Book Review

A look at life in an English monastery of the 1960s

Reviewed by Elizabeth Rackover
Catholic News Service

What did you give up for Lent this year? Chocolate? Alcohol? Cookies?

Pretty tough, huh?

Not even close, you pampered, self-deluded, post-Vatican II Catholic you.

In “An Infinity of Little Hours: Five Young Men and Their Trial of Faith in the Western World’s Most Austere Monastic Order,” author Nancy Klein Maguire examines a monastic way of life so austere, so stripped-down, so isolated that even the most devout and disciplined reader will shiver with the cold, ache with the hunger and swoon from night after endless night of interrupted sleep. Keeping company with the monks in Parkminster, a Carthusian charterhouse in West Sussex, England, is to keep a lonely vigil in a lifelong quest for “soli Deo”: God alone.

The book is two tales, really. It is an informed and respectful history of “the Western world’s most austere monastic order,” the Carthusians; it is also a sensitive record of five young men whose individual vocations led them to Parkminster in 1960.

Maguire gives us their stories and accounts of life in the slow lane firsthand, offering enough background on the Carthusian order (founded in 1089 and, until the Second Vatican Council, “never reformed, because never deformed”) to vividly convey the sense that deprivations of sleep, comfort and even simple companionship are considered a privilege in this now-dwindling order.

The five young men whose stories comprise the basis for the book were drawn to Parkminster from happy homes and family lives in Germany, Ireland and America. They arrived separately over several months in 1960 with an interesting mixture of faithful ardor, naivete and youthful enthusiasm; not all of them fully understood the deprivations they would experience as postulants.

What becomes of their passion and their faith — not to mention their psyches — is an unpredictably interesting and well-written tale that, like a good novel, plunges you into their world and makes you wonder how you would fare there.

Braced against its own solitude, the power and strength of Carthusian devotion lies in its utter and complete focus on “God alone.” But inhabiting the cowls and hair shirts are, after all, mortal men with egos, personalities and — surprise, surprise — power struggles.

The chasm between divine and human shows clearly in the choir leader’s near hysteria over sloppy, off-key and just plain lousy singing; a novice master considered too radical who is eventually replaced; and one old monk weeping at the funeral of another.

This is the gold that Maguire mines out of a seemingly impenetrable entity. From this all-male enclave where contact with the outside world is limited and controlled, she gained the trust and confidence of elder monks and tracked down the young men who left the monastery before making their solemn profession, a vow to remain in the religious order until death. Her careful, scholarly approach — and her association with the order through her marriage to an ex-Carthusian — led to what I have to assume is unprecedented lay and female access to Parkminster, where she was allowed to visit an unoccupied cell and spend time in its vast library.

Maguire, a scholar-in-residence at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, carefully crafts — through the words, memories and experiences of others — the story of monastic life in all its tedium, monotony and potential glory. That some fall short of that glory is no matter. The young men who made a go of it, who dared greatly, who tell the tale through Maguire’s knowing eye for authenticity and simplicity, deserve the reader’s greatest admiration.

Rackover is a parent and religious education teacher in southeast Michigan.