You say you`ve had your European tour, your Caribbean cruise, your Club Med, your spa.
You say you`ve bed-and-breakfasted New England, barged through Burgundy, hiked the Rockies.
And now, you say, after years of traveling, your Lewis and Clark response to summer vacation is interrupted by recurring visions of Walden Pond.
Oh, my friend, you are not alone.
Thousands of Americans are packing for a different kind of journey this summer. Destination: a higher spiritual plane.
Guest rooms in convents
Guest rooms in abbeys, convents and monasteries across the country are tightly booked.
”It`s gotten to the point we can`t handle the number of requests for individual retreatants,” said Don George, director of La Casa de Maria, a Roman Catholic retreat in Santa Barbara, Calif.
Jangling reservation lines are piercing the silence of an austere Zen monastery in the Catskills, at a Trappist monastery in Colorado, at an Episcopal monastery perched on the Hudson River.
Travel experts say that monasteries now have a lower vacancy rate than hotels.
”Everybody is posing Camus-type questions,” said Dena Kaye, whose cable television program, ”A Sense of Place with Dena Kaye,” is broadcast daily on the Travel Channel.
”It depends,” she said, ”on whether you want to think it out on a super-yacht or someplace a little simpler.”
Peace costs $50 a days
Most monasteries offer tidy, quiet rooms, three home-cooked meals a day and all the spirituality you want for about $50 a day.
Some have such secular pleasures as tennis courts or swimming pools. But most appeal to the spirit more than the senses, offering austere tranquillity. ”Every time there is a crisis, we fill up,” said George, who retired from a lucrative business career to volunteer at La Casa de Maria.
”There is a pretty close parallel between Las Vegas and retreat centers. People know there is something wrong. They need to get away. They need hope.” Of course, religion in the summertime is nothing new. Church retreats, tent revivals and religious camps are as much a part of the nation`s landscape as amber waves of grain. But the new hospitable monasteries eschew evangelism in favor of solitude and scenery.
There are about 600 small monasteries in the U.S. with guest rooms. Some are training grounds for the newly frocked, while others house retired clerics or religious communities. A handful of modern refuges were once grand homes.
Not ”preachy places”
”These aren`t preachy places,” said Marcia Kelly, who, with her husband, Jack, has written ”Sanctuaries” (Bell Tower, 1991), a guide to lodging in monasteries in the Northeast.
”They are time out from a driven, aggressive world.”
The book-which began with a serendipitous stop-is becoming the Michelin guide of the retreat set.
”We were visiting a friend at Big Sur and fell for a monastery there,”
said Kelly, who calls himself a ”retired Catholic” (his wife is Jewish).
The sojourn set the couple monastery-hopping, and they have now visited more than 200 retreats.
Some offer solace in their setting.
The Carmelite House of Prayer in Oakville, Calif., a former family mansion with 11 guest rooms, sprawls between the terraced ripples of the Napa Valley.
”I come up here to hear myself think,” said Jason Erlicsohn, a 37-year- old banker from San Francisco.
From his spartan room he can also hear water that dances from a Versailles-like fountain in the monastery`s backyard, the gentle clang from the belfry, the chirp of sparrows.
”I used to go over to the health spa when I got stressed out,” he said. ”Now I just sit here and listen. I end up in better shape after a weekend.”
Other retreats do their soothing through a stubborn connection to bygone days.
Time loops back
The contrast of modern, secular life with ancient, contemplative ways is clear as one steers along the Tokenekee Trail to the Convent of St. Birgitta in Darien, Conn. The road weaves through a land of tennis courts and horses, of designer weekend wear and $2,000 weekday commuter garb. Nearing the convent, time loops back.
Gray robes flapping, black veils billowing under starched white crowns, the Sisters of St. Birgitta look like Beguines welcoming returning crusaders as they run to greet arriving cars.
In addition to taking vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, the nuns pledge themselves to ”hospitality as an ecumenical effort,” said Sister Dolores, mother superior of the convent. Along with seven other sisters, her days begin at 6:15 a.m. with community prayers.
For guests who haven`t risen for early prayers, the day begins around 8 with breakfast: steaming bowls of cereal, eggs cooked to order, homemade muffins, waffles, a compote of fresh fruit and an elegant, never-empty silver coffee urn.
The 16 guests gather around the formal dining table and are served as if in a home of the butlered gentry.
Between cooking and serving, polishing the convent`s museum-quality furniture and tending the nine acres of grounds, the nuns gather to sing prayers in the convent`s chapel.
Guest attendance is optional. But after several days of quiet attention and home-cooked meals, even the least inclined are drawn from their reading or from walks along Long Island Sound to the lilting chants.
Another clarion call for inner peace is sounded at Holy Cross Monastery, a rambling red-brick mansion perched on a grand knoll in West Park, N.Y., overlooking the Hudson.
”People are soothed by living in harmony with an ongoing religious order,” said Brother Timothy, prior of the Episcopal monastery, which has 39 guest rooms.
Noting that except for honoring ”the Great Silence,” from 9 p.m. to 8:15 a.m. daily, participation in all religious service is optional, he said. ”If guests hear a calling, it is the part of themselves that modern society has forgotten.”
In contrast, guests can`t help hearing the call at Dai Bosatsu Zendo, a Zen monastery that looks like a relocated chunk of traditional Japan at the end of a 10-mile dirt road outside Livingston Manor, N.Y., in the Catskills.
Other than the gentle brush of bare feet against the monastery`s well-polished wood floors, often the only sound heard is the gong that announces the chanting and meditation sessions or a meal. Joining in is not mandatory, but it is the rare camper who chooses the comfort of his futon over participation.
”Sitting,” a kneel-squat position that is assumed for two to four hours of meditation, is the central activity for guests. Some of the best sitters, like Junpol Dennis Kelly, vice abbot of the Catskill monastery, study yoga to develop endurance for sitting; he urges the newly initiate to ”stay with the uncomfortableness” as a means of transcendence.
A crick in the knee, a strain in the back, the frustration of chopsticks ferreting a lentil stew from a lacquer bowl-these eventually conquer the anxiety of the type-A existence that most visitors are retreating from.
For some retreats, the public quest opens the door for fiscal growth.
”A lay person left us this mansion and we need to take in more guests to support it,” said the Rev. David Costell, standing in the grand foyer at the Carmelite House of Prayer under the scaffolding that he and three other priests are using to repair a leaking roof and peeling paint.
Throughout Europe, insolvent monasteries are often turned into luxury hotels.
The prestigious Relais & Chateaux group has half a dozen former monasteries in France. And Travel Business in New York City books stays in former monasteries in Spain and Italy.
Jack Kelly says that he`s met ”stock brokers, bank executives, school teachers and social workers in monasteries.”
Most are looking for the same thing: ”They are trying to get past the coat-and-tie-on-Sunday mentality and to bring a spiritual element back to daily lives,” he said.
