But for six weeks this winter, the sights and sounds were captured by film crews. And the men who pulled the rope were, many a morning, among five non-monks who were called to live there not by God but by producers from The Learning Channel.
A reality show set in a monastery? Sort of. But producers of this TLC effort, which is scheduled to air as a 10-part series this fall, say they're working on an "observational documentary" that follows people who are at spiritual crossroads and in search of profound answers.
The premise of The Monastery, an American version of a similar British show produced last year for the BBC, is to cloister five men of varied backgrounds and faiths at the Benedictine Monastery of Christ in the Desert here in the mountains northwest of Santa Fe and five women at the Our Lady of the Mississippi Abbey on a farm near Dubuque, Iowa. Each participant has a dramatic back story, from a soldier who lost his leg in the Iraq war to a woman who had her first child at age 14 and yet put herself through school for an MBA degree.
"This isn't a reality show," series producer Sarah Woodford says.
"The point has not been to create traps for hapless people to fall into. We're interested in exploring how people like us can live a good and purposeful life and what the 1,500-year-old monastic tradition can teach modern people."
Making it work for TV
That may be a noble effort, but will it make for good TV? Woodford herself struggled with the notion, noting that following the participants as they pray, chant and do menial tasks hardly sounds like thrilling viewing. To create interaction in a largely silent environment and, yes, even some drama, participants were paired with a mentor monk or nun with whom to discuss their internal reactions and struggles. They also were given cameras in their rooms, known as cells, with which to record their thoughts in a video diary.
Placing the five men in the remote desert outpost near Abiquiu, a town best known as the home of the late painter Georgia O'Keeffe, provided plenty of televised intrigue.
Participants were selected through a rigorous but low-key casting call publicized quietly via Craigslist.org and word-of-mouth so as to avoid glory-seekers (as opposed to glory-of-God-seekers). They weren't told where or what sort of monastery they were going to until they arrived.
Then for six weeks they immersed themselves in prayer, work and reflection on their lives. They broke from the routine only for the occasional inspired moment, such as the time they erected an 8-foot cross atop a 750-foot mountain.
Many participants bristled at various tenets of the Catholic Church and took on the monks and nuns on such issues as women's and gay rights.
Warren Huber, 24, of Worcester, Mass., did so most. Huber is an aspiring Episcopalian minister with a voracious reading appetite for theology texts who says he is still recovering from childhood physical abuse.
"For a lot of it, I was able to say, 'OK, this is what they do, this is what they believe, not what I believe,' " Huber says. "But once in a while, it did kind of rub me a little bit the wrong way. Especially if I was scheduled to do or say something I didn't believe."
His defiance occasionally set off a conflict, as when he refused to sing certain songs about saints. Ultimately, the abbot said it would be OK for Huber to abstain.
"In my tradition, we don't pray to the saints, but this is a very big thing for the Catholics," Huber says. "The basic concept of praying to saints isn't bad, but there are some prayers that border on idolatry, and some that cross that line. Some of those things, I could not do in good conscience."
That sort of dispute is pretty cerebral stuff, a long way from Omarosa back-stabbing Kwame on The Apprentice. But despite TLC's best highbrow efforts, some reality-show-style antics did occur, including an incident when two of the men tried breaking into a liquor closet to steal beer.
And one of the participants found the strictures of monastic life so difficult that he went home about four weeks into the 40-day period. (Woodford asked that his name be withheld so as to not reveal a plot twist of the show.)
"Look, it wasn't easy," says participant and recovered drug addict Tom Kramer, 46, of Los Angeles, a TV writer best known for work on the long-running HBO show Not Necessarily the News. "Sometimes it was mental torture, especially the Gregorian chants for four hours a day."
A window to the church
Perhaps the most surprising part of The Monastery is the notion the monks and nuns would allow TV crews to inject quiet routines with the clatter of cameras and unpredictable, possibly insincere strangers.
But Abbot Philip Lawrence says the TLC producers convinced him that they intended to make a mature documentary that would illuminate the virtues of faith, monasteries and the Catholic Church.
And Lawrence's monastery has been in the public eye before. When the remote monastery started a website design business in the 1990s, it was covered in USA TODAY and media around the world.
"Right now, I'm sure you're aware, the Catholic Church and priests do not have a very high reputation in the public eye," says Lawrence, a jovial man garbed in a flowing black habit who is given to frequent fits of high-pitched laughter.
"We're sharing the monastic life and saying yes, our faith is valuable. And we're also saying that the spiritual life is not about doctrines and dogma. There is more to it than that."
In the end, participants say, they learned that their search for answers will be a longer struggle than any six-week stint at a spiritual spa can resolve. Yet that in and of itself was a revelation for Kramer.
"I thought by going there, I'd have a chance of knowing God," he says. "What I learned is that even the monks don't know God. It's a big mystery and a big journey, and that's what I've now embraced. It's not about knowing, it's about the search. I mean, even the monks don't know the answers. Think about that."
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