“Into Great Silence” is a documentary (see Father Lauder’s column, Page 18), and if you have the opportunity to see the nearly two-and-a-half-hour film about an austere Carthusian monastery in the French Alps, there are two things you should know.

First, it is not like most documentaries you have seen. Aside from a handful of spoken words, it is an entirely visual event, and should be approached more as a prayerful opportunity rather than a night at the flicks.

Second, avoid sitting near anyone munching on a chicken salad during the screening. But more on that later.

In Anchorage, a local theater/pub called “The Bear Tooth” showed the award-winning documentary. The Bear Tooth screens artsy films, old films, films the big chains don’t select, and usually runs them only one or two days.

So Anchorage had two opportunities to view “Into Great Silence.” The place was packed the night I arrived, and as I expected, I saw lots of friends.

Anchorage, like most places in Catholic America, has its traditional and progressive wings of the Church and sometimes it seems that nary the twain shall meet. So it was nice to see that this film brought out a wide cross-section of Catholics, all seeking together a clue to the mystery of God in our lives.

I did come prepared for a prayerful event. I knew that the filmmakers had spent six months at the monastery, recording the ordinary lives of monks who reside in disciplined silence.

We saw monks at prayer, monks at work silently preparing meals, digging for the spring planting, making their way down a quiet hallway with the lunch cart, pausing to stop and push the day’s food through a cell’s small opening.

The monks share a meal together only on Sundays and then spend recreation time where they are allowed to talk. I tried to imagine what that recreation time might mean for me. I would be positively bursting with chatter. But the monks’ conversation was quiet, full of a peace and gentle humor that must come from a life of constant awareness of God.

The cinematography in “Into Great Silence” is gorgeous. The monastery, perched on the side of a mountain, is literally above the clouds. How could you not be prayerful if you called this place home?

But I have to admit, after two-and-a-half hours I started squirming. I was looking at my watch, thinking about the late hour, the kids I had to get up with early the next morning, all the things crowding my “to do” list. What a contrast my life is to the slow and peaceful pace of the monks I was watching on screen.

And then there was that chicken salad. The pub part of The Bear Tooth means it serves meals — everything from pizza to nachos — during films. It wasn’t the kind of movie I would think of munching through, but the lady who was kind enough to let me squeeze in next to her was later served an enormous and very pungent meal. The proximity and the odor of that salad were nearly overpowering. I was sure I could still smell it when I went to bed.

The next morning, when I went to my own silence – that prayer time that is so essential for all of us – I thought about that salad with a smile. It sort of symbolized for me my own vocation – not the ordered, silent life of a cloister – but the crazy, messy life of a mom who tries to grab