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Sarah Masters reviews the film

Into Great Silence

The acclaimed film Into Great Silence has just been released on DVD. During the close to two-hour film there is no dialogue, there’s no musical score, and there is no artificial lighting. Rather, the creak of monastery floorboards and the shafts of sunlight through monastery windows suffice. Documentary filmmaker Philip Groning spent more than six months filming one of the world’s most ascetic monasteries in total silence, with no crew.

Into Great Silence is a meditation on the lives of the Carthusian monks, the Roman Catholic Church’s strictest order. Monks of the Grand Chartreuse monastery between Grenoble and Chambery in the French Alps gave the filmmaker permission to film sixteen years after his initial request. That long waiting period was Groning’s introduction, he says, to the deliberateness of these monks’ lives, to their sensibility.

A spiritual voyage, Into Great Silence shadows monks who never sleep more than three hours at a time, eat in their individual cells with the exception of one Sunday meal, and follow a taxing day and night of prayer and work.

Groning told Steven Gradanus of “Catholic World Report” he hoped that “in the absence of language, the present moment would become such a strong, strong thing…so much stronger that in the presence of language…And this is what the monastery is about. It was totally intermarried: making a film about a monastery, about silence, about time.”

One of the first and one of the last scenes of the film is of snow falling against a window pane. Into Great Silence moves from winter through spring and summer and back to winter, but the viewer’s experience of the second winter is profoundly different from the first. By the end of the film, you can hear the snowflakes fall.

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Completed: 2007
Running Time: 162 Minutes
Director: Philip Groning
Producer: Shannon Attaway

If you are interested in purchasing this film, you can do so at www.hartleyfoundation.org. Just click on “Masterworks” on the homepage for more information. The cost of the film is $ 24.99 for a 2-DVD set, the second DVD filled with special features.

Book Review

Rev. Stephen King, Ph.D., reviews

Spirituality in Patient Care: Why, How, When, and What

Harold Koenig, M.D., author of the book and one of the leading researchers in religion and health, uses evidence based research and over twenty years of professional practice to advocate in a very readable and succinct way for health professionals to attend to the spiritual and religious issues of their patients. In the process, he clearly and repeatedly advocates for professional chaplains while also describing their training and expertise. This new edition updates the 2002 edition with research from the last five years and by chapters addressing additional health professionals.

Chapter by chapter, Koenig addresses many of the concerns of doctors and other health professionals, such as “Why include spirituality?”; “How to include spirituality?”; “When to include spirituality?”; “What might result?”; “Boundaries and Barriers?”; “When religion (or spirituality) is harmful?”; and “Chaplains and Pastoral Care”. The first half of the book, which is the meat of the book, directly addresses doctors. The second half expands and applies what has already been discussed to include nurses, social workers, rehabilitation workers, mental health providers, and those interested in developing a curriculum for health professionals about this topic. The last major chapter of the book offers a brief summary of information about specific major religious traditions and health care. Since chaplains usually cannot see everyone and need assistance from others for screening, Koenig advocates for doctors doing spiritual screening and documenting the results; if the doctors won’t do it, then the nurses should; if the nurses won’t do it, then the social workers should.

More precisely, Koenig includes how to do a spiritual history screening, the importance of documentation, referral, supporting healthy spirituality, connecting to the community, utilizing spirituality as a resource, and what to do if the patient is non-religious. He also addresses barriers to spiritual screening by doctors: lack of time, knowledge, comfort, and training; not wanting to impose religion; perceiving spiritual screening is not in their job description. Koenig also includes and addresses some cases of negative consequences of doctors doing spiritual screening.

I wish every doctor, if not every health professional, would read this book and take it seriously. In the press release, Koenig says, “’I think this version will be my most important contribution to the field of spirituality and health. Every bit of what I know about the integration of spirituality into clinical practice … is contained in this book.’” The book is also an informative resource for chaplains in terms of summarizing much research in religion and health and in offering one way to structure (and talk about) a collaborative multi-disciplinary approach to spiritual and religious care in health care settings. It offers an excellent “middle way” that is patient centered for this sensitive and necessary topic.

Koenig, Harold G., M.D. Spirituality in Patient Care: Why, How, When, and What. Revised and Expanded Second Edition. Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2007, 264.

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