Michael Whyte (2009)

The Curzon web pages give a good summary:

‘After ten years of correspondence, Michael Whyte was given unprecedented access to the monastery of the Most Holy Trinity, in London’s Notting Hill.  The monastery, which was founded in 1878, is home to the Discalced Order of Carmelite Nuns.  The nuns lead a cloistered life dedicated to prayer and contemplation, rarely leaving the monastery except to visit a doctor or dentist.  Silence is maintained throughout the day with the exception of two periods of recreation.

No Greater Love gives a unique insight into this closed world where the modern world’s materialism is rejected; they have no television, radio or newspapers.  The film interweaves a year in the life of the monastery with the daily rhythms of Divine Office and work.  Centred in Holy Week, it follows a year in which a novice is professed and one of the senior nuns dies.  Though mainly an observational film there are several interviews, which offer insights into their life, faith, moments of doubt and their belief in the power of prayer in the heart of the community.’

In fact there’s information in those two paragraphs that I didn’t pick up from watching the film:  whether the nuns had access to newspapers was one of the questions I was left with.  Other include … Are the priests who officiate at services in the chapel members of a male division of the same closed order or do they live and work in the world outside?  Do the nuns like some of their colleagues better than others – do they ever disagree and what happens when they do?  When and how did they decide to get a computer and is it used only for online food shopping?  Is silence required throughout all shared activities, except during the twice daily periods of recreation (there’s a bit of conversation, for example, between two nuns working in the monastery gardens)?  Michael Whyte may have judged some of these questions too sensitive to be raised – but others seem uncontroversial and the answers would helpfully have told us more about the way the place works.   And what did the nuns think about moving from an existence in which silence predominates to one observed not just by God but by a film crew – and about giving interviews to camera?

It’s the interviews which are at the heart of No Greater Love and keep you on the edge of your seat (partly because Whyte’s questions to the sisters are nearly inaudible).   The nuns are impressively thoughtful – you certainly want to know more about them.  There’s one who makes only a single contribution in which she talks, with tantalising brevity, about the music of silence.   There’s a kind-faced nun who radiates a deep equanimity – she really looks to be living in a state of grace – when she talks about evening prayers as marking the death of the day and as a diurnal rehearsal of the end of life.  Another nun of compelling benignity, who speaks in a very soft and lovely Scottish accent, insists that the nuns’ isolation isn’t an easy option because it requires ‘you to confront your own self’, than which, she says, there’s nothing harder.  The most remarkable is the prioress.  Asked if she fears death, she admits that it’s ‘very awesome’ and to a ‘shudder’ at the occasional thought that ‘the atheists’ may be right.  This candour from the senior nun in the monastery is rather a shock.  The prioress’s consolation at moments like these – that if the atheists are right she won’t know they are and if she’s right she’s right eternally – makes her religious belief sound a close relation to Pascal’s wager.  What she goes on to say is startling too.   She first visited the monastery for a few weeks at the end of her first year as a Cambridge undergraduate in 1959.  Her father insisted – ‘to my chagrin’ – that she complete her degree before joining the order so it seems she’s been in the monastery full-time since 1961.  She explains her reason for choosing this existence as ‘wanting something that demanded everything of me’ – and which would be a ‘ridiculous’ way of life if it depended on ‘something that wasn’t true’.   This may come across less like Pascal than as a challenge to God – daring him not to exist – but the prioress’s motivation is piercingly convincing.  She also admits to having experienced, during her near half-century in the monastery, a ‘desert’ period, in which she felt God’s absence rather than presence.  This period lasted no less than eighteen years.

One of the most inconceivable things about a post-mortem, incorporeal existence is its having a social aspect.  I’ve often wondered if religious people in closed and/or silent orders are trying to make the afterlife more believable by, here and now, eliminating human interaction and minimising the physical variety of spatio-temporal existence – turning it into a largely mental and emotional state of being which anticipates Heaven because it’s just you and God.  Although No Greater Love didn’t dissuade me of this idea entirely, the sense of community among the nuns here is strong enough to contradict it.    Living this kind of life must greatly alter your temporal perspective – perhaps makes you really feel ‘that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day’ (2 Peter 3:8).   The experience of watching this film increased this viewer’s consciousness of being rooted in time and space.  It’s hard not to yawn (or to remember, as you do so, yawning during church services as a child) and hard to avoid unworthy thoughts.  The nuns’ vows commit them to poverty, chastity and obedience:  some of their faces are beautified by their minds and feelings but you can’t help thinking that none of them looks likely to be in danger of invitations to lose her chastity in the outside world.   You may also find yourself taking issue with the Scottish nun’s certainty that confronting yourself is the hardest thing for a human being to do.  (How does she know?)  And although the death-of-the-day/end-of-life comparison is attractive (the nun who talks about this quotes Gerard Manley Hopkins – ‘All Life death does end and each day dies with sleep’), it’s easier to believe if your existence is so orderly and disciplined that nocturnal sleep is the only time when you lose consciousness.   (If you drop off on the train coming home from work, or in an armchair in front of the television, you’re struck by the discontinuity of conscious life in a very different way.)

No Greater Love is fascinating and tedious at the same time.  The fascination is in the subject – and the human subjects – rather than in Michael Whyte’s film-making.  His camera captures some beautiful sounds and images:  the music in the chapel; an aged nun in her coffin (the same one, I think, whom we’d watched being fed and managing to smile ‘A very good meal’ at the end of that difficult process);  sunlight in the corridors and the gardens of the monastery; the nuns on their knees polishing a parquet floor, which fuses ideas of devotion to labour and to God and recalls the famous painting (by Degas?) of labouring men cleaning a floor.   The tedium is twofold:  Whyte gets across the unappealing prospect of an unvarying life going on and on and on (one of the main problems with the idea of Heaven); he also relies on one or two devices that become too predictable, such as the intrusion every now and then of ugly noise – the monastery strimmer, a helicopter passing overhead.  A more penetrating comment on the interaction between the nuns and the ‘real’ world comes in the online orders to Sainsbury’s, which look like a concession to modernity until you realise they reduce social contact below the minimum that was possible before the arrival of the web.

The film shares its title with a Christian drama, also recently released (in the US anyway).  According to Wikipedia, ‘Christian romance, No Greater Love, has claimed the No. 1 Hot New DVD best-seller position in both the Religious as well as the Family Life drama categories of Amazon.com.’  The IMDB synopsis of the other No Greater Love explains that:

‘Jeff and Heather Baker were life long sweethearts and happily married… for a time. But at her greatest moment of weakness, Heather abandons Jeff, forcing Jeff to raise their young son alone. Ten years later, through a God ordained encounter, Jeff and Heather meet again. They must wrestle with forgiveness, reconciliation and the pressing of the Savior on their hearts.’

This is more than enough to make you count your blessings at having seen the Michael Whyte No Greater Love instead.

2 May 2010