Did anyone watch it? I forgot. "The Monastery" being the Learning Channel’s attempt to duplicate the BBC program of the same name.
The Monastery of Christ in the Desert
(And those of you who have been hanging around The Internets since the beginning know that the Monastery of Christ in the Desert has a had a strong, helpful web presence for a very long time, in Web Years.)
A post from the Beliefnet Pop Culture blog
It’s here that five men from all walks of life have come to sort out their spirituality. Some, like the television writer Tom, have had a loose faith in God tested by addiction or tough experiences. Others, like a former gang member-turned-counselor and a Satanist-turned-Episcopalian, are looking to develop a strong devotion. Still others have no faith at all. They learn how to pray eight hours a day, work and eat in silence, and each is mentored by one of the monks to seek God. Not all of them make it, and those that do don’t do so in predictable ways.
A review in the Seattle paper – says it’s nice but not exactly stirring television.
This might have worked better as a two-hour documentary — and without the reality-show elements. Except for Alex, who never stops smiling even though he seems perpetually angry, the men are so uniformly low-key that they don’t hold your attention. And Alex’s bull-headedness quickly becomes annoying. Tom does do well in confessional talk-to-the camera interviews, perhaps because he has had some TV-directing gigs in his past, but everything he says is so measured, it practically feels rehearsed.
Two of the monks — Abbot Philip Lawrence and Brother Joseph Gabriel — give the documentary a boost, especially Gabriel, with his quiet discipline and adherence to faith in the face of adversity.
The five men are all assigned individual mentors, and those one-on-one discussions can be revealing, but I wish the program had spent more time addressing Jon’s struggle with why God allows suffering, a question that many people wrestle with. Other questions are left unanswered: Warren, the most spiritual of the men, is a former Satanist, but we get only the scantest indication of what led to his 180-degree conversion.
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