A day with the brothers

Monks at lunch

It was one of the most unusual/fascinating things I think I’ve ever done.
I spent a day with a friend at Downside Abbey, a monastery inhabited by a community of Benedictine monks.
Antony’s holiday cottage was booked, so his fallback plan for our catch-up session was a place that he’d used as a retreat on several occasions.
The accommodation was fine and the setting was certainly austere, but the various brushes we had with monks over the day were exhilarating!

For me, the monastery newbie, the mealtimes were the highlight. They were in silence - almost. Antony and I would wait until the 20 or so black-robbed monks (early 30’s up to late 80’s) had filed/shuffled into the refectory.
We didn’t sit with the monks. Our table was off to one side, one corner of which was used as a stockpile for elderly monk medication – eg Dom John’s days-of-the-week tablet box of statins.

The meal would start with the Abbot “dinging” his ornate brass counter bell. The one exception to the silence was the monk chosen to read from a book, deemed by the Abbot to be of betterment to the community. The current passage was the chapter “Russia – the 3rd Rome” from Diarmaid Macculloch’s book - A history of Christianity. Hardly Jackie Collins, and it flew stratospherically over my head, but it was all part of this remarkable experience.
It required supreme self-restraint to stop myself taking surreptitious pictures of this amazing ritual. I failed once or twice and the monks around the refectory tables are just about visible.
The meal ended as it began with a “ding” from the Abbot. The reader finished mid-sentence… closed his book and the monks all filed out. You could almost hear the tumbleweed after they had processed out of the room.

It was a revelation to me. A good number of these men have lived the same routine at the abbey (starting with Matins prayer at 7am) day-in day-out for decades. One monk with whom we had polite conversation, Brother Martin, had been there for over 40 years. He was warm, articulate and super-intelligent – hardly the effect you’d imagine so much repetition to have had on someone’s mind. But maybe there’s method in the madness.

The Work of God for these monks as St Benedict describes it, is the incessant praise of God through prayer and study – mostly in silence. A simple, uncomplicated but devoted life. How utterly OTHER is that from today’s wild rat-race? The 24hrs there had a big enough impact on me. I'd like to do it again sometime soon.

And it begged a few questions of me. How often do I take time out – do nothing – sit in silence – take stock – take time to think things through properly?
How much stress, unnecessary baggage, anxiety, “noise” could I offload if I could “be” a little more and “do” a little less. Would it make life simpler, more manageable, more meaningful?