At the turning point of a still world (The Tablet 21 May 2005
Tony Burke was deleting emails at his office in Covent Garden, when one message caught his interest. It invited volunteers from a “busy, modern, fast-moving, metropolitan environment” to take part in a reality TV series. Burke ticked all the boxes. He worked in advertising – and was also producing storylines for Bang Babes, a lesbian soft porn TV channel, run in tandem with a sex chat line.
The email came from the producers of The Monastery, the acclaimed BBC2 series, which is now in its final week. Set at Worth Abbey in East Sussex, it followed five contemporary men who took part in the life of the Benedictine community there for forty days and nights last August. The resulting programmes are a portrait both of monastic life and of the men and their spiritual journeys.
Tony Burke replied to the email and the producers chose him from several hundred applicants. In a dramatic sequence in next Tuesday’s programme, which ends the series, Burke is seen in the throes of what he understands very clearly to have been a spiritual experience. It was an unexpected and unsought end to his six weeks at Worth.
His personal history makes Tony Burke an effective and unusual witness. He has few illusions about himself and as an advertising copywriter, he has an instinct for words, along with the weight they carry. He had led a rather rackety life, with a trail of broken relationships, drug use and heavy drinking. His underlying justification was that ‘I work in advertising and I’m allowed to go out and do silly things’. The trail led, predictably, to a breakdown and a spell in a rehab unit. He had since recovered, gone back to work, and was “able to view the world with excitement again” when The Monastery email appeared in his inbox.
While Burke had no previous religious background, he had an open mind about the monastic experience. “I was prepared to believe. I was also prepared to expose it as a sham. If I came out after six weeks and said ‘do me a favour lads, this is a bunch of guys opting out, escaping from life, believing in a farcical nonentity’, that would have been fine. But I went the other way.”
At first he was sceptical, experiencing monastic silence as a ‘blank’, and finding it difficult to accept that the scriptures might shed useful light on human experience. The monastery’s routines tired him, along with the ceaseless recitation of the hours of the daily office. But as time passed, Tony Burke was seduced by the underlying search and, as the programmes show, he had an instinct for asking sharp theological questions. Friendships with the monks made a powerful impression. “It’s more than just going to church six times a day. The truth, the belief and the love that you get from these individuals as men reverses your scepticism. Monks have a hard job. It’s not an easy life. You realise that these guys are for real and they believe in what they are doing. You have to respect it.”
Tony Burke: "From that moment on, and ever since, everything has been different."
Invited to choose a spiritual director, Tony Burke found a kindred spirit, Brother Francis, who works outside the monastery in a hospice, where he nurses children in the final stages of cancer. “He has an amazing job - he’s a modern man, a monk who also lives in the real world. He is a sensitive, yet realistic, human being and I could speak frankly with him and sort out some of my own issues.”
His final session with Brother Francis was the trigger for Tony Burke’s spiritual experience. As television, the episode has a dramatic force, which is heightened by long silences. But the power of the moment is also sacramental. The prelude is a conversation about leaving Worth and readjusting to life in London. Burke is preoccupied by the tension between his need to earn a living, producing trails for Bang Babes, and the values he has learnt to appreciate at the Abbey. Francis replies that vocation is the lifelong search for one’s deepest identity, and that in its honest pursuit one cannot go far wrong. He hands Burke a white stone, a reminder of his ‘white stone name’ (a reference to the Book of Revelations), and a symbol of one’s truest self.
“What happened next”, Tony Burke told me, “was out of the blue and took me completely by surprise. It was a very frightening experience. The only thing to which I can begin to compare it to was coming up on ecstasy. It was a surge of energy, which paralysed me and left me speechless. I was scared and couldn’t move. Luckily I wasn’t on my own. I had Francis there.”
“I remember him smiling back and saying ‘It’s OK – you’ll be OK’. It went on for some time – just this constant swirling up of energy and it just gripped me. It was a very simple silent experience. On camera it looks as if I had had a few drinks, but it just went on and on and on. Then it subsided. Francis blessed me. It came again. Eventually Francis said, ‘do you want to finish?’”
As the TV crew stopped filming, Francis helped Tony from the room. “What the f*** was that?’ He said to me ‘Tony – you’ve done this on your own. You’ve listened. You’ve worked hard for this. Don’t try and explain the mystery of God’. Attempts to explain don’t do it justice. I felt that after a very exhaustive spiritual process of shifting perceptions, and listening, and working, I was being contacted and touched and rewarded for the work that had been done’.”
This intensely private experience will become very public, when it is broadcast on Tuesday night. Throughout the six weeks at Worth, Burke and his fellow retreatants were aware – in peripheral vision - of the production crew’s presence. But the footage of the encounter with Brother Francis has an unforced and un-self conscious quality. It is also something of a television miracle. According to the series producer of The Monastery, Gabe Solomon, he and his colleagues had a strong sense that “something was in the air that night. Often in television, you are fighting life. But sometimes things come together, as they did that night, and they just work.”
Religious mystics are careful to place spiritual experiences in context. For Thomas Merton their real value was the extent to which they returned the individual to the physical world with an enhanced sense of responsibilities to others. After he left Worth Abbey, Tony Burke returned briefly to Bang Babes, but did not stay there long, as he felt there was too great a tension with his newfound values. He now works in a mainstream advertising agency. Although still unsure about organised religion, he visits a Catholic church in Marylebone several times a week, and keeps in touch with the monks at Worth, where he has helped develop a special website for viewers of The Monastery. Already it has had many thousands of visitors and Burke hopes it will build a bridge to ‘the contemporary Londoner who’s a bit too cool to think about spirituality to consider instead that ‘perhaps there’s something for everyone in all this’.
After he returned from Worth, his friends were unimpressed. “I came out of the Monastery saying ‘Right – things have changed lads, things have changed a bit for me’. They said ‘Yea – whatever’”. On the night the series started, several friends turned up at his flat, uninvited, to watch. While they giggled through the opening sequences, they watched the rest of the programme in silence. “After the show we went to the pub and I’ve never seen them so animated. We had a lock in and we were there till half past twelve. I’ve seen these guys talking about football and shagging and all that normal kind of stuff. The debate didn’t stop and if I had sneaked out, the debate would have carried on. They are very cynical about organised religion. But they were spellbound by the programme and willing to take it on board and see the other side.”
Burke is unembarrassed by the BBC footage of his experience. He recently showed it to an art director colleague at his advertising agency. The director, a tough streetwise Australian, was sceptical until he watched the video, but was, Burke says, ‘gobsmacked’. Tony Burke is grateful for the tape. “Not many people can say they have a high definition record of a spiritual experience. As time moves away, you approach that experience in different ways. And you may begin to doubt it. Without that permanent record, you could start to doubt it. But that was the turning point in my life – that moment. From then on, and ever since, everything has been different.”
Worth Abbey website for The Monastery
http://www.worthabbey.net/bbc/index.html
The email came from the producers of The Monastery, the acclaimed BBC2 series, which is now in its final week. Set at Worth Abbey in East Sussex, it followed five contemporary men who took part in the life of the Benedictine community there for forty days and nights last August. The resulting programmes are a portrait both of monastic life and of the men and their spiritual journeys.
Tony Burke replied to the email and the producers chose him from several hundred applicants. In a dramatic sequence in next Tuesday’s programme, which ends the series, Burke is seen in the throes of what he understands very clearly to have been a spiritual experience. It was an unexpected and unsought end to his six weeks at Worth.
His personal history makes Tony Burke an effective and unusual witness. He has few illusions about himself and as an advertising copywriter, he has an instinct for words, along with the weight they carry. He had led a rather rackety life, with a trail of broken relationships, drug use and heavy drinking. His underlying justification was that ‘I work in advertising and I’m allowed to go out and do silly things’. The trail led, predictably, to a breakdown and a spell in a rehab unit. He had since recovered, gone back to work, and was “able to view the world with excitement again” when The Monastery email appeared in his inbox.
While Burke had no previous religious background, he had an open mind about the monastic experience. “I was prepared to believe. I was also prepared to expose it as a sham. If I came out after six weeks and said ‘do me a favour lads, this is a bunch of guys opting out, escaping from life, believing in a farcical nonentity’, that would have been fine. But I went the other way.”
At first he was sceptical, experiencing monastic silence as a ‘blank’, and finding it difficult to accept that the scriptures might shed useful light on human experience. The monastery’s routines tired him, along with the ceaseless recitation of the hours of the daily office. But as time passed, Tony Burke was seduced by the underlying search and, as the programmes show, he had an instinct for asking sharp theological questions. Friendships with the monks made a powerful impression. “It’s more than just going to church six times a day. The truth, the belief and the love that you get from these individuals as men reverses your scepticism. Monks have a hard job. It’s not an easy life. You realise that these guys are for real and they believe in what they are doing. You have to respect it.”
Tony Burke: "From that moment on, and ever since, everything has been different."
Invited to choose a spiritual director, Tony Burke found a kindred spirit, Brother Francis, who works outside the monastery in a hospice, where he nurses children in the final stages of cancer. “He has an amazing job - he’s a modern man, a monk who also lives in the real world. He is a sensitive, yet realistic, human being and I could speak frankly with him and sort out some of my own issues.”
His final session with Brother Francis was the trigger for Tony Burke’s spiritual experience. As television, the episode has a dramatic force, which is heightened by long silences. But the power of the moment is also sacramental. The prelude is a conversation about leaving Worth and readjusting to life in London. Burke is preoccupied by the tension between his need to earn a living, producing trails for Bang Babes, and the values he has learnt to appreciate at the Abbey. Francis replies that vocation is the lifelong search for one’s deepest identity, and that in its honest pursuit one cannot go far wrong. He hands Burke a white stone, a reminder of his ‘white stone name’ (a reference to the Book of Revelations), and a symbol of one’s truest self.
“What happened next”, Tony Burke told me, “was out of the blue and took me completely by surprise. It was a very frightening experience. The only thing to which I can begin to compare it to was coming up on ecstasy. It was a surge of energy, which paralysed me and left me speechless. I was scared and couldn’t move. Luckily I wasn’t on my own. I had Francis there.”
“I remember him smiling back and saying ‘It’s OK – you’ll be OK’. It went on for some time – just this constant swirling up of energy and it just gripped me. It was a very simple silent experience. On camera it looks as if I had had a few drinks, but it just went on and on and on. Then it subsided. Francis blessed me. It came again. Eventually Francis said, ‘do you want to finish?’”
As the TV crew stopped filming, Francis helped Tony from the room. “What the f*** was that?’ He said to me ‘Tony – you’ve done this on your own. You’ve listened. You’ve worked hard for this. Don’t try and explain the mystery of God’. Attempts to explain don’t do it justice. I felt that after a very exhaustive spiritual process of shifting perceptions, and listening, and working, I was being contacted and touched and rewarded for the work that had been done’.”
This intensely private experience will become very public, when it is broadcast on Tuesday night. Throughout the six weeks at Worth, Burke and his fellow retreatants were aware – in peripheral vision - of the production crew’s presence. But the footage of the encounter with Brother Francis has an unforced and un-self conscious quality. It is also something of a television miracle. According to the series producer of The Monastery, Gabe Solomon, he and his colleagues had a strong sense that “something was in the air that night. Often in television, you are fighting life. But sometimes things come together, as they did that night, and they just work.”
Religious mystics are careful to place spiritual experiences in context. For Thomas Merton their real value was the extent to which they returned the individual to the physical world with an enhanced sense of responsibilities to others. After he left Worth Abbey, Tony Burke returned briefly to Bang Babes, but did not stay there long, as he felt there was too great a tension with his newfound values. He now works in a mainstream advertising agency. Although still unsure about organised religion, he visits a Catholic church in Marylebone several times a week, and keeps in touch with the monks at Worth, where he has helped develop a special website for viewers of The Monastery. Already it has had many thousands of visitors and Burke hopes it will build a bridge to ‘the contemporary Londoner who’s a bit too cool to think about spirituality to consider instead that ‘perhaps there’s something for everyone in all this’.
After he returned from Worth, his friends were unimpressed. “I came out of the Monastery saying ‘Right – things have changed lads, things have changed a bit for me’. They said ‘Yea – whatever’”. On the night the series started, several friends turned up at his flat, uninvited, to watch. While they giggled through the opening sequences, they watched the rest of the programme in silence. “After the show we went to the pub and I’ve never seen them so animated. We had a lock in and we were there till half past twelve. I’ve seen these guys talking about football and shagging and all that normal kind of stuff. The debate didn’t stop and if I had sneaked out, the debate would have carried on. They are very cynical about organised religion. But they were spellbound by the programme and willing to take it on board and see the other side.”
Burke is unembarrassed by the BBC footage of his experience. He recently showed it to an art director colleague at his advertising agency. The director, a tough streetwise Australian, was sceptical until he watched the video, but was, Burke says, ‘gobsmacked’. Tony Burke is grateful for the tape. “Not many people can say they have a high definition record of a spiritual experience. As time moves away, you approach that experience in different ways. And you may begin to doubt it. Without that permanent record, you could start to doubt it. But that was the turning point in my life – that moment. From then on, and ever since, everything has been different.”
Worth Abbey website for The Monastery
http://www.worthabbey.net/bbc/index.html
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