The first time I stayed in a monastic enclosure—a cloister, in effect, reserved for monks and a few guests—I took as my holy scripture The Kid Stays in the Picture, the raucous memoir by Bob Evans, the bon vivant Hollywood producer who married seven times. I’d found a copy of it in the monastery’s unofficial library—a rickety, hundred-year-old wooden house across from the official library—in which I also found collected stories by Woody Allen and the love-soaked fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Graham Greene.
A worker (10 or more of these live with the monks, helping with plumbing and generators) was doing pull-ups against a creaky beam; also in the “raunchy library,” as a monk had beamingly presented it to me, were a stationary bike and a “world class” 160-gram Frisbee. My room—St. Paul the Hermit—had a bed that almost collapsed under my negligible weight, down the corridor from a shared toilet whose seat slipped out from under me every time I tried to use it. The window in my cell was held together by cellophane and hope.
This was all a wonderful way to rescue me from any romance I might have harbored about the monastic life. Every time I looked out the window, I saw men in work clothes bustling back and forth with wheelbarrows. Someone was heading out in a golf cart to tend to some plugged toilet in a retreatant’s room. Someone else was carrying a mountain of stuffed pillowcases to the laundry room. In the “rec room” on Sunday evenings, the monks gathered around A Fish Called Wanda or The Lavender Hill Mob.
I felt strange at first staying with the monks. I’m not a Christian and I didn’t attend any of the four or five daily services on offer in this Benedictine hermitage. I didn’t read holy books very much—other than Bob Evans—and when, occasionally, I went into the chapel and heard the psalms, I had to hurry out, ears stinging from references to the “ungodly” and the “filthy” and “hating those who hate thee.”
Yet as the world accelerated, I’d started to make retreats in this simple place high above the sea in Big Sur, California, in much the same way I started going to the health club: to clear my head, to step away from the rush, and to ensure I don’t collapse. Very quickly it became my most trusted medicine; I never did anything spiritual there other than take long walks above the sea, write letters, and try to count the stars. Yet after every visit, over 33 years, I came back home refreshed, clarified, and remembering what I really care for.
The monks, to my surprise, turned out to be the friendliest, most down-to-earth, and least dogmatic souls I knew. Their congregation, the Camaldolese, is the most contemplative of all Catholic communities, to the point where the prior headed across the hills and led workshops at a Zen training center and kept on his wall a portrait of Jesus in the lotus position. The monastic bookstore was full of books on Sufism and Buddhism amidst its tasty cakes and necklaces. At a time when the world seems ever more divided, it was a relief simply to be in a place where nobody was trying to inflict his preferences or assumptions on anyone else.
I’ve stayed by now at other retreat houses across the planet, but none had quite the radiance, the pulsating stillness of this one. Big Sur already feels like a world outside of time; suddenly, on the dramatic 60-mile stretch of Highway 1 winding along the central-Californian coastline, every worldly care seems to vanish. And the fact that there was no guru in residence, no rules to observe, nothing but 900 acres of golden hillside and an untroubled sea below made the monastery as liberating as anywhere I’d found in a lifetime of constant travel.
Even so, I was surprised that the monks were open-minded enough to allow a nonbeliever to stay not just in their retreat house but in their private quarters, sharing lunch with them each day, hearing about their doubts and frustrations, asked to offer nothing but a nominal voluntary donation. I’ve always been somewhat allergic to New Age centers or anything based around a “spiritual teacher”; here I was in the midst of a 1,000-year-old discipline that wasn’t centered on any fallible human or feel-good philosophy discovered the night before last.
The monks’ special gift, I realized as the years went on, was for staying out of the picture. They’re happy to host visitors from Hollywood or anywhere—their enclosure has been home to one man who’s now a rabbi and another who’s an MTV executive—and their only real concern seems to be tending to every guest, as if he (or she; the majority of visitors are female) is a blessing.
I never expected I’d see our nation and our globe so cut up, with people insisting they know more or better than everyone else; many of my friends seem driven to despair these days by the unceasing assault of wokeness, Trumpism, or murderous reminders of a climate crisis. At such a time, I find the most useful thing I can do is step into my car, drive three and a half hours north out of Santa Barbara, and walk into a living silence—no cell-phone reception, no Internet, no TV—that unfailingly sends me back with a clearer sense of purpose and of hope.
After more than 100 retreats, sometimes lasting for three weeks, I decided to write down some of what I’d learned in case anyone else is feeling harried or too distracted. In the silence above the sea, even Bob Evans’s memoir can feel like something essential.
Pico Iyer is a Columnist at AIR MAIL
