Nancy Klein Maguire

An Infinity of Little Hours

Original airdate: October 19, 2007

About the Book: This riveting chronicle of a difficult spiritual journey offers an unprecedented look inside a secretive world unchanged since the eleventh century.

In 1960, five young men arrived at the imposing gates of Parkminster, the largest center of the most rigorous and ascetic monastic order in the Western world: the Carthusians. This is the story of their five-year journey into a society that had maintained the same beliefs and lifestyle since St. Bruno initiated the order in 1084.

An Infinity of Little Hours is a uniquely intimate portrait of the customs and practices of a monastic order almost entirely unknown until now. It is also a drama of the men’s struggles as they avoid the 1960s—the decade of hedonism, music, fashion, and amorality—and enter an entirely different era and a spiritual world of their own making. After five years each faces a choice: if he stays to make “solemn profession,” he will never leave. But if he leaves, he must turn his back on his journey to find God in solitude—his life’s ambition.

A remarkable investigative work, the book combines first-hand testimony with unique source material to describe the Carthusian life. And the final chapter recounts a reunion forty years later revealing who succeeds and how the others incorporated their monastic experience as they rejoined the world outside.
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