I first began spending time with my friend Therese after she wrote me a letter about an old book of mine I’d written about trying—and failing—to be a monk. I’d been too young in my 20s to really understand what kenosis, or emptying of self, was about or to sift the aesthetics of the practice from the heart. But if ever I should like to visit, her letter said, we might have much to talk about.
Not many weeks later, I found myself back near her home in Big Sur, Calif. Therese lived alone in a little cabin in an unpeopled valley reached by a dirt road that was part of a Benedictine monastery. She’d stayed there for a quarter of a century with her husband Eric, but he was gone now and she was free, she told me, to enjoy all the meditative fruits of solitude and silence. Up the slope from where she lived was a community of 15 Camaldolese monks, their chapel, their refectory, their library and cells—and the 10 or so male workers who helped out with odd jobs around the property.
This itself was something I could not have imagined when I was young: that a monastery might house, and the monks look after, an elderly woman. They regularly came down to fix her toilet or secure her screen doors against summer flies; now that Therese was in her 90s, one of them wheeled her up to the chapel for Eucharist on Sundays. In the deep forest all around, she had made her own chapel of eclectic objects to complement the light-filled minimalist chapel up above: pieces of driftwood with stones in their laps, streams made of pebbles serenaded by wind chimes, a dancing Krishna, a Buddha sporting a turquoise necklace.
Most of all, lanterns, candles, colors everywhere in what otherwise might have been an impenetrable darkness, so that the wilderness all around resembled a festival of lights.
Thus Therese became one way I learned to free myself from my far too simple ideas about what a Catholic monastery might be. I’d gone through 15 years of Anglican cloisters while growing up in England: chapel every morning, chapel every evening, the Lord’s Prayer in Latin every Sunday night, the Gospel according to Matthew in Greek by day. I’d begun to wonder whether I needed any more hymns or crosses. But after a forest fire reduced my home and everything in it to ash, and I was spending months sleeping on a friend’s floor, I’d started to make retreats in this Benedictine hermitage a friend had urged on me.
At the very least, he’d pointed out, I’d have a bed to sleep in there, as well as a long desk, a private walled garden with an ocean view, three meals a day—all for $30 a night. The deeper prize, I soon found, was that I was freed from all my everyday concerns and frustrations, and released into a deeper self—or non-self—that I might otherwise have forgotten.
Almost as soon as I stepped out of my car, on my first visit, I felt transported. My plans were left down on the highway and replaced by an intuition I would have to trust. Over the next 20 years I began spending more and more time in the embarrassingly inexpensive retreat house, sometimes taking over a solitary trailer on the hills, complete with its own kitchen and bathroom, for weeks on end, sometimes even taking over a room in the monastic enclosure. At this point in my life, I estimate I have made about 100 retreats at the monastery.
Finding heaven in a radiant setting, free of emails and trifling news updates, is not so difficult, especially if you’re a solitary writer who loves taking walks and reading and sitting out in the warm night trying to count the stars. But in time I learned that the monks who opened their doors to me and 15 or so other retreatants were members of one of the most contemplative orders in Catholicism; they were ready to welcome anyone who visited, confident that she or he, whatever their background, would find what was truest in them in silence, what T. S. Eliot had called “the Life we have lost in living.”
As I started haunting the monastery bookstore—Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, even Rumi—and joining the monks for Sunday lunches, I also found that they were far more down-to-earth and gregarious than I had imagined, the least dogmatic and most practical souls I knew. One was a trained psychologist who received calls from the Pentagon to lead workshops on suicide prevention; another was a scholar born in Hollywood whose life was blown open after his mother, when he was 14, gave him a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi. I met the celebrated mystic who slept on the floor of the Camaldolese ashram in southern India, clad in a dhoti and eating with his hands—he’d studied under C. S. Lewis—and the one from South Africa who liked to come to my trailer to talk about his favorite novels, leaving me on one occasion with a consoling greeting card in which Piglet offers solace to Winnie-the-Pooh.
The Camaldolese had been granted by the Vatican a dispensation to engage with what is true and holy in every religious tradition; more than that, I felt, the brothers were so deep in their commitment that they had nothing they needed to defend or protect. They were ready to learn from everyone.
They knew the outside world, these artists and chemists and engineers—the recent prior had given concerts of his own music everywhere from Beirut to Jakarta—but they had chosen a deliberate life of obedience and devotion. As the world began to speed up ever more furiously, I grew ever more grateful for the life of attention and kindness the brothers opened up to every visitor. And as the planet grew more and more divided, I started to spend more and more nights in their midst, in their enclosure, sometimes even in a monk’s cell if one happened to be unoccupied.
I could never become a monk. I had a widowed mother to protect three hours to the south, and a wife and two kids across the sea in Japan (though after she retired, my wife would start delightedly coming to join me on retreats). Still, I knew of nowhere saner or more steadying, especially in a world of acceleration and contention. As soon as I arrived at my retreats, I remembered what I loved and therefore what I ought to be doing over the next three months. I also found a sense of purpose and of joy—as well as the meaning of commitment—that I had misplaced somewhere along the way.
Going to meet Therese became perhaps the final blessing in this slow move from skepticism to exultant solitude and then to a richer sense of community and even service. She baked fresh ginger cookies for me—and to take back to my aging mother—every time I visited her in her cottage. She set out a yellow legal pad as we spoke so she could note down anything of significance. She rejoiced in my horribly unflattering green sweater full of holes, and since I wore it on every visit, decided that “‘holeyness’ is a form of permanence.”
Well into her 90s, she was screening a movie for me and my wife, “As It Is in Heaven,” that she had seen, she reported with glee, more than 50 times. She was sending me elegant cards and letters whose poetry spoke for her 35 years in silence. She pointed us toward secret shadow shrines she’d set up amid the trees, handing me a cool moist towel every time I arrived at her cabin lest I was feeling hot.
I grew used to seeing her delicate features in her black velvet jacket, the mischievous eyes under the red Alice band that contained her soft white hair. Sometimes, when the remote hilltop hermitage got cut off by winter storms, she had to be helicoptered out after she’d had a fall; more than once, she had to be hurriedly evacuated as wildfires roared around the monastery. “We had two mandatory evacuation orders,” kind Vickie, who began looking after Therese, told me in 2020, “even as we also had mandatory stay-at-home orders” during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Sounds like real life,” I said. In Japan the government had announced a state of emergency during the pandemic even as life proceeded very much as usual.
Just as the pandemic began to ease, Therese, at 96, passed away. But not before celebrating 38 joyful birthdays within the monastery, and brightening many a life with a clarity and wisdom that seemed the perfect complement to the heroic lives of the busy monks up the slope.
By then, I’d realized that I knew nothing of the tradition I had thought I knew too well; I’d never been introduced at school to The Cloud of Unknowing or Pascal, to Meister Eckhart or Father Thomas Keating. Whatever I’d imagined of a Catholic monastery had been a flickering projection that could not begin to take in women helping monks to stay true to their deeper course or non-Christians sharing in a Christian life. I think back now to Therese, and to all the old friends who are still living in that sometimes terrifying wilderness, and realize that no life I could lead down on the highway would make sense without the life of prayer I’ve met far above.
