New Camaldoli

26-29 September 2025, New Camaldoli Hermitage, near Big Sur, California 

I think that Christian retreats are – essentially – of two sorts. There’s the ‘tidying up the garden’ sort, which usually involves a bit of spiritual dead-heading, perhaps some sweeping up, pruning and edging, and – if you’re lucky – some seasonal planting. These are great as ‘a refresh’, and everyone should go on one regularly. And then there’s the ‘hard landscaping’ sort of retreat, where you suddenly realise that it’s a bit more than dead-heading that’s called for. You need, you realise, to start over, and to attend to some of the deeper, more structural things that lie beneath, without attention to which the garden doesn’t ultimately stand a chance. Retreats of this sort are less common experiences, perhaps fortunately. I’ve been on both sorts these past forty two years, since my first at Kinnoul Monastery in Perth aged 18. Many more of the former, inevitably. But not this time. 

Sweep from your mind images of Barbie-pink, drop-head-Cadillac, muscle-beach blasting Beach Boys California. That’s all LA and South. This is the North. The true Pacific Coast. And it is majestic landscape. This is the America that inspired Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and John Steinbeck. Here the Santa Lucia hills skirt the ocean, and at their foot, clinging, route 1 winds its perilous way, fighting off rock-falls and landslides, thought often as now losing. My ambition to see Big Sur was thwarted. The road is closed just yards North of here. The only way in here is from the South, and Big Sur, in theory just a short drive up the coast is, for the time being, a three-hour excursion. Next time. 

High above route 1, The New Camaldoli Hermitage surveys this majestic coastal scene. A cluster of 25 hermitages around a central church, and with guest accommodation too – though thanks to a hiking pilgrimage, I’m upgraded this time to the Monastic Enclosure where, instead of sharing facilities I live alongside the monks and have my own tiny home with its own shower! Here, in the church, the brothers of the Camaldolese community gather briefly four times each 24 hours, for Vigils (in the dark), for Lauds at 07:30, for the mass at 11:00 or 11:30, and for Vespers at 17:00. That’s it. Otherwise it’s silence, and a sort of companionable isolation with the monks and the retreatants either disappearing into the landscape or retiring to their cells to pray, to study and to sleep. Oh, and to eat. Three times a day food is provided, but it is not eaten together – rather you forage and take back to your cell enough for one meal, eaten alone. 

This is not picturesque monasticism. This is a tough, isolationist existence – and somehow the whole landscape physical, spiritual and emotional, conspires to create a place of challenge. Stripped of chatter, and of anything but distant camaraderie and the occasional friendly nod, the place poses the question, what is the irreducible minimum that you need to sustain your faith? 

The answer comes, unexpectedly to me at least, in the daily 30 minute period of silent prayer that follows Vespers. The sung office in the nave completed, the congregation – mostly – makes its way to the rotunda, the octagonal apse with the massive stone altar in the centre, to sit against the walls, or in cushions or on benches, in silence. Incense slowly rises and creates a delicate veil that hangs above the altar beneath, while on that altar a very simple monstrance is placed with the Blessed Sacrament displayed for all to gaze upon. All the words of the day having been spoken, here, physically and symbolically in articulate silence is Christ at the centre of all of us, and here we sit, knowing that this is the irreducible minimum: that we must intentionally put Christ at the centre of everything. Everything. Thoroughgoing Christocentrism. So easy to lose sight of the deep simplicity of that amidst a welter of concerns, worries, dreams and aspirations. What that means, precisely, in terms of readjustment each of us needs to work out, but that is the statement somehow being made. And that is the shift needed, the structure required and the groundwork needing to be set firm beneath whatever landscape we create above.

I’m grateful for this time of blessing. Perhaps this time it is clearer because of 21 days spent in Asia without Christianity being represented by a church on every street corner, but rather surrounded and assailed by other gods and their shrines and temples, and by the unfamiliar prayers of others. But it’s also clearer here, where there is no Christian clutter at all. Just space and the question: what is the irreducible minimum? 

And now, feeling disconnected enough from the day-to-day back in London, and that groundwork in place, off to New York, to work out the detail!