MONASTIC LIFE: ALMOST EVERYONE KNOWSabout Glenstal Abbey. Even people who have never been there can tell you about the monks who inhabit the monastery in the wooded valley outside Murroe in Co Limerick – about their CDs and their books and their boxes of chocolate liqueurs, writes ARMINTA WALLACE
That’s what outsiders see: the Glenstal brand, maintained by a core of media-savvy monks who turn up regularly on the telly, on the radio and on the bestseller lists.
When you actually go to Glenstal, however – when you drive up that winding avenue and, especially, when the weathered wooden door of the guesthouse clicks softly shut behind you – you get a very different view of monastic life, 21st-century style. If it were possible to bottle and sell something called “essence of Glenstal”, the main ingredient wouldn’t be big names and celebrity superstars but something altogether more intangible – the dedication of those whose names rarely hit the headlines.
The monk who sings the morning psalm at 6.30am in a clear, bell-like tenor. The reader whose calm voice makes sense of even the muddiest scriptural pronouncements. And if you’ve ever stayed at Glenstal for the feast of the solemnity of Mary the Mother of God on January 1st, you’ll know that it really is a feast, marked by exceptionally beautiful liturgies – but also by a mammoth roast lunch with all the trimmings, followed by Christmas pudding, custard and a glass of wine.
Guests, of course, come to Glenstal in search of spiritual sustenance. But physical sustenance also plays a surprisingly important role – perhaps because the experience of filing in silence into a refectory and sharing a meal with monks is, for many visitors, one of the highlights of their stay at the abbey. And now the man behind the daily round of lunches and suppers has stepped – reluctantly – into the limelight.
"I still think it's quite bizarre," says the author of the newly published Brother Anselm's Glenstal Cookbook,picking up my copy of the book from the table in front of us and gazing at it with a quizzical smile.
“I mean, I just did this because I was asked to do it.” He is referring both to the cookbook and to his 12-year career in the monastery kitchen. “It all happened in a higgledy-piggledy sort of way,” he says. “I’m not presenting myself as a professional chef or anything of that sort. I was asked to deal with the suppers, and ended up being in charge of the kitchen. And it’s quite a major job, I have to say – the menus, and the ordering, and making sure we’re never short of anything.”
He’s quick to add that he doesn’t do all the cooking himself. That task largely falls to the two women who are pictured with him on the back cover, Bridget Hayes and Christina Carberry. But the recipes are dishes that he has made his own over the years. There are 65 of them in the book, each with a paragraph of introduction or explanation. Wire-bound for ease of kitchen use, the book also features mischievous black-and-white illustrations by Emer O’Boyle alongside slices of psalms, chunks from the Rule of Benedict and a foreword by Brother Anselm’s real-life brother, the actor John Hurt.
“It has a certain fascination for journalists that the famous John Hurt has a brother who’s a monk at Glenstal Abbey,” Brother Anselm says wryly. His voice is as English as his recipes; kedgeree, treacle tart, Somerset chicken. Simplicity is, he insists, his kitchen watchword. Brother Anselm doesn’t stint on such good old-fashioned ingredients as cream, eggs, salt – and butter. In fact, he insists on them.
“I get people who say, ‘Oh, there’s an awful lot of butter in this’, ” he says. “But actually there isn’t, really – if you think how much one person is eating. One dish that I’m rather fond of is Cassoulet Gascoigne. Now that would not be what it is if it wasn’t for the garlic butter – which involves three-quarters of a pound of butter, with garlic and mustard and things all mixed in. It just wouldn’t be anything without that. But even then, you see, that’s enough for 30 people.”
The son of an Anglican vicar, Anselm Hurt grew up in the English midlands. He converted to Catholicism at the age of 25 and became a monk at Downside Abbey in Somerset. He found, however, that daily life at Downside was not what he had imagined. “I thought it would be rather austere and removed from the world and all that sort of thing.” Instead, it was a busy monastery with much to do in the secular world. So at the age of 38, he left the priesthood.
“I didn’t leave to get married, but of course I met somebody and one thing led to another,” he says. “And I shouldn’t have married, really. I don’t think I was cut out for marriage. It had its very good side, of course – the children were great.” He and his wife had three children, but when they were almost grown up they decided to call it a day. “The committees that looked at our case agreed that it was an annullable marriage – but it was all rather traumatic, I have to say.”
After working in adult education for a while it occurred to Anselm Hurt that it might be possible to return to monastic life. “If anyone would have me. I didn’t think they would, you see. But I took early retirement and set out to get board and lodging in exchange for my work, which would give me a chance to go to the office and that sort of thing.”
He tried three or four monasteries in England, with no success. The Cistercian monastery on Caldey Island, in Wales, looked more promising. “The abbot was on for giving it a trial, but his council were not – as he discovered after I’d arrived.” Brother Anselm laughs heartily. “I’m glad now. I don’t think I’m really a Cistercian. But I’d have done it, at the time.”
Instead he came to live in west Clare, where some friends needed his help making a garden at their house. “One wet Friday when we couldn’t do anything else, we visited Glenstal.” He put his case to the community and after three years of living with the monks, and working as a maintenance man at the boarding-school, he found himself rejoining the Benedictine order.
After 12 years at Glenstal, how would he explain his idea of God? "Hmm," he says. "A very difficult subject. It's odd, really. It did seem straightforward in an earlier period of my life. I've done a lot of thinking about this. Well, naturally. You would do, wouldn't you? You get very frustrated with the language used in describing God and the whole divine economy. And then you realise that of course, it iswords. It's boundto be inadequate. You can't expect to explain a mystery; the world is not explained simply by human reason. And so I find myself thrust back on putting my faith, my trust, in God – in the Christian and, of course, the Catholic, tradition. But I'm much more vague in my own mind about explaining exactly what it is I believe."
Despite being a monk, he sees his family regularly. “I’ve got six grandchildren. My son has one child, my elder daughter has three and my younger daughter has two.” When I wonder aloud what they call him, he beams, like any proud granddad. That’s another thing I’ve learned from visits to Glenstal over the years. Being a place of openness and tolerance, it’s also a place of blurred edges rather than sharp black-and-white lines. And it’s a place of stories.
“Here’s one I rather like,” says Brother Anselm, right on cue. “When my eldest daughter went to university, she read theology and English and, as a subsidiary, French.” At the first French class the students were issued with a questionnaire to test their vocabulary. “At one stage, she held her hand up. The question was, the occupation of your father. And she asked, ‘What’s the French for a monk’?”
- Brother Anselm's Glenstal Cookbookis published by Columba Press, €12.99. www.glenstal.org
Glenstal goodies
Like many monasteries around the world Glenstal Abbey has both an appealing real-world shop and a thriving online shop (www.glenstal.org). A Glenstal goodie hamper might include some or all of the following:
Chocolate heaven
Monks and alcohol seem to be a good mix, with many monasteries having a tradition of producing high-end beers or liqueurs. At Glenstal they do chocolate, and their bestselling Dessert Liqueur Chocolate Truffles selection (€9.95) contains 10 truffles flavoured with liqueurs of monastic origin, including Ampleforth apple brandy, Chartreuse and – naturally – Benedictine.
Thriller chillers
Monasteries and murder mysteries go quite well together too: think of Brother Cadfael, or PD James's Death in Holy Orders. Glenstal has its own resident thriller writer, Andrew Nugent, who has already produced three police procedurals and is working on a fourth. The highly atmospheric Second Burial,set among the bustle of the African restaurants on Dublin's Parnell Street, is available from the website at €9.
Pipes of praise
The organist at Glenstal, Cyprian Love, spends most of his time as understated accompanist while the monks chant psalms and antiphons. However, if you're lucky and slip into the church at precisely the right moment – as I did – you can eavesdrop on one of the practice sessions, which cast an exuberant net of notes over a lazy sunny afternoon. Occasionally he gets the chance to break out on a solo album – such as this superb selection of music by Bach, Byrd, Messaien, Tournemire and Titelouze: Cyprian Love plays the organ of Glenstal Abbey(€15).
Dies Domini
If it's chant you're after, this CD of music from Lauds, Vespers and Sunday prayer is the business. It's worth buying just for the beautiful introductory essay by Gregory Collins OSB which explains, in a couple of pages, what monastery life is really about. "The monastic tradition, with its long, slow offices chanted as darkness recedes before the sun's rays and then, as it begins again to cover the earth . . . links our life to the rhythm of the cosmos, with its alternation of light and darkness." Dies Dominicosts €19.
The new Book of Prayer
When The Glenstal Book of Prayerwas published in 2001 it went on to sell 140,000 copies, making it one of the biggest-selling hardbacks in the history of Irish bookselling. Now, hot off the press, comes the long-awaited second volume. This has a two-week cycle of morning and evening prayer, followed by some brief prayer stops and a compline service. The Glenstal Book of Daily Prayercosts €14.95
