Monastic boot camp

An Infinity of Little Hours: Five Young Men and Their Trial of Faith in the Western World's Most Austere Monastic Order.

By Nancy Klein Maguire. Public Affairs, 272 pp., $13.95 paperback.

IN OUR NOISY and technologically correct secular society, mystery and silence are as absent as they are secretly craved. Two of the most austere Western monastic orders to distill this countercultural craving are the Carthusians and Trappists. They share the three vows of obedience, stability of place and conversion of life. The Carthusians are the focus of Nancy Maguire's book. I myself belong to the Trappist tradition.

Maguire's accomplishment in description is all the more impressive because she is a woman plumbing a severely masculine domain. She brings to this work not theological training but scholarly expertise in theater (she has been a scholar-in-residence at the Folger Shakespeare Library since 1983). Through her marriage to an ex-Carthusian, she was able to locate five men who from 1960 to 1965 experienced the rigorous formation in the virtually closed Carthusian world of the Parkminster Charterhouse in West Sussex, England. Maguire teases us throughout to guess which of the five men is the one who takes the lifelong vows of solemn profession. I guessed wrong.

Her research included 6,000 pages of e-mail communication, a considerable number of faxes, and extensive use of letters, pictures, books, journals and telephone conversations, culminating in a face-to-face reunion of the five, who had retired and were in their 70s.

The five men, all of whom entered the monastery while in their 20s, are interestingly diverse. One, whose well-to-do family had fled East Germany, was Jesuit trained and had entered a missionary order and was working in Africa when a contemplative spark was ignited in him by Thomas Merton's Seven Storey Mountain. Merton's writings stimulated another of the postulants, a New Yorker of Irish descent. Ponderings on the beach led this son of a Philadelphia doctor to be drawn to monasticism--about which he knew almost nothing. One of the men, an only child from Chicago, was talented in everything he tried--from academics to golf. Another was an all-or-nothing type with an entrepreneurial streak, known for his attraction to sports and girls, who was brought face to face with his soul-hollowness in the solitude of recovering from a broken leg.

Those who left the monastery did so for various reasons: "nervous and spiritual deterioration" (likely caused by a need for companionship and agony over possible homosexual tendencies); the disturbing dilemma of having fallen in love with a woman while on the ocean voyage to the monastery; meticulousness to such an extreme that the person "disciplined himself into a nervous breakdown"; and the "dark force" of relentless sameness, experienced by an intellectual and multitalented young man who saw his talents "going no place."

While one of the five made solemn vows and never left after he appeared at the Carthusian door, the other four moved on to secular careers: one became a physician in Germany, one a librarian, one the founder of an alternative school for troubled teenagers in France, and one the CEO of a small consulting firm following 20 years as a banker. It is the lives and spiritual journeys of these men that Maguire probes.

Although Maguire was clearly intrigued by her explorations, one senses also the sadness of her mission. The heroic Carthusian spirituality remained virtually unchanged for almost a thousand years before the Vatican II reforms of 1962-1965, but now the Carthusians are on the verge of becoming "the equivalent of a lost tribe [that] will disappear from recorded history."

Maguire feels duty-bound to rummage among the fading memories of the few who remember what a Carthusian "boot camp" was like. Although time-mellowed, the documentation she gleans is sufficient to justify her description of this formation as the training of "spiritual athletes" to conquer their own Mount Everests so as to qualify as "Catholicism's green berets."

The Carthusian Order emerged slowly after St. Bruno, at the peak of his social and intellectual career in 1084, vowed to leave the world. With six friends, he climbed into a place of forested solitude above Grenoble, France. There the seven built separate hermitages which enabled them to brave the severities of the French Alps and pursue their calling: supporting each other as "Christ's poor" through practices of poverty and penance. Having no intention of forming a new order, they had no rule. Nevertheless, in time the customs of the group were articulated and written down. From that point, the customs were held to with such tenacity that the order boasted that it had "no need for reform for we have never become deformed."

In time, lay brothers assumed the physical labor of providing for the needs of the ordained hermits, who lived in the isolation of separate, four room, two-story cells within the monastic complex. Each cell had a main room containing a work table, a stove and a bed with straw mattress, complemented by a prayer room, a workroom, a small toilet, and a storage room for wood and coal--l,200 square feet in all, plus an enclosed garden.