For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to be a writer. It’s not a job my family knew anything about and, when I told my career guidance teacher, she suggested I apply for the Civil Service. But it was the 1980s, during a recession, and people told me there was no work anyway, so I felt free to do a BA in English and an MA in postmodernism. And then I thought: now what?
I met a newspaper editor in Galway called Ronnie O’Gorman, who was full of enthusiasm for my ideas and gave me a weekly column in the Galway Advertiser. “Just do it,” he’d shout encouragingly. And so, my life started.
I made a sad return to Galway in May for Ronnie’s funeral. It had been a hard year all round. My best friend, David, who I met at the start of that potentially useless BA had also recently died from a brain tumour.
David was another inspiration, and I wanted to write about our lives, about Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s and the things that shaped us. But I was caught up in writing about stuff to pay the bills – scientific discoveries of antibodies nobody had heard of, the benefits of cladding, five ways to cook a turkey.
After the funeral, I was telling my significant other about the moving eulogy given by Ronnie’s schoolfriend, Br Mark Hederman from Glenstal Abbey, when inspiration struck. “Monasteries often offer retreats,” he said. “Why don’t you go to Glenstal to write?”
On the Glenstal website, I discovered that, as well as a guest house and rental cottage on the monastery’s 500-acre grounds in Co Limerick, two self-catering studios are also available for visitors: the God Pods. They are lovely timber huts with big windows and a view of trees, and I felt excited just looking at them. I mean, who couldn’t write a masterpiece in a God Pod? I booked one for 10 days in autumn, feeling David – and Ronnie – looking down on me approvingly.
Fast-forward to autumn and my significant other was no longer significant, now just an other, which meant that instead of being driven to Glenstal, it was going to take three buses to get me, my suitcase, my laptop and enough food for 10 days there. With a 6.30am start from Sligo, two buses down and six hours travelling, I gave up in Limerick and took a taxi for the last 20km.
Just past the village of Murroe, we turned through the gates of Glenstal and drove for another kilometre past trees and rolling fields, four lakes, swans and a lot of cows. The farm work is outsourced these days, but the monks still run a boarding school and rounding a corner we saw it, housed in a grand Normanesque castle. It was built by the Barringtons in 1836 as their family home and they sold it to the Benedictine Order in 1928.
I was delighted to find Br Mark manning the reception desk. “You brought me here,” I told him.
He jumped in the taxi to bring me to the God Pod, directing the driver down another avenue for a kilometre, past more fields, trees and cows. We turned on to a bumpy track overhung with branches and eventually pulled up beside a grassy path, the God Pods visible up a hill in the distance.
“I hope you’ll have a lovely stay,” said Br Mark as I climbed out of the taxi. “I’m sure I will,” I said. “I’m here for 10 days.” The taxi driver looked at me like I was insane.
The God Pod was gorgeous, with steps leading up to a small terrace overlooking fields fringed by trees. Inside, there was a big sunlit room with a stove, armchair and dining table to the front and kitchen area with fridge, hob and microwave behind. In an alcove, a single bed under a window had a view of the second God Pod. There was a compact bathroom with electric shower, and another small terrace overlooked the woods at the back.
I put away my food – porridge, bread, cheese, pasta, pesto and tea bags (nothing sweet; it seemed like a good chance to cut back on sugar). I unpacked my clothes and had a browse through the books on the shelf.
According to Glenstal’s website, the God Pods were designed as solitary places to pray and seek God, so I was not surprised to find a Bible, Saint Martin magazines and The Veritas Book of Blessings for All Occasions. Sheila Flanagan’s Bad Behaviour and Sophie Kinsella’s My Not So Perfect Life were more unexpected but it’s good to know the monks realise you can’t be praying all the time. Or, in my case, at all.
I made a big plate of pasta with pesto and ate it sitting on a lounger on the front terrace, preening like a cat in the sun. In the distance I could see Knockfierna – the hill of truth – the place where Br Mark, at the age of nine, first met God.
“I was aware of God on this mountain, almost as if God was a timid animal at the other side of a hedge or some huge presence that was finding it difficult to have friends. I developed a relationship with this presence,” he said on a YouTube video, part of a series called Meet the Monks.
As well as their YouTube skills, the monks are also famous for their Gregorian chanting – they’ve released several albums – and sing five services every day in the abbey church. After 8am, as a bell started to ring in the distance, I made my way down there for Compline, the light fading in the sky, swallows swooping overhead.
I lit two candles in the church and watched 18 monks file out on the altar. There was a short reading and a prayer and then they sang, moving from psalm to psalm, ending each one with the Gloria. Every time they sang glory, I silently sang glory too for all the things I was grateful for, like being there surrounded by beautiful singing and candlelight, and for having had the luck to have people like David and Ronnie in my life. Then I went back and sat on the terrace, gazed at the stars and fluttering bats, delighted with myself and my new temporary home.
I went to hear the chanting every day, sometimes getting up before 6am, when it was still dark. I walked all over the grounds, past rivers and tiny graveyards, visited the swans on the lake and petted the donkeys in the walled garden. I sat on the sun lounger watching the deer grazing in front of the God Pod and used a bird app to identify the chorus of singers – goldcrests, bullfinches, robins and chaffinches. And, with so much of the day spent by myself, I talked the ear off anyone I met, people out walking from the guest house, Amanda in the monastery shop, the man who brought my firewood.
What I didn’t do is any writing.
By the fourth day I would have chewed my own arm off rather than have eaten one more plate of pasta and pesto, so I walked the two kilometres to Murroe, bought rice and vegetables in the supermarket and inhaled a Mars bar still standing at the till. That night at Compline, the singing sounded more beautiful than it had all week, and I could sense David standing at the edge of the seat. I moved over to let him sit beside me and felt him touch my arm. Then I bent my face forward so my hair hid the tears running down my face.
On the fifth day I started to write. Jumbles of words and half-formed ideas, memories of Galway, people I had met, the feeling of life opening up. I wrote every morning as the birds sang their loudest, sitting on the terrace when the weather was good. I met Ann from Vermont, staying in the God Pod next door, and she gave me a chocolate cake. Great, I thought, that will fuel the writing. The sugar rush nearly knocked me out.
I enjoyed the solitary life most of the time but sometimes I felt lonely and wondered if the monks ever did too. I asked Br Mark when we met again at the end of the week, after the Sunday service.
“Some people are temperamentally cut out for this life, and some aren’t. I’ve never been lonely because I’ve had this connection with God, so I wouldn’t have wanted another person around, being a gooseberry.”
I ask if it is hard to reconcile the God he found on the mountain with organised religion and he said that’s why they built the God Pods, as an alternative way to connect with God. “It’s like having a red phone to the Oval Office,” he said, laughing.
“There is this idea that if you stay in a God Pod, you might make that connection for yourself, and some people have. But people come for all sorts of reasons, some just want time by themselves. Some are artists or writers or composers.”
By the time I left Glenstal a few days later, I had written 10,000 words of something that might turn out to be a book. I’m not sure what kick-started the writing in the end. Maybe I’d just run out of places to walk to and needed to sit down quietly for a while. Maybe it was the thought of David rolling his eyes if I left there without anything to show for it. Or the memory of Ronnie brimming with enthusiasm, shouting encouragingly, “Just do it”.
The God Pods at Glenstal Abbey are available to rent for €65 a night. Glenstal.com
