It was a strange place to find him, this Caribbean character out of a Jimmy Buffet song. True, he was still bumming around the islands. But this was a Welsh island; it was January and just above freezing. Without knowing him as he was before, it was obvious Brother Paul was a changed man.
Because of a New Year’s storm, I was a day late making the crossing to Caldey from the mainland. From my hotel room in Tenby, I’d stared out at the Severn Sea watching fishing boats in Tenby’s ancient stone harbor break loose from their moorings. One boat had sunk. But because low tide completely drains the harbor, all the captain had to do was wait until then and pump her out.
Finally now, three miles off the south coast of Pembrokeshire in Wales, the long, low island grew as the boat approached. The buildings of the monastery appeared above the rough cliffs and fields of gorse.
Isolation is a concept invariably associated with small islands and lofty mountain peaks. It is no accident that many of Britain’s western islands have at one time or another been used as a refuge for men seeking to withdraw from one world as they aspire to another. Maybe no man is an island, but that doesn’t stop a lot of them from trying. And while Caldey is only a mile and a half long and less than ¾ of a mile wide, this slow and gentle island has been attracting men looking to change their lives for past 1,500 years.
No one met me at the stone jetty on Priory Bay so I made my own way up the old road. Father Robert, the abbot, welcomed me when I tentatively rapped the gargoyle knocker on the door of Caldey Abbey. But then he hurried away. Caldey’s material welfare depends on the influx of tourists who overrun the island during the summer and drive the monks behind the fences of their private enclosure. The brothers’ spiritual welfare therefore depends more on the solitude of these quieter cold months. He left me with a map of the island and introduced me to a young man from Llandovery who had fled to the island to cram for his A-Level exams. Neil offered to give me a tour.
Caldey’s Welsh name is Ynvs Pyr, “the Island of Pyro.” Pyro began Caldey’s monastic tradition when he retired to the island to live as a hermit in the 6th century. Others followed, and Pyro became the first abbot of a Celtic monastery. One dark night, according to legend, Pyro got drunk and fell down the well.
Not far from the modern abbey, completed in 1912, Neil and I explored the Benedictine priory, which was built soon after the Norman Conquest on the ruins of Pyro’s community of wattle huts. The Norman monastery operated until Henry VIII suppressed all the monasteries in 1536.
The island changed hands many times after that. Ninety years ago an amateur archaeologist, the Rev. W.D. Bushnell, retired to Caldey and restored the priory, which had even spent some of the intervening time as a brewery.
The modern monastery was built by Anglican Benedictines, led by Abbot Aelred of Painsthorpe Abbey in Yorkshire. In 1928, the entire brotherhood abandoned the island. At the request of the Pope, they were replaced by Cistercians from the Belgian abbey of Scourmont.
It was very cold. Neil left me and returned to the guest house for his seventeenth cup of coffee. I wandered around, snapping pictures. The land behind the monastery was littered with automotive history: dozens of derelict vehicles in various stages of decay.
In the shadow of a WWII amphibious lander, someone was welding. Sparks popped off the burnishing rod, flaring in the lens, reflecting off his goggles, and making his gray beard look like it was on fire. When I coughed he looked up and I asked if he minded. He just grunted and went back to work.
Click. Intrigued, I asked, “What are you doing?”
“Welding. What does it look like I’m doing?” There was something strangely out of place about his voice. Something familiar.
“I mean it looks like you’re making that gear from scratch?”
“Made the whole da—“ he mumbled something “bike from scratch and odd parts.” He closed off the gas, took off his glasses, and looked at me. “Here.”
He led me into the garage. In the corner, a low motorcycle squatted in disarray.
“It works?”
“Of course it works!” he said irritably, but then picked up something meant to be a muffler. “Well, usually it does.”
Neil had mentioned that one of the friars was an American ex-Marine.
“You must be Brother Paul?”
“Who are you?” Then, “Where are you from?” “California.”
He swore and clasped my hand. “I’m from Florida,” he laughed.
Our conversation took on a different tone. Brother Paul rolled a cigarette, offered it to me first, then fished in the pockets of his tattered bomber jacket for matches.
“I’m something of a maverick around here,” he confessed. For instance, he loves to ride his bike around the island’s tracks, despite complaints that the noise terrifies the sheep. Leaning closer he admitted his secret dream of scaring one to death because he was dying for some ‘chops. The monastery is vegetarian. “You know what I really miss about the States? Porterhouse steaks.”
“So what are you doing here?”
His answer began with a string of good-natured obscenities and imprecations.
“I just got my stability,” he said. He explained that he’d been here for three years and had recently taken the further vows of a man intent on remaining in the Order for life. Usually, a monk is expected to go off by himself to be sure of his decision. Brother Paul had just camped on the far side of the island.
Father Joe, the chief mechanic, came in. Brother Paul introduced him as “my boss.” Father Joe had sewn a scapula onto his jump suit, although the hood was more for the cold than for monastic effect. Brother Paul seemed uncomfortable talking now, so I made an excuse and left.
Each monk on Caldey is an expert on something, Neil had told me. One is the baker, one works at the dairy with some of the island’s secular tenants, two make Caldey’s famous perfume, Brother Paul and Father Joe are mechanics. I found Brother James, who Neil described as “the public works type,” tooling around on a roto-tiller hitched like a tractor to a cart.
“Can I take your picture?”
He stopped, shrugged. “It takes nothing from me,” he said in a heavy accent. “Wait!” He adjusted his beret and his sheepskin vest. “You think I look French?”
The monks are all fairly close in age now. All in their 50s and early 60s. But while some like Brother Paul have only been there a few years, Brother James has been on Caldey on and off since almost from the beginning. I helped him load slate into the cart and then patch parts of the road where the rain had made potholes.
Brother James came to Caldey when he was 24. He was sent just to help out for a while. He is now 60. He had entered the order in Belgium when he was 16. “I confess I cried like a baby in my straw mattress on my first night. But only once.”
In the 60s his abbot at Scourmont asked Brother James to take a Rover full of supplies from the Belgian Congo to Zaire.
“But I don’t know how to drive.” Brother James protested.
“You’ll learn.”
He was gone six years.
Suddenly Brother James straightened up. “We’re late,” he said and started up the road to the abbey. Neil was out in front of the guest wing shouting for me to hurry up.
During the day, as they go about their chores, the monks appear as they are. Muddy Wellingtons, mended sweaters, scarves, bomber jackets... scattered around the island. At sext, as they do many times during the day, for lauds and mass, terce, sext, none, vespers, and compline, the monks exchange their dirty work clothes for robes and scapula and file into the choir stalls of the Abbey Church. When they come together in song and prayer, they blend with each other’s voices in the Gregorian mode:
...As it was in the beginning, is now,
and ever shall be. World without end. Amen.
They sing with varying expressions and degrees of devotion. Their voices range high and low. Brother Paul leaned back in his choir stall, his eyes were far away, his mouth working the prayers. He appeared to be somewhere painful in his own past.
Exiting the chapel, they file down the red stone floor of the cloisters as a line of humility. With Neil and I in tow, they filled the refectory, a huge dining hall under a high beamed ceiling with a tiny electric heater burning in the massive fire place.
The room could easily have seated a hundred people, but there were only about a dozen brothers left and a few guests. In the Middle Ages there were 14 Cistercian monasteries in Wales. Now there is only one.
Lunch was yams, potatoes, soup, and baked fruit. Talking in the refectory is not allowed, although this doesn’t stop the brothers from communicating. Neil reported he has seen Brother Paul and his “mates” engage in riotous exchanges of contorted faces and shaking fists across their wooden bowls. Brother James is the cook as well as the road mender. With a point and a thumbs-up he signaled that the biscuits were fresh.
Armed with Father Robert’s map I set off across the island after lunch. The map was roughly drawn but carefully annotated with warnings like “Passable, with care, at very low tides” and “Beware of the Bull.” But instead of the lighthouse I ended up exactly where I didn’t want to be: I walked hght into the bull.
When I passed the garage, Neil and Brother Paul were in earnest, quiet conference. But when Brother Paul saw me coming, he began berating the junior. “Would you believe this guy?” They both laughed. Neil had apparently been asking for serious advice. He has a very high opinion of the American monk. He excused himself to get to his studying. I leaned against the workbench and waited for his story.
Brother Paul sucked on the stub of a cigar. “I spent my whole life” he explained philosophically, “chasing the Almighty Dollar.” Born and raised in Florida, he went to Korea with the Marines. Then he bummed around the Caribbean for 20 years. He made good money running charter boats out St. Thomas, augmented by what he alluded to as quick trips “south of the border, if you know what I mean.” But he also alluded to trouble with the law.
As is so frequently the case, money proved to be Brother Paul’s undoing. Eventually the tax laws caught up with him and he gave it all up and traveled to Europe. He visited Caldey several times, as I was visiting now. Then one day he reappeared banging on the door and said, “I want to be a monk!” He is about as monk-like as an ex-pirate can be, but monastic life is giving him time to study, something that he never had before. Now he was preparing for his final vows.
* * *
In a paneled alcove of the sitting room, Father Robert and I had tea. He laughed at my surprise on finding the brothers so active and casual. From the outside we try to imagine the contemplative life. Either we picture ascetic monks frozen in the lotus position or lost in some repetitive, mindless task. We do not entertain the image of one replacing the transmission on a Land Rover. Contemplation, the Abbot emphasized, is an attitude not an action. The brothers try to simplify life by removing some of the distractions. “It is contemplative in the sense of making space for the awareness of God... that is the atmosphere of the whole place.”
They still follow the rules laid down by Benedict in the 4th century, but monastic life is not as strict as it used to be. Initiates must be able to convince the Order that they are sincerely seeking God and that they will be able to accept monastic discipline. They also have to be Roman Catholic, 21 and have no dependents.
“And of course,” Father Robert added, “they have to be willing to spend a lot of time praying.”
Despite all the coffee, Neil slept through dinner.
I was the only visitor in the dining room, which was now dark and somber. Brother Paul swept his arms angrily until I got up and took what he considered a hefty second helping. Then one by one the brothers exited the refectory to leave me eating all alone. I could hear him laughing behind the kitchen door.
* * *
I had little time in the morning. The weather was turning again and, afraid of being trapped on the island by the coming storm, I was leaving on the early boat. Brother Paul walked me down to the landing. We could already see the boat approaching against the white buildings of Tenby. He clucked his tongue and told me the Abbot had been disappointed when I didn't join them for vigils at half past three in the morning.
I didn’t tell him that I’d found a racy thriller in my room and read until dawn. He probably would have understood.
It started to rain. We crowded with other islanders under the rusted roof of a shack. Brother Paul talked about leaving soon on a pilgrimage of sorts to Israel. I could imagine him wandering through a Middle Eastern bazaar with the backpack of his old life and the robe of his new one.
By way of saying goodbye, he asked, “You sure you didn’t bring any of that ol’ Black Label with you?” But his eyes were smiling into mine. He didn’t need the scotch. He’d found something that now suited him better.
Paradise, too, is a concept invariably associated with islands. Caldey has no barrier reef, no blue lagoon or swaying palms. But there are many different kinds of islands. And many different kinds of paradise. Someone threw the bowline onto the deck at my feet. Brother Paul, hands in the pockets of his bomber jacket, turned to walk back up the road to the abbey. I saw him there, isolate and still. He stood apart, but far from alone.
Originally published in Santa Barbara magazine September 1987.
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