More travelers seeking monasteries for peaceful escapes

More than 3,000 guests each year flock to Holy Cross Monastary looking for escape from fast-paced lives

September 14, 2000
Web posted at: 3:15 PM EDT (1915 GMT)

In this story: At your own pace Cashing in on connection and community RELATED SITES

From CNN Correspondent Garrick Utley

WEST PARK, New York (CNN) -- When day breaks over the Hudson Valley, and you hear birds singing and a church bell ringing, it seems all is right with the world.

There's nothing new, of course, in Americans looking for escape from their fast-paced, high-pressured lives. What is new is the dramatic increase in the number of people finding that escape in places like Holy Cross Monastery.

"We got all kinds of people," says Brother Andrew Colquhoun, prior of the Episcopalian monastery 75 miles (121 kilometers) north of New York City.

"Physicians, we have postal workers, we have hair dressers. You name it -- construction workers, they all come here."

In fact, more than 3,000 guests come each year. They can do nothing, or pitch in to help the brothers keep the place up.

"I work in corporate America," says guest Lind Phillips. "It's crazy. It's high-paced. Technology moves faster probably than anything else today and here it's nice and quiet. It's slower. And you get to do things at your pace, not a pace that somebody else is driving you to."

Jane Tully says she has become hooked on small doses of the monastic retreat.

"My first visit here was a silent retreat for an entire weekend," she says. Silence is not what Tully gets much of in New York City, where she is a freelance speech writer, and where she networks with other professional women.

"I think everyone's under a tremendous amount of pressure," she says. "I think there's just a tremendous hunger out there for meaning, connection, community, for a sense of how to measure what's important and what's not."

It's one thing to see a monastery as an antidote to modern life. But there's also another side to what's happening here. A monastery is also a business.

Guests can attend religious services with the monks

The monks have to find some way of supporting themselves. In opening their doors to paying guests, they have found their market.

"There is a market," says Brother Andrew. "And it's taken a lot of hard work. We don't just sit and wait for people to turn up. Our guest-master, Brother John Thomas, has done a phenomenal job of getting the pulse of what people are needing."

Those who come to Holy Cross pay $60 a night for a room, meals, and all the quiet and serenity they can absorb. And if they want a religious services, well, there's that too.

Call it food for the soul. There are now hundreds of monasteries in every state of the union taking in paying guests, and the same trend is seen in other countries. The Order of the Holy Cross, in fact, is opening a similar monastery for guests in South Africa.

"We do a lot with body these days in our society, and we do a lot with mind and not so much with spirit," says visitor Richmond Shreve. "And that's what's available here."

In a world facing so much change, it was perhaps inevitable that monasteries too would change. After more than 1,000 years of largely closing their doors to the everyday world, they are now becoming and quiet, contemplative part of it.

The Monastery of Christ in the Desert
Birken Forest Monastery
Wat Metta, Metta Forest Monastery

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