Get Thee To a Monastery

For most of her life, Pam Nolan, 45, found herself in a cold war with God. Her parents, disaffected Roman Catholics, left the church when she was 18, taking her with them. But more than a decade later, after the birth of her daughter, she made a slow creep back to religion, first as a Unitarian and then as a Methodist. But still her soul kept its distance. Then last year her church went on a retreat at the Abbey of the Genesee, a monastery in upstate New York. During a discussion, when a monk (and a recovering alcoholic), repeatedly said, "God loves you," Nolan started sobbing. In a message she later posted on the Internet, she explained that "the God I met as a child was judgmental, condemning, did horrible things to his own son." But somehow here, in the most Catholic of places, she says, the wall fell.

Nolan still doesn't attend church regularly, and she considers herself spiritual, not religious. The only ritual she has decided to keep is coming back to the abbey every June for her birthday. A three-day weekend, it is her only vacation away from her job as a computer specialist in Edinboro, Pa., and this is what she gets: a hard single bed with threadbare sheets in a sweltering, non-air-conditioned room; a warped desk and chair that would be rejected by Motel 6; and simple meals like baked beans or tuna casserole. And for the whole weekend she is supposed to be silent. But as she walks across the abbey's 2,200 acres, past the wheat fields and down by the river, or sits near a statue of the Madonna, watching white-tailed deer dance by and listening to bullfrogs, Nolan says she finds peace. "It's mine, just my time," she says. "I can sit, think and pray."

Nolan is on a path increasingly well traveled. Across the country, Catholic monasteries and convents, usually regarded as strange or the stuff of medieval myth, are besieged with would-be retreatants and booked months in advance. "Please don't mention our name," begs an abbot at a Vermont monastery where the wait for one of its 29 spaces stretches a year. "We're overwhelmed." There is even a popular guidebook, Sanctuaries, that helps readers choose a great monastery or convent. While organized church retreats are not new, what is startling is that much of the increase is in individual retreatants, including many Protestants and even non-Christians, who say the Catholic monasteries, with their ancient chants, beautiful grounds and prices at a pittance, offer the most refreshing vacation going. Now, say the monks, if only they could keep the growing horde down to the true spiritual seekers, not just vacationers at Club God.

Why the interest in these sanctuaries, amid a pop culture in which nuns and monks are usually depicted as demanding and dry or who, in their softest incarnations, wonder, "How do you solve a problem like Maria?"? Theories vary, but one reason is poet and novelist Kathleen Norris. She first hit the best-seller list in 1993 with Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, a meditation on the farm crisis, religion and the wind-whipped Plains state of North Dakota. That was followed in 1996 by The Cloister Walk, a log of the nine months that Norris, a married Protestant, spent living among the monks at St. John's Abbey in Minnesota. Readers went wild, keeping it on the best-seller list for 27 weeks.