I’m 10 miles past Palmdale, somewhere near the western edge of the Mojave Desert, when I lose cell service. My music abruptly stops playing, and the bars on my phone disappear, replaced by a “No Service” message. Fortunately, I only have about 8 more miles to drive before reaching my destination, Saint Andrew’s Abbey, in the tiny, unincorporated community of Valyermo, California.
It’s unsettling enough to lose cell coverage when going about my day in Los Angeles, but it’s another thing when I’m in the desert and I have little idea of what lies ahead. I question my motivation for driving out here. What am I hoping to find? I wasn’t raised religious; my attitude toward God while growing up was equal parts dismissive and condescending. I wondered how anyone could be so foolish—so irrational—as to believe in some invisible deity in the sky. Not until later in life did I become more open to and curious about ideas of God and worship. As someone who makes his living (nominally) as a writer, I’m constantly inquiring about things that make me curious, including religion. Over the past 10 years as a journalist, I’ve often traveled the country, embedding myself with different communities, trying to understand how—in such a corrupt nation as ours—people continue to experience God.
This article appears in Issue 36 of Alta Journal.
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I pull into the Saint Andrew’s parking lot just after 3 p.m. and approach the only person I see, who appears to be a groundskeeper. I tell him I have a reservation for a private retreat at the abbey and ask where I can check in. “Welcome,” the man says to me. “They’re expecting you.” He smiles and points 10 yards farther up the narrow road.
I check in at the office, and the receptionist hands me a key and shows me to a small room with concrete-block walls, a concrete-tile floor, and two twin beds with thin bedcovers. No television, no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth, no clock, no telephone—certainly no mini-fridge. The only embellishments are a generic landscape painting, a wooden writing desk, a rocking chair, and a small crucifix fastened to the wall.
The receptionist informs me that dinner is served in the dining hall at 6 p.m. sharp.
“Listen for the bell,” she says.
She leaves me to get acclimated to my monastic cell, which will be my home for the next five days.
Follow the Rules
Saint Andrew’s Abbey is a Benedictine monastery, established here in 1955—but its origins go back to Chengdu, China, where, in 1929, Belgian monks from Bruges founded a monastic community called Saint Benedict’s Priory. When Chengdu was besieged by the People’s Liberation Army in 1949, during the final days of the Chinese Civil War, the Communists placed the monks under house arrest, before expelling them from the country in 1952. The monks found their way to Southern California and purchased the Hidden Springs Ranch—1,900 acres in Antelope Valley, 75 miles north of Los Angeles—transforming the cattle ranch into a Catholic monastery and retreat center.
Dating back to sixth-century Italy, the Benedictines are considered the oldest monastic order in Western Christianity, founded by Benedict of Nursia, whose Rules of Benedict continue to be followed by approximately 7,500 monks and 13,000 nuns globally. The roughly 400 Benedictine monasteries and convents across the world operate autonomously, each governed by its abbot or abbess. Benedictines devote themselves to communal living, contemplative silence, discipline, and celibacy—but the marrow of Benedictine life is liturgical prayer. Monks gather several times each day to recite the liturgy of the hours, or the Divine Office, which includes readings from Holy Scripture and the chanting of verses from psalms and hymns known as antiphons and canticles.
The Divine Office commences at 6 a.m. with Vigils (the Office of Readings), followed by
Lauds (morning prayer) at 7:30 a.m., Mass at noon, 5:30 p.m. Vespers (evening prayer), and 7:30 p.m. Compline (night prayer), with communal meals in between. A schedule as tightly regimented as this doesn’t allow much time for mischief.
Saint Andrew’s sustains itself through donations, retreat guest fees, and sales of distinctive ceramic angel figurines, which are handcrafted on-site. The abbey receives around 2,500 guests each year, typically from Los Angeles County or Orange County. Peppered by Joshua trees, pines, and junipers, with an unobstructed view of the nearby San Gabriel Mountains, the monastery is a desert getaway for city slickers seeking a break from the noise, commotion, and sinfulness of urban life. Guests are not required to be Catholic, nor are they expected to maintain the monks’ daily schedule or know the difference between the major and minor hours of the Divine Office.
I’ve signed up for the whole deal. I want to live as a monk for five days, from Monday to Friday, from 6 a.m. Vigils to 7:30 p.m. Compline, and to experience what it would be like to withdraw from the modern world and hide away in the desert, without Netflix, DoorDash, or Instagram Reels. I want to know if God could be found here in this secluded corner of Antelope Valley.
Silent Nights
The chapel bells ring at 5:20 p.m., loudly announcing to monks and guests that Vespers will begin in 10 minutes. I make my way to the chapel—a small, plain, wooden structure—and I catch sight of the black-robed monks entering through a side door. Inside the chapel, printed sheets with the alternating chants, canticles, and antiphons are available for guests, to help us follow along with the monks. Including myself, there are about 10 guests, none of whom acknowledge one another. Eighteen monks sit before us as the chapel choir—half on one side of the altar, half on the other, facing one another but also not looking at one another.
Hidden bells peal from inside the chapel, softer than the bells in the wooden tower outside but still startling, and all at once everyone, monks and guests alike, stands and begins to chant. I do my best to join in the slow, elegy-like intonations—selections from various psalms extolling God’s love or else affirming His wrath. The cantor (who I later learn is also the abbot) leads the chants in an effortless and carefully controlled tenor, while I sound like a feral cat singing Pavarotti.
Thirty minutes later, Vespers is concluded. The monks silently file through their door, and the rest of us exit the chapel and reconvene in the guest lounge, which is large, casual, and familiarly bland, with gray sofas, upholstered chairs, worktables, a kitchenette, and a fireplace, looking less like a religious sanctuary and more like a hotel conference room. After a moment, a piercing bell rings from somewhere inside the lounge, a heavy wooden door that I hadn’t noticed earlier slides open, and the monks welcome us into the spacious dining hall, where our meal has been arranged buffet-style. Dinner is sliced ham, sides of carrots and broccoli, and a simple green salad. I try to keep a vegetarian diet, so I double up on veggies and salad.
I meet other guests: an affluent older man and his wife from Santa Monica, two women from Orange County, a stand-up comic from Burbank, two priests from Peru, and a man wearing a lanyard around his neck with a badge that reads “I’m on a silent retreat,” whom, obviously, I don’t learn much about. Most guests are seated together, while the monks sit among themselves at separate tables. The monks at Saint Andrew’s are from all over the world, including Barbados, Saint Lucia, Cuba, Mexico, Ireland, and China. Their side of the dining hall looks like the United Nations General Assembly. As dinner goes on, I convince myself that Abbot Damien, seated at the head table, is glowering at me, perceiving my wickedness. I try to avoid meeting his eyes as I finish my veggies.
When dinner is over, I go to my room for a moment, until the chapel bells ring again at 7:20, calling us to Compline, the final prayer of the day. More chanting of psalms, more scriptural readings, concluding with the abbot sprinkling holy water on our heads for protection. After Compline, the monastery observes a Grand Silence, during which we are encouraged not to speak until after breakfast the following day. With nothing else to do, I return to my chamber and settle in for the night. Because it’s February in the High Desert, the night is bitterly cold. The electric wall heater is cranked up all the way, fighting for its life to get the room above 60. I put on two sweaters and slide under the thin bedcovers and say a silent prayer to God that the heater doesn’t conk out in the middle of the night.
The Meaning of Solitude
I’m awakened at 5:20 a.m. by my alarm—one of the only functions my phone can still provide. I head outside, where it is still dark and so cold I can see my breath, but it’s a short walk from my room to the chapel. Besides the monks, the only people other than myself inside the chapel for Vigils are the two Peruvian priests. Vigils ends at 6:30, and we return to the chapel at 7:30 for Lauds, followed by communal breakfast in the dining hall, which is completely silent but for the scraping of knives and forks.
After breakfast, I wander the abbey grounds alone, circling the duck pond and walking the hillside Stations of the Cross—which, notwithstanding the large cross on top of the hill, looks like your average eccentric folk-art installation in the desert. I visit the monastery gift shop and buy a ceramic angel to bring home to my wife. I walk up a winding dirt road to the hilltop cemetery, where two dozen former monks and four times as many oblates (laypeople associated with the monastery) lie buried beneath identical concrete crosses.
The chapel bells call us to noon Mass, followed 20 minutes later by lunch, which is the one time during the day when we are all welcome to freely interact with the monks. I’m surprised to see them laughing and joking, with one another as well as with some of the other guests, whom they know by name.
A monk named Father Isaac introduces himself to me. Born in 1959, Father Isaac had been a philosophy student in college, but he was unsatisfied with the direction of his life and wanted to learn how to live free from sin. He arrived at Saint Andrew’s in 1981 and took the vows of a Benedictine monk. He has lived here ever since.
“I do miss some things sometimes,” Father Isaac tells me. “I miss my family, and I think I would’ve liked to start a family of my own. Still, I don’t regret coming here.”
I think about the cemetery, and I ask Father Isaac if monks typically remain at the monastery for the rest of their lives.
“Oh, yes,” he says with an awkward laugh. “We often joke that there’s no getting out of here alive.”
I go for another stroll around the grounds after lunch, as there isn’t much else to do between meals and prayer services. I come across a long, narrow creek, and I follow it for a quarter mile without seeing another person. I think that maybe this wouldn’t be such a bad way to live—reciting psalms, contemplating God, wearing the same black robe every day, with no worldly distractions, just the sounds of the creek and birds and chapel bells. But then I think of all the things I would miss: my wife, of course, but also the sounds of city life—street vendors, skateboard wheels on a sidewalk, the steam wand of an espresso machine, music spilling out of apartment windows on a summer day, the clinking of beer bottles. I think of the quote attributed to the “Desert Mother” Abbess Matrona, the Christian ascetic from late antiquity: “It is better to live in a crowd and want to live a solitary life than to live in solitude but all the time be longing for company.” Solitude is, for me, a place to visit—not a place where I want to relocate permanently.
Americans have long been fascinated by our native-born ascetics and hermits. We have an inexplicable veneration for such famed loners as Thomas Pynchon, Thomas Merton, and the sage of solitude, Henry David Thoreau. But few of us would personally subject ourselves to the isolation they chose. We can’t even bear to be away from our phones for 30 minutes. For many of us, to retreat from modern society and journey into the desert, alone with nothing but our thoughts, is a special kind of torture. Yet Sartre famously wrote that hell is other people, so is solitude heaven?
I hear the chapel bells ring at 5:20 and rush back for Vespers, where I bungle my way through the hymns and the Magnificat, followed by dinner. I skip the chicken and again double up on veggies, then dutifully return to the chapel at 7:30 for Compline. After the conclusion of the night prayers, I have nowhere else to go but back to my cold cell, where I get under the bedspread, say a quick prayer for the electric wall heater, and set my alarm for 5:20.
The Lord’s Work
The next day, after Vigils and Lauds, as I’m strolling along the road past the abbot’s office, I catch sight of Abbot Damien behind the office window, waving me over. I have a moment of panic. He knows I don’t belong here. He’s going to warn me against speaking to the monks. He knows I’ve got doubts about the historical validity of the Immaculate Conception. He’s perceived my wickedness.
I push open the door and say hello. “Please, have a seat,” the abbot says, removing his glasses and gesturing toward a chair. I sit.
“The monks let me know that you don’t eat meat,” he says.
“Oh,” I say. “Yes, that’s correct, but it’s OK. There are plenty of side dishes for me.”
“I want to apologize,” he says. “I wish you’d told us earlier. We would’ve prepared a nonmeat dish for you. How long are you staying with us?”
“Until Friday,” I say.
“Wonderful,” he says. “We’ll be sure to prepare some fish for you tonight and tomorrow.”
I don’t have the heart to tell the abbot I don’t eat fish either, so I smile and say thank you.
Abbot Damien then offers a little about himself: Born in San Diego to Samoan parents, he first arrived at Saint Andrew’s in 1998 to visit and decided to remain. “I’m a workaholic,” he says. “I need the structure of the monastery and the bells. Otherwise, I wouldn’t know when to stop working!”
I ask if monks are ever permitted to leave the monastery. Abbot Damien says yes, many monks teach at seminaries or other Christian institutions from time to time. Monks are also provided with a two-week vacation and a small stipend once a year.
“And they can do anything they want?” I ask.
Abbot Damien laughs. “Well, no, not anything.”
He then notices my tattoos, peeking out from the sleeves of my sweatshirt, and tells me he once considered getting tattooed, long before becoming a monk. “I’m Samoan,” he says and laughs again. “I love tattoos!”
Compline
By the end of the week, the retreat guests I met earlier have left; they’re replaced by new guests, and I realize that I’m the only one who has stayed the entire week. I’ve more or less gotten the hang of the chants, the gesticulations, when to stand and when to sit. (Waking up at 5:20 each morning, regrettably, doesn’t get any easier.) I even find myself helping some of the newly arrived guests with the exacting routines. I also find that I don’t miss scrolling on my phone or circling back on emails or anxiously refreshing my news feed every two minutes. I don’t know if I believe in an afterlife, but if there is a heaven, I’m certain it will not have TikTok.
On my last full day at Saint Andrew’s, I go for a hike through the grounds surrounding the monastery. I walk up to the cemetery, then keep going, walking high up on the ridge overlooking Antelope Valley, until there’s nothing around me but chollas and creosote and dirt and rocks. The sun begins to sink into the San Gabriel Mountains as I hear the chapel bells ringing in the distance, calling us to Vespers. I’m too far away to make it back in time, so I remain where I am. I watch the sky turn sorbet orange and radicchio pink, the first stars beginning to appear, as I look up and reflect upon the glory and wonder of existence.•
Santi Elijah Holley is an award-winning journalist and the author of An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created. He is a regular contributor to Alta Journal.
