THE BEST moment in the first episode of
The Monastery, a new series on BBC Two in which five men try their hands as postulants (beginner monks) at Worth Abbey, was undoubtedly when they had a row.
Two of the postulants confronted one another, locking horns, as men do, because one thought the other was too materialistic, a wolf in sheep’s clothing: “His god is money!” After all the slightly forced piety, this viewer was glad of some authentic emotion at last. They made it up, the accuser apologised, the accused retreated to nurse his wounded pride.
It was just a spat, a sudden rush of testosterone brought on by too much solitary silence, plain food and no sex. One might call it habit rage. Yet their spiritual guide, who had been watching quietly throughout, did not rebuke them. “We were treading on holy ground,” he said.
What the monk sees, and the postulants do not, is that men, particularly in English culture, usually require a conflict to express their feelings, especially about one another, with any degree of honesty. Men have to get angry before they can become holy.
It isn’t just an Englishman’s home that’s his castle: it’s his heart, too. (Ask any woman.) Only by giving the new chaps leave to behave more in character — more Big Brother than Oh, Brother! — did the monks have any hope of penetrating the carapace and finding the inner man.
This is, to a greater or lesser extent, the predicament of all men in modern society. Women have devised countless outlets for their emotional frustrations, principally talking to one another. They are always on the lookout for ways and means of giving shape to their spiritual aspirations, too.
Not men, though. They opt out of conversations and situations in which they might have to address anything as impractical as the meaning of life. A preoccupation with such things is considered embarrassingly unmanly, and with a few exceptions — priests, who wear dresses, and dons, who wear gowns — red-blooded Englishmen don’t talk about it. Look what happens to men who are “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought”, from Prince Hamlet to the Prince of Wales.
The audience for popular philosophers such as Alain de Botton is predominantly, though not solely, a female one. But the appetite for spiritual nourishment is not limited to one sex. It is just not readily acknowledged among men.
This has something to do with the fact that all-male company is, outside the gay subculture, increasingly hard to come by. Work and sport, school and university, club and pub have all been feminised. One of the attractions of Army life has always been that it represented a masculine comfort zone. That, too, is changing. Foreigners remark on the absence of camaraderie in British society, and they are right.
Paradoxically, it may be only where masculinity is taken for granted that men do not feel self-conscious about exposing their spiritual yearnings. Ever since antiquity, there have been all-male talking shops of one kind or another at which it was OK to discuss one’s hopes and fears for this world and the next.
When I went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, in the mid-1970s, it was still an all-male institution, just as it had been since the 15th century. Having enjoyed female company at my mixed grammar school, I found this atmosphere misogynist and oppressive. In time, however, I recognised the distinctive intellectual and spiritual quality of this and other male colleges: an unbroken tradition going back to Plato’s academy.
Men seem to require an institutional framework to overcome their spiritual shyness. Whereas a woman may well find herself pouring out her deepest feelings to a friend, or even a stranger, men tend to be wary of exposing themselves to their friends or families, even their wives. Only in our time have male institutions become so rare that a man must go to a monastery to be among others like himself who are not ashamed to admit their spiritual needs.
The muscular Christianity of a monastery does indeed have something in common with other forms of male sociability. The American monk Thomas Merton — one of the best writers about the contemplative life — describes his fellow Cistercians “going out to work like a college football team taking the field”.
But monasteries, like the priesthood, are in decline. Catholic families no longer encourage their sons to renounce the world. We prefer vacations to vocations.
Given that this is unlikely to change any time soon, we can at least taste the contemplative life by spending a day or two on retreat. I once went with my wife and children to a family retreat at a Catholic lay community called the House of the Open Door. For me, the door to spiritual experience only half opened. I was not the only man to feel this. In the communal activities, it was noticeable that the women tended to speak up much more readily than the men. And the fact that the men were there at all made them untypical of their sex.
It was an enjoyable experience, though not, for me, a deeply spiritual one. Reflecting on why this should be, I realised that I had all the time felt too self-conscious, too aware of my role as a husband and father, to be able to lose myself in prayer. In the discussions my instinctive male competitiveness made me too combative. And the very presence of my loved ones made it harder to focus on God.That does not mean that we should not try again, and we shall. The growing popularity of retreats is a sign that the ice of British reticence is breaking.
One remarkable case study of male spirituality has just produced a bestseller, Father Joe, by Tony Hendra, a successful satirist whose credits include Spitting Image. It is the story of Hendra’s friendship with a Benedictine monk, the eponymous Father Joseph Warrilow. Although Father Joe knew that Hendra “would never make a monk”, he indulged the young man’s highfalutin ambitions, stayed loyal while he rejected his faith, and brought the author back to the fold after a rackety life in the world of the media.
One revelation comes only after Father Joe dies, when Hendra learns that, far from being the old man’s unique spiritual son, he is one of hundreds. It seems that countless men out there yearn not only for a respite from the rat race, but also for the spiritual companionship of a holy man. A few — but only a few — are finding what they seek. Others may have to make do with finding God vicariously: through books and music, truth and beauty. All of us, though, have the option of rediscovering the faith of our fathers — or, more likely, mothers.
Yesterday was Pentecost, the birthday of the Church. Not a bad time to remember that, on the pilgrimage of life, faith is not merely a crutch to help us through the bad patches — it is the destination.
- The Monastery, BBC Two, 9pm, May 17 and 24.
