TV series demystifies life in a Benedictine monastery
Life in a monastery is ``hell'' -- at least according to Tom Kramer, one of five men who spent 40 day at Christ in the Desert Monastery near Abiquiu participating in the filming of a television show called The Monastery.
The five-part series, which the producers are calling an ``observational documentary,'' recorded the experiences of five laymen who volunteered to live, work and worship as Benedictine monks for 40 days last spring. It is being aired Sunday on The Learning Channel.
``We had to get up at like 3 or 3:30 every morning,'' Kramer said. ``We had to be at church at 4. We'd sing Gregorian chants for an hour. We'd go back to church seven times a day to sing Gregorian chants, over and over again.
``Some of it was in Latin, but most of it was in English for us, and a lot of the words were very violent,'' said Kramer, a television writer and producer who said he learned about the project while looking for work on the Internet.
I was at a crossroads,'' he said. ``I was applying for any job I thought I could do. I applied for this job on craigslist that said, `Would you like to live in a monastery?' I thought, sure.''
As it turned out, the job wasn't what he'd expected -- and the money he got seemed less like pay than just something to offset time lost at work.
Kramer ended up as part of a five-man cast that included a former gang member, a Marine who'd lost a leg in Iraq and a cynical Albuquerque paramedic who told cast members he ``generally mistrusts the church for its wealth while its congregation struggles in poverty.''
Christ in the Desert's prior, Christian Leisy, said the monks there were not interested at first in being the subject of a reality TV-type show but changed their minds after talking with monks at a monastery in England where a similar show was filmed.
``It sounded like a lot of work, a lot of intrusion, etc.,'' Leisy said. ``But we thought about it and prayed about it and talked about it and said maybe it would be valuable to let the world in on some of the methods of our tradition, and we ultimately decided to do it.''
Leisy said a brother from the monastery flew to Texas and another went to California to help select the five men.
Kramer -- who describes himself as a recovering alcoholic and recovering Catholic -- said he was raised Catholic but struggled for years to find a comfortable relationship with God.
``I thought I might be missing something,'' he said. ``Everyone else seemed to either know God and be very content and happy and wonderful, or they are comfortable being atheist or agnostic and it didn't bother them. But it bothered me a lot not to know God, like there was something wrong with me. I was in a kind of dark, desperate phase.''
Kramer said he also was curious about what happens in a monastery.
``Coming from a Catholic background, I knew about monasteries but only in a mythical way,'' he said. ``It seemed so secretive; no one really knows what goes on in a monastery. You can only imagine.''
Leisy said Christ in the Desert's 27 monks soon learned to ignore the two cameramen and the sound man working on the film and carry on their normal routines. ``We didn't feel like we were being actors or pretending to be someone rather than who we are,'' he said. We had our differences of opinion or approach as you'll see, but the community overall took it very well.''
``I think it was hard for some of the (laymen),'' Leisy said. ``The routine of prayers throughout the day, a work period for a certain time, quiet time. You're supposed to be quiet at night, and you'll see by watching the show they didn't always observe that.
``We kind of laughed,'' he said. `` `Come on, you guys, you're only having to do it for 40 days.'
``It's pretty rigorous, not inhuman but a pretty demanding way of life, and it's not for everybody or we'd have more than 25 to 30 guys out here,'' Leisy said.
``For 40 days, we never said a word while eating,'' Kramer said. ``We took one field trip to the Pecos Monastery, and it was the best meal we had in 40 days because we could talk. We did stop at a gas station, and we all got like Fritos and Cokes; that was a big treat, but they wouldn't stop at Burger King or McDonald's or a casino.''
Kramer said some of the laymen couldn't adhere to the monastery's rules and sneaked in liquor, stole the monks' liquor and even ``borrowed a truck to drive into town and get drunk.''
But those bits might not have made it into the show. The contract allowed the monks some editorial control, though Leisy said they didn't exercise much.
He said a promo clip on The Learning Channel shows one monk venting about a man he was supposed to be mentoring. ``He's saying, `There is a part of me that would like to duke it out with this guy,' '' Leisy said. ``He didn't duke it out with him, but it adds some cutting-edge stuff to the show.
"If there had been some huge fight or something, we might not want that on television, so we wanted some editorial rights but there was no need to say, `Cut all this out; this is too scandalous.' "
Kramer said he argued with the monks about issues such as whether the conversion of the sacramental wafer and wine was literal (as the monks believe) or symbolic (as he believes), but that he liked and respected them.
``They were funny and smart, and I trusted them,'' he said.
Kramer said in desperate times in the past, he considered becoming a monk as a last-resort way to survive but that participating in The Monastery cured him of that.
``I thought of it as a way out,'' he said, ``a way of hiding from society. You know you'll be fed. You know you'll have a robe to wear. But after living at the monastery, I realized that is not an answer. If you don't love praying and singing Gregorian chants five hours a day, it's not a good life. It's very hard, so I now know that being a monk is off my list of backup plans.''
SERIES PREMIERE: The first episode of The Monastery will air at 8 p.m. Sunday on The Learning Channel, cable channel 57 in Santa Fe.
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