The Tablet
30 April, 2005
A MIRROR TO THE SOUL
Brendan McCarthy
Last year five men, none of whom were Catholic, made a forty-day monastic retreat. A landmark BBC series traced their progress.
Two men in armchairs face each other across a low table. One is a Benedictine monk of Worth Abbey in West Sussex – and the other man is coming to the end of a highly unusual retreat. There is a television crew in the dimly lit room. A silence hangs heavily and continues, almost uninterrupted, for what in TV terms is an eternity. But the director stays with the shot -and the silence - defying all the usual rules of television. Later on, the retreatant, his voice breaking with emotion, makes a video-diary entry. “I didn’t want this to happen. But something touched me; something spoke to me very deeply. It was a religious experience. When I woke up this morning I didn’t believe in this. But as I speak to you now, I do. Whatever it is, I believe in it”
It is a climactic moment in BBC2’s three-part television series, The Monastery (from 10 May). Last year the Benedictines at Worth agreed to the BBC’s request to accept five outsiders into their community for forty days. The aim was to test the relevance of the monastic tradition for a group of contemporary men. Several monasteries had turned the BBC down, but the Abbot of Worth, Fr Christopher Jamison, believing that the Benedictine tradition has something of deep value to offer the modern world, welcomed a very public opportunity to prove it.
The BBC selected the five men from hundreds of volunteers. One worked on the fringes of the soft porn industry (“lipstick lesbian stuff”), while a second was a former protestant paramilitary from Northern Ireland, who had spent years in prison. A third was a retired teacher. There was a Cambridge PhD student with experience of Buddhist monastic life and a businessman from a legal publishing company. None was Catholic, one was atheist – three had little previous contact with religion.
Gabe Solomon, the series producer, told me that he had aimed to make a programme about spirituality for a mass audience that “didn’t feel like a religious programme and that spoke to more people than a typical religious programme might.” The Monastery is a ‘cross genre’ programme of a kind much approved by the BBC’s director-general Mark Thompson, in this case a hybrid of film documentary technique and of a newer style, ‘reality TV’.
‘Reality TV’ has achieved a dubious notoriety. It relies more on contrivance than on the techniques of pure documentary. Such series as Big Brother, I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, and Jamie’s Kitchen, have prompted one senior figure in the TV industry to deride the genre as ‘lifestyle porn’. The monks at Worth weren’t exactly familiar with Big Brother, but Christopher Jamison isn’t daft. When the project was first mooted (and before a producer was assigned), there was a suggestion that the five men might dress in monk’s habits and ‘have some fun’. Carry On Up the Cloister, so to speak.
“We entered a negotiation”, Father Christopher told me. “I told the production company that their original idea was a very bad one, but that in dialogue we might reshape the idea into something that might work.” He was well aware of the risks. The history of television documentary is littered with the fates of institutions that admitted the cameras, only to fare very badly in the eventual product. Nonetheless he felt that there was an endemic distrust of the media in the Catholic community in Britain because of the media response to the child sex abuse scandals in the church. “Someone had to take the risk of rebuilding this trust. I believed that Worth was well placed to do that.”
The retreat was not ‘Benedictine lite’. Instead the volunteers committed themselves to the monastic disciplines of silence, obedience and humility for forty days and forty nights. They joined in the daily round of the Abbey, eating with the monks, working in the grounds, attending Mass, and joining in the hours of the daily office, from Matins to Compline. They handed over their CD players and their mobile phones.
The new arrivals were sceptical at first. In the words of one, “If you are looking for a career with guaranteed success, get yourself down to your local monastery, because I don’t think it’s the hardest job in the world and you could be easily very good at it just by toeing the line and not swearing. And not having sex with anyone.”
Discipline did not come easily. Two of the men broke the rules and left the monastery for an outing (“looking for virgins and cigarettes”) For Father Christopher this minor misdemeanour amounted to a misunderstanding of obedience, a core monastic value. At this (still early) point, Gabe Solomon, the director, was worried that his film might lack momentum. “Nothing happens quickly in a monastery. I feared it might be like this all the way through. We just had to trust that this had been going on for 1500 years and to accept Father Christopher knew what he was doing.”
But Solomon was initially tempted, the Abbot remembers, to see if he could engineer something into happening, as would happen in reality TV. “Gabe said to me: ‘You know – aren’t you going to tell them off about the trip to the shops? Isn’t this bad and aren’t you going to reprimand them?’” Fr Christopher was adamant that there would not be a big scene – but, rather, a quiet explanation of the reasons that the trip didn’t fit in with the values of monastic life. “The aim is to get people to internalise the values - to understand is that obedience is about listening; that silence is about space and that humility is about being realistic. So that the way of life becomes truly their own.”
In the event, Gabe Solomon had no need to load the dice. Real drama followed as two of the men became every bit as fractious as any of the inhabitants of the Big Brother house or the Celebrity jungle. Although the atmosphere was very tense, the Abbot was unworried. “I said to Gabe – ‘at least it will make great TV’ and Gabe said ‘I don’t know if it will make great TV. It’s the wrong kind of TV for this programme’. I said ‘Why?’ From our point of view, the emergence of this kind of conflict is part of what happens in community living. This is OK. This is monastic life. This is not Big Brother. Don’t laugh, there’s a chapter in the Rule of St Benedict entitled ‘Why Monks should not hit each other’. Gabe was really surprised. But when he saw how we contained the conflict and moved it forward, he then started to understand.”
For several of the participants the fruits were psychotherapeutic rather than expressly mystical: the slaying of old demons, acceptance of the need for personal honesty and a heightened sensitivity for others’ personalities. Peter, the retired teacher, although slow to surrender to the experience, admits: “I thought really ‘this is just going through ritual’. And felt even it might be a bit empty. But actually it isn’t.” Another participant began, after an initial enchantment with monastic life, to rant at a silent God. This was ‘a really good point’, Father Christopher told him. He replied sceptically: “It’s always a good point, isn’t it? No matter how bad things are you guys always say it’s a good point. You always turn it into the positive.” In the event – and the films reveal as much in the most dramatic way - it was a turning point. In Father Christopher’s words, it was the threshold of a journey into “scary territory - not psychotherapy ‘scary’, but scary because ultimately it’s to do with meeting God.”
Shortly after, one of the men has what he calls an ‘epiphany’ while sitting in the monastery church. “It was a real moment of clarity. I had an unexpected feeling of near weightlessness, you know. I felt as if a whole weight was lifted, physically lifted, off my shoulders – and I was incredibly happy.” The account sounded authentically mystical and Father Christopher concedes as much. “It’s not a moment when you particularly tried. The tradition would say to you that the beginning of any serious prayer and meditation is usually an uplift of some kind like that, which God gives to beginners.”
A visit to the Carthusian abbey at Parkminster and an introduction to the austere regime of the monks there (“it makes Worth seem like Center Parcs”) forces another of the men, Nick the Cambridge PhD student, towards his moment of crisis. “The degree to which the religious life is either truly sane or absolutely bonkers is pushed up to the absolute limit and you really have to decide what’s what. And what isn’t. And the scary thing is that place made a lot of sense.”
The striking thing about The Monastery is that the genius of the Benedictine tradition gives shape and coherence to the programme. Although life at Worth is refracted through the prism of ‘reality TV’, it is not distorted and the programme is not the calculated exercise in humiliation of a Big Brother but instead an honest journey, an experience of the psychology of grace, which affirms and makes whole its participants. It is dramatic evidence for Karl Rahner’s proposition that everyone is an incipient mystic. While there has been for some years a creativity crisis in TV religion departments, this is a programme, which will capture different parts of the television audience and for different reasons. Most of all, these are programmes which, as they are shown around the world, and repeated down the years, will be an enduring snapshot of the English Benedictine tradition, while presenting a benign picture of a healing Catholicism.
Father Christopher Jamison is delighted with the results. “We were amazed by what good TV this was. We knew that the monastic framework would enable the men to find a better balance in life and – at one level - a good ‘spiritual health farm’ experience. What we didn’t know was how people would respond if they didn’t share our religious faith. What surprised us, and that shouldn’t have surprised us, was to discover that the way of life leads inevitably to Christian faith. For us that realisation was a wonderful experience.”
***The Monastery, a Tiger Aspect production for BBC2 (10, 17, 24 May)
30 April, 2005
A MIRROR TO THE SOUL
Brendan McCarthy
Last year five men, none of whom were Catholic, made a forty-day monastic retreat. A landmark BBC series traced their progress.
Two men in armchairs face each other across a low table. One is a Benedictine monk of Worth Abbey in West Sussex – and the other man is coming to the end of a highly unusual retreat. There is a television crew in the dimly lit room. A silence hangs heavily and continues, almost uninterrupted, for what in TV terms is an eternity. But the director stays with the shot -and the silence - defying all the usual rules of television. Later on, the retreatant, his voice breaking with emotion, makes a video-diary entry. “I didn’t want this to happen. But something touched me; something spoke to me very deeply. It was a religious experience. When I woke up this morning I didn’t believe in this. But as I speak to you now, I do. Whatever it is, I believe in it”
It is a climactic moment in BBC2’s three-part television series, The Monastery (from 10 May). Last year the Benedictines at Worth agreed to the BBC’s request to accept five outsiders into their community for forty days. The aim was to test the relevance of the monastic tradition for a group of contemporary men. Several monasteries had turned the BBC down, but the Abbot of Worth, Fr Christopher Jamison, believing that the Benedictine tradition has something of deep value to offer the modern world, welcomed a very public opportunity to prove it.
The BBC selected the five men from hundreds of volunteers. One worked on the fringes of the soft porn industry (“lipstick lesbian stuff”), while a second was a former protestant paramilitary from Northern Ireland, who had spent years in prison. A third was a retired teacher. There was a Cambridge PhD student with experience of Buddhist monastic life and a businessman from a legal publishing company. None was Catholic, one was atheist – three had little previous contact with religion.
Gabe Solomon, the series producer, told me that he had aimed to make a programme about spirituality for a mass audience that “didn’t feel like a religious programme and that spoke to more people than a typical religious programme might.” The Monastery is a ‘cross genre’ programme of a kind much approved by the BBC’s director-general Mark Thompson, in this case a hybrid of film documentary technique and of a newer style, ‘reality TV’.
‘Reality TV’ has achieved a dubious notoriety. It relies more on contrivance than on the techniques of pure documentary. Such series as Big Brother, I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, and Jamie’s Kitchen, have prompted one senior figure in the TV industry to deride the genre as ‘lifestyle porn’. The monks at Worth weren’t exactly familiar with Big Brother, but Christopher Jamison isn’t daft. When the project was first mooted (and before a producer was assigned), there was a suggestion that the five men might dress in monk’s habits and ‘have some fun’. Carry On Up the Cloister, so to speak.
“We entered a negotiation”, Father Christopher told me. “I told the production company that their original idea was a very bad one, but that in dialogue we might reshape the idea into something that might work.” He was well aware of the risks. The history of television documentary is littered with the fates of institutions that admitted the cameras, only to fare very badly in the eventual product. Nonetheless he felt that there was an endemic distrust of the media in the Catholic community in Britain because of the media response to the child sex abuse scandals in the church. “Someone had to take the risk of rebuilding this trust. I believed that Worth was well placed to do that.”
The retreat was not ‘Benedictine lite’. Instead the volunteers committed themselves to the monastic disciplines of silence, obedience and humility for forty days and forty nights. They joined in the daily round of the Abbey, eating with the monks, working in the grounds, attending Mass, and joining in the hours of the daily office, from Matins to Compline. They handed over their CD players and their mobile phones.
The new arrivals were sceptical at first. In the words of one, “If you are looking for a career with guaranteed success, get yourself down to your local monastery, because I don’t think it’s the hardest job in the world and you could be easily very good at it just by toeing the line and not swearing. And not having sex with anyone.”
Discipline did not come easily. Two of the men broke the rules and left the monastery for an outing (“looking for virgins and cigarettes”) For Father Christopher this minor misdemeanour amounted to a misunderstanding of obedience, a core monastic value. At this (still early) point, Gabe Solomon, the director, was worried that his film might lack momentum. “Nothing happens quickly in a monastery. I feared it might be like this all the way through. We just had to trust that this had been going on for 1500 years and to accept Father Christopher knew what he was doing.”
But Solomon was initially tempted, the Abbot remembers, to see if he could engineer something into happening, as would happen in reality TV. “Gabe said to me: ‘You know – aren’t you going to tell them off about the trip to the shops? Isn’t this bad and aren’t you going to reprimand them?’” Fr Christopher was adamant that there would not be a big scene – but, rather, a quiet explanation of the reasons that the trip didn’t fit in with the values of monastic life. “The aim is to get people to internalise the values - to understand is that obedience is about listening; that silence is about space and that humility is about being realistic. So that the way of life becomes truly their own.”
In the event, Gabe Solomon had no need to load the dice. Real drama followed as two of the men became every bit as fractious as any of the inhabitants of the Big Brother house or the Celebrity jungle. Although the atmosphere was very tense, the Abbot was unworried. “I said to Gabe – ‘at least it will make great TV’ and Gabe said ‘I don’t know if it will make great TV. It’s the wrong kind of TV for this programme’. I said ‘Why?’ From our point of view, the emergence of this kind of conflict is part of what happens in community living. This is OK. This is monastic life. This is not Big Brother. Don’t laugh, there’s a chapter in the Rule of St Benedict entitled ‘Why Monks should not hit each other’. Gabe was really surprised. But when he saw how we contained the conflict and moved it forward, he then started to understand.”
For several of the participants the fruits were psychotherapeutic rather than expressly mystical: the slaying of old demons, acceptance of the need for personal honesty and a heightened sensitivity for others’ personalities. Peter, the retired teacher, although slow to surrender to the experience, admits: “I thought really ‘this is just going through ritual’. And felt even it might be a bit empty. But actually it isn’t.” Another participant began, after an initial enchantment with monastic life, to rant at a silent God. This was ‘a really good point’, Father Christopher told him. He replied sceptically: “It’s always a good point, isn’t it? No matter how bad things are you guys always say it’s a good point. You always turn it into the positive.” In the event – and the films reveal as much in the most dramatic way - it was a turning point. In Father Christopher’s words, it was the threshold of a journey into “scary territory - not psychotherapy ‘scary’, but scary because ultimately it’s to do with meeting God.”
Shortly after, one of the men has what he calls an ‘epiphany’ while sitting in the monastery church. “It was a real moment of clarity. I had an unexpected feeling of near weightlessness, you know. I felt as if a whole weight was lifted, physically lifted, off my shoulders – and I was incredibly happy.” The account sounded authentically mystical and Father Christopher concedes as much. “It’s not a moment when you particularly tried. The tradition would say to you that the beginning of any serious prayer and meditation is usually an uplift of some kind like that, which God gives to beginners.”
A visit to the Carthusian abbey at Parkminster and an introduction to the austere regime of the monks there (“it makes Worth seem like Center Parcs”) forces another of the men, Nick the Cambridge PhD student, towards his moment of crisis. “The degree to which the religious life is either truly sane or absolutely bonkers is pushed up to the absolute limit and you really have to decide what’s what. And what isn’t. And the scary thing is that place made a lot of sense.”
The striking thing about The Monastery is that the genius of the Benedictine tradition gives shape and coherence to the programme. Although life at Worth is refracted through the prism of ‘reality TV’, it is not distorted and the programme is not the calculated exercise in humiliation of a Big Brother but instead an honest journey, an experience of the psychology of grace, which affirms and makes whole its participants. It is dramatic evidence for Karl Rahner’s proposition that everyone is an incipient mystic. While there has been for some years a creativity crisis in TV religion departments, this is a programme, which will capture different parts of the television audience and for different reasons. Most of all, these are programmes which, as they are shown around the world, and repeated down the years, will be an enduring snapshot of the English Benedictine tradition, while presenting a benign picture of a healing Catholicism.
Father Christopher Jamison is delighted with the results. “We were amazed by what good TV this was. We knew that the monastic framework would enable the men to find a better balance in life and – at one level - a good ‘spiritual health farm’ experience. What we didn’t know was how people would respond if they didn’t share our religious faith. What surprised us, and that shouldn’t have surprised us, was to discover that the way of life leads inevitably to Christian faith. For us that realisation was a wonderful experience.”
***The Monastery, a Tiger Aspect production for BBC2 (10, 17, 24 May)
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