left unexplained; as they are repeated viewers gradually come to understand them. Their repetition parallels the recurring prayers of the monks and the biblical quotations Groening chose as title cards that appear periodically throughout the film.
In some ways contemplative life can be seen as offering a plentiful emptiness -- spiritual abundance amid physical privation. In one of the very few lines of dialogue in Groening's movie, and the only instance in which anyone directly addresses the camera, an elderly blind monk explains that feeling of safety: 
Both Maguire and Groening were struck by the palpable absence of fear and anxiety in the monasteries they visited. "If I did not have somebody [in the film] explain why they are living so free of fear, this thing of confidence," says Groening, "then you as an audience would think, 'Oh they are happy because they are living in a monastery, and they can be so joyful. But unfortunately I have to go to an office every day.' And then that would lose the major point. It would be tricking the audience of the entry that they have for themselves. What [the blind monk] says you can apply to any kind of life."
INTO GREAT SILENCE seems to have arrived on the scene at a moment of intensified searching for that entry point. "Vatican II suggested to the monasteries that they bring their way of prayer out and share it with the laity," says David McAuliffe, director of the Catholic studies program and cofounder of the John Main Center for Meditation at Georgetown University. Yet at the same time that the Catholic laity was granted greater involvement, the period after Vatican II focused more on communal activism than solitary prayer. The most visible religious since then -- Jesuit Father Daniel Berrigan, Mother Teresa, and death penalty opponent Sister Helen Prejean, for example -- have actively been involved in the wider world community. The image of the nun being arrested at a protest outshone the nun in a cloistered convent.
Wittberg cites the Beatles' famous 1968 trip to India for a course in transcendental meditation as another watershed. "You ended up with Catholics devaluing their own contemplative life at the same time that everyone else was valuing it," she says. In the popular consciousness, contemplation became associated with Eastern religions. Yet this same association, says McAuliffe, has paved the way for a resurgence of Christian meditation. The rise in Buddhism's popularity in the West and the visibility of the Dalai Lama helped to promote the practice; sooner or later, people realized it was compatible with other religions as well. The trend also applies to religious orders themselves. A report just released by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University notes "a relative decline in the traditional active apostolates of nursing, social work and (to some extent) teaching," while "communities emphasizing contemplation, Marian devotion, and spirituality in general appear more likely to attract new members."
Wittberg finds this unsurprising and says the proliferation of active orders in the 17th through the 19th centuries represented an aberration. Throughout the history of Christianity and religion in general, those she terms "religious virtuosi" have nearly always been contemplative. While vocations to religious life continue to decline across the board, "contemplative ones are holding their own, and when the dust settles I'd bet more on the contemplative groups than the active ones," she says.
In an epigraph to her book, Maguire cites Soren Kierkegaard to explain the ongoing attraction of contemplative monasticism. The 19th-century Danish religious philosopher once wrote:
"Of this there is no doubt, our age and Protestantism in general may need the monastery again, or wish it were there. The 'monastery' is an essential dialectical element in Christianity. We therefore need it out there like a navigation buoy at sea in order to see where we are, even though I myself would not enter it. But if there really is true Christianity in every generation, there must also be individuals who have this needÖ"
According to Baylor University philosophy professor C. Stephen Evans, "Even if one does not personally see oneself as a monk, one can affirm the value of the monastic life as providing a public witness that religious faith is costly and demands outward expression."
"A contemplative order is like a lighthouse," Groening says. "You're not supposed to go where the lighthouse is, but seeing a lighthouse on the other side of the ocean means there is land there, and it changes your perception of the ocean." "This is their function in the world. Your perception of what is a human being can change if you know that choice is possible. I think [the Carthusians] were aware that they were losing that function."
For Groening, who was raised Catholic but later disavowed religion entirely, the Carthusians had an intensely personal effect. "One of the reasons I wanted to do [the film] was to go back and find that thread I cut myself and sort of recreate a continuity," he says. While his time inside the monastery didn't necessarily return him to the ranks of practicing Catholics, Groening pulled back from his strictly scientific view of the world. "What we live is not something that's totally haphazard going around. I do have a feeling that there's something that protects us and takes care of us."
Benedicta Cipolla is a writer in New York City. She has written as well for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on artist Mark Podwal and novelist John Updike.
