ABIQUIU, N.M. -- As the afternoon prayer service
began, a parade of men in flowing black habits shuffled into this
adobe chapel from behind the altar to bow and take seats.
For a remote monastery nestled in the mountains north of Santa
Fe, that's routine. But weaved into this procession was a gaggle
of men in lay clothes, including William Morales, a muscular,
tattooed Bostonian in a Roxbury YMCA T-shirt, and Warren Huber,
a scraggly-bearded man from Worcester.
And there was a video camera capturing it all for a television
series.
Morales and Huber were among the five men and five women selected
as participants in one of the more peculiar concepts in the
annals of reality TV, a program in which people of diverse backgrounds
and faiths were sent to live this past winter in a monastery
for 40 days. An American version of a hit British show, ''The
Monastery" is slated to air as a 10-part series for The Learning
Channel this fall.
TLC producers and monastery leaders are quick to say this
isn't a reality show in the exploitative, crass, faux-dramatic
manner of ''The Bachelor" or ''Unan1mous." Rather, they say
it's an observational documentary in which the camera is as
unobtrusive as possible and the participants aren't in any competition.
(This is not, they insist, ''The Amazing Grace" or ''American
Idolatry.")
''The only thing this has in common with a reality show is
that we've chosen people who wouldn't be doing this otherwise,"
series producer Sarah Woodford said. ''Where we depart from
a reality show is that then we let the events unfold. 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."
The five men lived from early February to mid-March at the
Monastery of Christ in the Desert near quaint Abiquiu, best
known as the longtime home of the late painter Georgia O'Keeffe.
The women went to Our Lady of the Mississippi Abbey on a farm
near Dubuque, Iowa, from December to early February.
To create more interaction in a situation that was largely
silent and introspective, Woodford paired each participant with
a monk or nun mentor to speak to regularly about the experience
and furnished all the participants with video cameras in their
cells that they could turn on to comment on their lives when
they wished. The film crew occasionally interviewed the participants,
too.
Morales, 35, and Huber, 24, are both from New England, but
that's where their similarities end.
Morales is a married father of three, a lapsed Catholic, and
a onetime leader of the X-Men gang in Egleston Square who now
works as associate executive director at the Roxbury YMCA. He
is the brother of Hector Morales, a 19-year-old gang member
shot to death by police in 1990 on the Jamaica Plain-Roxbury
border after he opened fire on officers. Will Morales was in
Walpole State Prison for dealing cocaine at the time, and his
brother's death and his mother's grief rattled him into leaving
the gang life. He was more than a decade removed from crime
and prison when he became part of ''The Monastery," but he said
he got involved because he was still searching for spiritual
satisfaction and guidance.
Huber is well grounded in his Episcopal faith and answered
the casting call because he hopes someday to start a monastery
in New Zealand. But he said he continues to cope with the impact
of alleged physical abuse from his childhood. While he was raised
an Episcopal in Westborough, he found his local church too strict
and spent his teens exploring atheism, Wicca, druidism, and
Satanism before finding a more tolerant Episcopal congregation
in Fitchburg.
Both had reservations about ''The Monastery" and made producers
convince them they weren't looking to make a lurid program.
They were joined by an Iraq war veteran who lost his leg in
combat, a recovered drug and alcohol addict, and a paramedic
disturbed by a childhood friend's suicide more than a decade
ago.
''I was a little nervous, but I looked at some of TLC's other
programs and I realized it wasn't going to be scripted," Morales
said. ''It wasn't a ridiculous concept of individuals trying
to back-stab and that kind of thing. I mean, we were going to
a monastery, so it couldn't get too crazy."
The monastery's leader, Abbot Philip Lawrence, agreed to open
the doors for the same reason. Lawrence admitted that he hopes
the exposure will help viewers understand Catholics at a troubling
time for the church.
''They're not out to do something that is going to make fun
of us," Lawrence said, referring to the producers. ''Right now,
I'm sure you're aware, the Catholic Church and priests do not
have a very high reputation in the public eye. 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."
Yet, as the program will likely show, there's plenty of that.
While there, the men woke daily for 4 a.m. prayers and spent
hours each day singing and chanting Gregorian prayers. They
contributed as the monks would to the maintenance and upkeep
of the 750-acre property and limited their outside contact to
once-weekly e-mail sessions and a single weekly phone call.
It wasn't an easy pace or lifestyle; one of the other men
went home four weeks in after attempting to break into a pantry
on the premises to steal beer. (Producers have asked that the
identity of the participant who left not be revealed before
the show airs.)
''The first two weeks, we were flying blind," Morales said.
''As it became more repetitious, it really started getting grueling.
Every day there was nothing new except the same thing over and
over again. We'd ask the monks how they do it, and they'd say
that this is their vocation, what they were called to do. I
received a call on the phone, but I didn't get a spiritual call
to do this."
For Huber, the challenges were both social and religious.
He had a rough time early on getting along with the other men,
who pegged him as a know-it-all.
''Especially because of my youth, I often come across that
way," Huber said. ''The reason for it is, I have a lot of knowledge
of things being discussed. These have always been areas of interest
and research for me. I've learned a lot of things that most
people haven't. The other part is that I'm a teacher -- I enjoy
helping people learn new things. Sometimes I expect everybody
around me to engage in that intellectual conversation."
Huber also wasn't shy about questioning the monks and rebelling
when various tasks troubled his Episcopalian sensibilities.
He refused to pray to saints, a standard Catholic practice that
some Episcopalians believe is akin to idol worship, and he engaged
the monks in debate over biblical teachings on homosexuality
and women as clergy.
''For a lot of it, I was able to put it aside and say, 'OK,
this is what they do, this is what they believe, not what I
believe,' " he said. ''But once in while, it did kind of rub
me a little bit the wrong way."
Yet there were moments of great inspiration, too, as when
the quintet climbed a 750-foot cliff overlooking the glass dome
of the chapel to erect an 8-foot cross. Morales said he was
particularly awestruck by fellow participant Alex Nicoll, 23,
the Iraq war veteran, who made the climb despite having to stop
regularly to drain sweat out of his prosthetic leg.
Already, the participants have felt the show's impact on their
real lives. Morales said that in his first week back on his
job there was a shooting outside the Roxbury Y.
''Normally, before this, I would have become very angry, would
have been out there in the street in the face of the police
telling them what they should do to make this neighborhood safer,"
Morales said. ''But this time, I just pulled my people in, locked
up everything, and silently prayed. I was looking at what the
blessings of the situation was. A man didn't die; nobody in
my building was injured. And that's what I learned, how many
blessings we have every day that we don't even notice."
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