that the monks had commented that I had fit into their life better than any other guest they’d had. For myself I had learned that I could probably be content living that monastic life. But while it might have been beneficial to me spiritually, I don’t think it would have been healthy for me over all. Yet I am quite aware that those five weeks, living on a tiny island on the south coast of Wales with fifteen monks, became one of the most important foundation stones in the spiritual house I am building right now. I learned that there is much more to spiritual life than I had been taught, and that it is not bounded by what can be found in the Scriptures, which I had also been taught.
In one conversation with Gildas (we had only three in the whole five weeks. Cistercians do not take a vow of silence, but their rule is of no unnecessary conversation, and that makes for a whole lot of silence) he told me that he had learned that one of the best times of the day for prayer was at dusk, just before dawn and just afer sunset, and that the chapel in the old fifteenth-century Benedictine ruins up the hill, kept barely usable with a still-consecrated altar, was one of the best places to pray, particularly just before dawn. So one morning when I was fairly awake, after the vigil I betook myself up the hill to the old ruins. It had been raining lightly, and the wind was still brisk. It was well before dawn so the cloudy sky was quite dark, and I had no flashlight with me. In the near blackness, the wind blowing globs of water off the tree limbs onto me, I made my way up the hill, around the mill pond and into the old courtyard, searching out the door into the choir where the Benedictines had sung their psalms five hundred years before. There was barely enough light inside to make things out, but my eyes gradually became accustomed to the blackness. I sat in the choir to pray: prayers of silence, of listening. I had become stalled in my writing, having nearly completed my articles on Celtic spirituality, but stuck trying to compose several prayers in the Celtic style for which I had no copy in Carmina Gaedelica. I was somewhat frustrated because time was running out for me on Caldey; but I was not praying that night about those prayers, or anything else. This was listening-prayer time. After a while I became aware of a strange sound in the choir. It took me a moment to identify it. The sound of the monks’s robes as they processed into chapel for Compline! (For all the other hours the monks straggled into the chapel individually, but at Compline they were coming from their daily chapter meeting and processed silently in order of seniority into the chapel; their robes made a very identifiable swishing sound as they came in together.) I actually looked around to see if the Cistercians were coming! They were not. But now there was a presence in the room with me, a warm and friendly presence. Perhaps the fifteenth-century Benedictines? As that sound diminished I realized that it was raining lightly outside, and what I was hearing was the sound of the rain on the slate room. And yet there was still a presence in the choir with me, as though the medieval monks were praying with me; not a spooky feeling, but the warm and friendly presence of monks appreciating my joining their silent choir. I sat for some moments wondering when suddenly I had to fish a frantic pencil stub out of my pocket and a scrap of paper, as words came tumbling out. It was one of the prayers that had stumped me for days, and it poured out into notes that were almost in finished form. I marveled! That prayer had been given to me; it came through my hand but not out of me. (Oh, I can appreciate hearing the sound of lightly falling rain as monks processing in coupled in the workings of the writer’s unconscious mind, but this plainly felt like something other than those. And who says that anything in life must have only a single cause?) I wondered for a few minutes, as the sense of that presence gradually evaporated and I was again alone in the chapel. I decided to move a dozen feet into the sanctuary. That was a spookier space: on the left side was a large door, overhung with a black curtain, leading into the ruined dormitory where it was rumored that the black monk still wandered, searching for the silver and gold altar vessels secreted during a Viking raid and never recovered. But it was starting to lighten just a bit, and through the window over the altar I could see the tree limbs outside shaken by the blustering winds. I sat in the silent sanctuary a few minutes, reaching again for that listening prayer, when suddenly I once more had to grab my pencil stub and paper and again the words of a second prayer came tumbling out, again nearly polished. And again it felt like a gift given. By now the space once again felt empty except for me, but comfortable, no longer spooky. I went down to join the monks for Prime in chapel.
I was fairly exhausted in my work toward the end of my stay in the monastery, and my work was far enough along that I could give myself the luxury of a day off. I pocketed some fresh fruit at breakfast and begged from Gildas a small hunk of cheese and a bottle of water, and told him I was going off alone to Sandtop Bay and would not be back for noonday meal or chapel until supper or Compline. So after mass I bundled up and made my way up the hill and across the top of the island, a mile or less, to Sandtop Bay on the west end of Caldey. It had been blowing a gale the day before so there were still high winds and the seas were up. Sandtop is fairly exposed to the Atlantic winds so I had to search a while to find the spot protected enough from the winds and blowing spray. The bay is protected on two sides with seventy or so foot cliffs, and on the backside with high, steep sand dunes which in a high wind can be difficult to negotiate. And this day the wind was coming in from just about due west, the unprotected direction. I searched for twenty or more minutes before I chanced upon a small location just barely protected, and fortunately furnished with the only grass-tufted hummock that provided a comfortable seat. And there I besat myself for four or five hours. What happened to me there is not very describable. I watched and I listened and I smelled. What I sensed was God-at-play.
The combers rolled in by the minute, through the hours, steadily, breaking into foam a hundred yards out, drawing lines across the narrow bay, swiftly marching row after row onto the beach, one upon another upon another endlessly, relentlessly, each rushing up the beach and hissing into the sand, disappearing as it began its retreat and the next took its place, rushing and hissing. It was marvelous. A show, as if staged just for me, as though I were not there to see it at all; only God. The edges of each wave on either side of the beach crashed against the cliffs, throwing spray high into the air where the winds caught and tossed it up, over the tops of the cliffs high above the hissing sands. The wind was strong enough that when standing I had to lean into it, and then it would gust, teasing me, trying to throw me off-balance and onto the ground. And the winds carried mists of salt spray onto my lips and my eyebrows and my hair. I had tasted salt spray years before, deep at sea, riding a Navy destroyer; it is not an unpleasant taste and sensation: refreshing, cool—gritty and cleansing. Wet. The sky was a marvelously deep blue, the color of the skies in Edinburgh when the breeze is refreshingly cool but the winds high aloft are crisply cold, and the clouds are white puffs of cotton scudding across. Gulls and other birds I did not know relished the winds, took delight in riding them, soaring higher and higher and then swooping down across the beach, laughing to each other as they coasted up over the sand dunes and then turned back seaward to take the ride again; a play-day for them, searching if by chance there might come an edible tidbit to be snatched from one of the waves.
I could write pages to describe that day, but by now you may have the notion of it. It was refreshing. Cleansing. Enervating. A taste of the very essence of life. A pleasure for the ears and eyes and nose and skin, and even the tongue. Of course it had come just when I needed it in my work. But I think it would have been the same even if I’d not needed it so badly, if I could have just paid attention. God was playing, and letting me watch. Perhaps taking delight in my pleasure. I knew of a certainty that I was in Her presence that day, and there was nothing needing to be said or heard, by me or by Her. Eventually the chill of the wind crept into my bones and I had to move. I made my way to the other side of the beach, to the cliffs where there were several small caves and the waves crashed at my feet. But the magic was ebbing away. (John O’Donohue tells us that the soul is a shy presence that can not be aggressively hunted. It does not want to be seen with too much clarity, but rather seems much more at home in a candle-like kind of light that has a hospitality for shadows and wonderful openings in the darkness.) I think when I crossed that beach looking for more, I became the hunter-too-aggressive, and whatever opening I had been cosseting that day turned shy, and closed gradually away. I made my way back up the sand dunes collapsing underneath each footfall, and across the top of the island, and back down to the abbey. What a glorious day. It still remains crystal clear in my memory. It taught me how to find God.
The
