The search for discipline

My current column in the UM Reporter - which you can read here - arose out of the confluence of a number of things going on in my life. The most immediate was the Duke Youth Academy and a documentary I previewed so we could show it to our students. That film, Philip Groning's Into Great Silence, chronicles the Carthusian monastic community at the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps. Groning wrote to the monks back in the mid-1980s to see if they would allow him to visit them and film their lives. They told him they would get back to him, which they did ... 16 years later. They allowed Groning to stay with them for around 6 months, but he had to come alone, he had to agree not to use artificial lighting, and he had to agree not to use any narrative voice-overs in the editing of the film. The actual speaking in the film is extremely limited, confined to the chanting of worship and a couple of other scenes.

The Carthusians, founded in the late 11th century, are known as one of the most austere of Catholic religious orders. Among their other vows, they take a vow of silence, so that except for one afternoon per week, their only speaking comes in the form of chanted prayers. The rigorous lifestyle they lead of prayer, study, worship, and work is not designed to be a mass movement, and currently there are less than 500 Carthusian monks and nuns in the whole of the Catholic Church.

Watching this documentary was deeply affecting for me. Like most folks, I will never begin to approach to intensity of Carthusian spirituality in my own daily discipleship. But I have begun to start to try and develop greater disciplines in my life, from diet and exercise to Bible study and prayer. A lot of this has included not just adopting new practices, but also trying to stop engaging in old, unhelpful ones. Some of this stuff, like TV watching, obsessive e-mail checking, and the tendency not to eat or pray very mindfully, may sound like small potatoes. But it all has to do with my daily habits, and I think rearranging them to lose some bad ones and gain some positive ones can have a big long-term impact on the kind of disciple I will be. I'm not lacking in God's grace; it's just a matter of how I am responding to it.

The documentary and its connections with my own spiritual struggles made me reflect a lot on the good of discipline. That, in turn, made me think about a third angle on all of this, which is the cultural predicament in which Gen X'ers and Millennials find themselves. This is just not a very conducive world for developing healthy spiritual disciplines. We eat on the run, work too much, and spend much of our days in the virtual world of digital media. And yet, you hear all the time about people of our generation craving for a more grounded, disciplined life. It is as if we feel like our houses are built on shifting sand, and all the while our deepest desire is to be planted firmly on the rock.

So I wrote my column, both for me and for us.

And by the way, if you get a chance, pick up a copy of Into Great Silence. It is remarkable.