And the LORD said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the LORD. And, behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the LORD was not in the earthquake:

And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.

And it was so, when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his face in his mantle, and went out, and stood in the entering in of the cave. And, behold, there came a voice unto him, and said, What doest thou here, Elijah? (1 Kings 19:11-13)

The hardest time of the year for me is the weeks between the end of the school year and the start of summer school. During this time, my son David and I are virtually inseparable.

I love my son but there's one thing about David that gets to me: He's noisy. I mean "so-loud-I-can-barely-hear-myself-think" noisy. Part of it is a function of his being autistic and part of it is that he's a kid. Either way, when he's around the silence I need to make sense of my life is definitely at a premium.

The subjects of the recent award-winning film "Into Great Silence" (Die Große Stille) would no doubt understand. In 1984, German filmmaker Philip Gröning contacted the Carthusian order, whose motto is "Stat crux dum volvitur orbis" (the cross stands while the world turns), asking for permission to make a documentary about the order and its great charterhouse in Chartreuse in the French Alps. The order replied that it would get back to him when the time was right.

Sixteen years later, it got back to him.

The Carthusians' sense of time should give you some idea of why Gröning wanted to make a film about them — that and their way of life. (Calling it a "lifestyle" would be a grave injustice.) What's been called Catholicism's "most austere order" combines elements of both eremitic (from the Greek eremites, meaning "inhabitants of a desert," from which we derive the word "hermit") and cenobitic (i.e., communal) monasticism.

Following the rules set forth by their founder, St. Bruno (c.1030-1101), the monks spend most of their time alone in their cells (the monastic use of the word "cell" long preceded the penal use) praying, studying and working in silence. They come together to pray the Canonical Hours, for Mass, a weekly communal meal taken in silence and for recreational time on Sunday afternoons: the only time when they are permitted to speak freely with each other.

The product of what the Carthusians acknowledge is a difficult rule that few can follow is a "joyful penitence" spent in an "everlasting prayer" where the monk (or nun: there are Carthusian nuns) can, in the midst of solitude and stillness, know that "God is" and know His goodness in a way that few of us can even imagine.

The "joyful" part isn't spin. While what the monks are doing is hard, it's clear from watching the film that they aren't. In one of the most memorable scenes, the monks snowboard without the board down the side of a hill. They fall, they laugh just as you or I would. They are affectionate towards each other and accepting, if reserved, of Gröning and his camera.

This shouldn't come as a surprise. What drives their joyful penitence isn't misanthropy or fear but the conviction that if God is to be found, if He is to be truly known, He must be pursued wholeheartedly — a conviction Gröning drives home by inserting text cards with verses such as "Anyone who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple" (Luke 14:33) and "Oh Lord, you have seduced me and I was seduced" (Jeremiah 20:7).

A big part of this wholehearted pursuit is putting oneself in a position where you can hear God who, as the passage from 1 Kings tells us, will not (and should not) turn the volume up to compete with the noise generated by a world turning out of control. The Hebrew kol d'mama daka, translated as "still small voice," can also be translated "still silent voice" or, my favorite: "the voice of eloquent silence."

Silence, by definition, cannot be heard over what theologian Robert P. Imbelli of Boston College calls "our habitual, often unthinking, verbal excess." And it certainly can't compete with the additional layers of distractions that we (including me) have come to assume are a necessary part of life.

(This pursuit of silence and stillness should not be confused with Luddism and the rejection of technology: The monks use computers and even electronic keyboards, when it furthers a purpose related to their calling, such as managing the charterhouse's finances or practicing the music sung during the Canonical Hours. For the Carthusians, they are tools like the axes and saws they use to cut their firewood.)

Arguably, the most noteworthy thing about Gröning's film is its critical and popular reception: It won the Special Jury Prize at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. A.O. Scott of the New York Times called it "the antidote" to every other film he had seen that year. If anything, audiences loved the film even more than the critics: It's become "something of an international underground hit," earning $4 million at the box office in Europe alone — an extraordinary amount for a nearly-three hour (162 minutes) documentary with no dialogue (of course) and no narrative structure to speak of.

The film has done ever better on DVD: It has ranked as high as number four at Amazon.de (Germany), number 11 at Amazon.ca (Canada, where I purchased it) and opened at number 22 on Amazon.fr (France). (The DVD will be released this October in the U.S.)

The obvious question is "why?" It's difficult to imagine a more explicit repudiation of our way of life than what's depicted on the film. One obvious answer is that the audience response reflects what Commonweal's John Garvey called "a spiritual hunger that goes deep." He likened it to the response to Marilynne Robinson's "quiet, and unabashedly Christian novel 'Gilead.'" People know the real thing when they see it.

But there's another, equally obvious, answer: On some level, we know that the Carthusians are right both about the importance of silence/stillness and about how God is best known.

As "media ecologists" like NYU's Mark Crispin Miller tell us, everyday thousands of images and messages compete for our attention. Companies and advertisers pay a lot of money for any insight as to how they might cut through this "clutter." When you combine this "clutter" with what's called the "Feiler Faster Thesis" — which says that as the flow of information increases and the news cycle shortens, our ability to process the information and move on to the next thing evolves to keep up — the result is the equivalent of swallowing your food whole without bothering to chew or even taste it. There might be something worthwhile in all that quantity (or, as the monks would tell us, outside of all that quantity) but we will never be able to tell.

That's because our lives bear an increasing resemblance to the practices of the vampire hunter played by Jessica Biel in the otherwise forgettable film, "Blade 3." (I know.) She not only "listens" to an iPod while hunting vampires, she prepares a different playlist before each hunt. You would think that she had more important things to think about, such as — I don't know — dying. Whatever the writer's and/or director's intentions were, it's a nearly-perfect illustration of our dread of silence.

Unfortunately, it's only in stillness and silence that we are likely to find what we want most. I'm not saying that we all must become monks if we are to know God as He desires to be known; I'm saying that the busyness, "clutter" and sheer volume of modern life is inimical to this search.

Just think of the many times in the Gospels that Jesus withdrew to a secluded place. To state the obvious, His world could not be remotely compared to ours in terms of distractions, not to mention the part about his being God incarnate. If He felt the need to withdraw to a "lonely place," can you imagine what we need?

As Matthew Boudway (also from Commonweal) put it, "Gröning's film succeeds in showing that the real purpose of monastic silence is not to soothe but to stimulate, to alert the senses to God's often quiet presence by scraping away or rationing whatever might distract us from it" (Emphasis mine). While few Christians are called to scrape as thoroughly as the Carthusians do, none of us are exempt from the requirement to ration that which keeps us from hearing what we need and long (whether we know it or not) to hear most.