Bred of Heaven by Jasper Rees Page A

monasteries. ‘We had about twenty-five years to think about it,’ Teilo adds. Eventually, in the early 1990s, the brothers of Caldey began to talk.
    Still, there is no talking in the refectory. Unless it’s by Father Daniel, who takes his lunch late so that he can read to the brothers as they eat. The choice of literature is not necessarily devotional. Today’s is from a book about the Open University or the World Service or some such. Spoken into a microphone, Father Daniel’s kindly Dutch voice booms across the long tall room via an over-amplified sound system. The other top monks are parked at a top table: Brother Luca, a short bald Italian from Port Talbot, and Brother Gildas, a tall and stupendously white-bearded figure. The rest of us sit along tables lining either wall of the refectory. I am sitting very much below the salt – below the psalt, if you will – beyond the last table leg of the last table.
    A trolley enters from a door to the kitchen in the far corner, pushed by slow-strolling monks in sandals. The monks look well fed on this simple food: soup, cheese, bread, a rather splendid tortilla with salad. (In one or two cases, they look very well fed.) I go up to the trolley and take a hefty plateful. Father Daniel’s lowlandvowels clang off the high walls. We masticate quietly. It’s none next. More psalms. Terce, sext, none: the daylight hours codified in cod Latin. The contemplative life is entirely knackering, I think, as I get up and take my things through to the swing door. On the other side a bunch of beaming monks from this formerly silent order, their hands dipped in suds or wielding tea towels, are all yakking their heads off.
    After lunch, none comes and goes. As does vespers, after which we embark on fifteen minutes of contemplation, of which I have been forewarned by my uncle. I sit and do not pray, though I attempt a sort of agnostic equivalent. The day-trippers flocking across the sound from Tenby have flocked off again to the mainland in a flotilla of vessels. As my Cistercian immersion draws to a close, the heavens have opened. Through tall narrow chapel windows rain splashes on full green leaves, drips insistently from a leaking gutter. It feels as if I have rifled through the entire Book of Psalms. Supper passes too. The Lord has been my shepherd and I have not wanted for quite a nice paella, a leftover from a feast day. And now compline, the final service of the livelong day. ‘Before the light of evening fades we pray, O Lord of all,’ intones Brother Titus from The Hague, ‘that by your love we may be saved from ev’ry grievous fall.’ I am a convert to monastic ritual, nodding to the altar without a second thought now. And it’s become second nature to bow with every ‘Glory be to the Father’ in – for the record – Psalms 4, 90 and 133. I feel quite embedded. The visiting priests have taken their slightly suffocating piety and nocturnal noise pollution back to the mainland. I am alone with the monks of the abbey on this holy island where Welshmen of yore once did much to establish Christianity in Britain.
    We sing the Nunc Dimittis very, very slowly. The atmospherics are spot on: tonally calming, hypnotic, suffusing one’s franticrestless grasshopper mind with a sensation of great peace. The bell in the tower is clanged. Most of Wales, land of monasteries and chapels, no longer worships. It has journeyed from faith through doubt to disbelief. St Mary’s in Conwy was empty but for me and three short elderly ladies. The Capel Yr Annibynwyr where my grandparents married has room for a thousand believers. Where are they now? ‘I wish one Sunday everyone would come at once,’ Towyn says of his scattered flock. God is not in my life either, however much I may wander about Wales looking for Him. The last Rees who believes is Teilo, born and raised in Carmarthen, sent into England and now, after sixty years