Arminta Wallace relishes the calm and contemplation of life with the Benedictine monks at Glenstal Abbey in Co Limerick

The mobile buzzes and I reach out a bleary autopilot arm to switch off the alarm - then pause, baffled. Where am I? A single bed. Snowy-soft bedlinen. Beyond the pool of light from the bedside lamp, darkness. Silence. Not my house, then. I turn to the phone for help. Six-fifteen am, the screen informs me. Six . . . what? Then it dawns on me. I am in a monastery guest house, miles from home. Not only that, but I am about to get up, go out into the very rain I can hear bashing against the window, and sit in church for a hour. Why, I wonder, am I doing this? I've asked myself that question more than once, during the course of a number of visits to the Benedictine monastery at Glenstal Abbey in Co Limerick. But 6am is not the time for hard philosophical questions. At Glenstal, it's a time for scrambling into some kind (any kind) of clothing - tracksuit bottoms and a fleece, perhaps, pulled hastily over pyjamas: are monks ever tempted to do the same? - just to get to the abbey church in time for Matina and Lauds.

And every time the early-morning office works its mysterious magic; even on unkempt monastery guests in inappropriate sports clothing who can't quite keep up to ecclesiastical speed while juggling two different service books and a psalter. Perhaps it's the service itself, with its murmured incantations, short but startlingly memorable readings and imagery of light and hope for the day to come. Or maybe, for those of us from a secular background, it's just the novelty of beginning each day in the presence of God - or, to put it in secular language, in a deliberate, thoughtful, focused manner.

All sorts of people make their way to Glenstal Abbey's guesthouse. Some may be going through a personal crisis such as illness or bereavement; some, including professional religious, need to recharge their spiritual batteries. Many just want to take time out. I once met a man who, after several days of exchanging amiable nods as our paths crossed on the regular trek back and forth to church, finally confessed that he had come to Glenstal for a bit of peace and quiet - to draw up a business plan. The extraordinary thing is that, regardless of the guest's motivation, background or circumstances, it's rare to meet someone who is not touched - changed - by this close encounter with monastic life.

How does it work? There are probably as many answers as visitors, but the regular rhythm of the Benedictine day seems to play a crucial role.

"I had to get away," fellow guests will tell you when you meet them pottering around the guesthouse kitchen, coffee mug in hand: the monastic equivalent of a water-cooler moment. We're all gripped, sometimes, by the impulse to flee, an impulse which monasteries understand very well. The roots of monasticism, after all, lie in the flight of thousands of well-educated early Christians - among them St Benedict, son of a wealthy Roman family - from the social whirl of the Mediterranean's glitziest cities to a solitary life in caves and deserts.

But when we think we need to be alone, to be alone is often the last thing we need. Solitude can be all fuzzy outlines - when should I get up? What shall I eat? Should I go for a walk now, or later? - and treacherous black holes of depression.

Too much solitude at the wrong time, and you can end up talking to yourself in Tesco's. A visit to Glenstal Abbey, though it allows the visitor plenty of time to be alone, is not a plunge into unstructured solitude. It is more of a slotting into the ordered calm of Benedict's daily timetable, aka his sixth-century Rule for Monks. Its details have been amended to suit the modern world, but in its awareness of the need for compromise between the demands of people as individuals and the needs of people in community, the Rule of Benedict is, in many ways, as relevant to 21st-century secular liberal society as it was to Europe in the Dark Ages.

Matins and Lauds. Tierce. Mass. Lunch. Vespers. Supper. Compline. The first-time visitor - especially a visitor whose own life is anything but a model of ordered calm - can't help but be struck, and more than a bit intimidated, by the regular-as-clockwork routine. But routine is strangely comforting. It encourages a kind of mental autopilot which, for a few blissful days, can feel like being suspended in warm, scented, gently sustaining bathwater, an effect enhanced by the beauty of the area - Glenstal Abbey is surrounded by acres of rolling parkland, with plenty of mountain and forest walks within easy reach - and the beauty of the Benedictine liturgy; lots of chant and prayer and silence, little or nothing in the way of doctrinal indoctrination.

All of which may give the impression that a visit to Glenstal comes into the same category as a weekend at a country house hotel (with spa). It doesn't. Which is not to say that you need to be particularly religious, or even a practising member of any religion in particular, to go there. The experience is holistic, certainly; but hedonistic? I don't think so. I'm often asked whether, if you go to Glenstal, you need to be into - well, "God and stuff". You don't, of course. But it always interests me that while - in theory - guests aren't required to attend any of the services in the abbey church, in practice, most guests attend almost all of them.

This is perhaps because a visit to Glenstal is about more than just pretty words and music in a pretty place. It's about touching base with traditions which run very deep in our culture. Not just Christian culture, either, but the much more ancient culture of Judaism - you get, whether you want it or not, a thorough dunking in the astringent Hebrew poetry of the psalms - and Celtic culture, too, with its strong sense of the natural world as a gateway to the spirit. You can experience much of this in an abstract sort of way, by visiting the ruins of monastic sites such as those at Glendalough and Clonmacnoise. They, too, are places for solitude and contemplation.

But Glenstal Abbey is not a place; it's a community. Flee there from the world, and you'll find that you've arrived in another world; check out the Glenstal website, and you'll get an idea of the diversity of interests and level of creative energy contained (barely) within the abbey's stout walls. Here are environmental activists, philosophers, musicians and at least one first-rate novelist.

In my - admittedly limited - experience, the monks of Glenstal Abbey are also kind, funny, tolerant and extraordinarily patient human beings. The solitude of Glenstal is special because it allows the visitor to be alone within, or at least at a tangent to, this world-within-the-world.

And though it takes most of us more than one visit to figure this out, the world of the monastery is designed to be, somehow, brought into the "real" world by its effect on the heart - or, to put it in theological language, the soul - of the visitor. For the seeker of solitude, it offers what may be the most valuable lesson of all. Maybe the world isn't as bad as you think it is; maybe you, even, aren't as bad as you think you are.