Here are many kinds of silence which can overtake you at Glenstal Abbey. There is the silence which fills the Lady Chapel after the final notes of the evening liturgy have died away. There is the moment where nothing appears to happen, and you realise that people are praying. There is the heart-stopping sensation which, as you find yourself dwarfed by an alley of unimaginably tall trees or stroll amid the sunshine of a 17th-century walled garden, forces you to stand still and acknowledge the awesome beauty of it all. And there is the silence in which meals are taken in the refectory, which is not silence at all but a brisk, cheerful business filled with the clatter of cutlery and the rattle of plates and overlaid, first by a reading from the rules of St Benedict, and then by a particularly gorgeous recording of Monteverdi.
We arrived just in time for supper, and received from the monastery's guest master, Father Ambrose, the kind of warmly unobtrusive welcome for which the Benedictines have been famous since St Benedict first organised his followers into a religious community in 6th-century Italy. All kinds of people knock at Father Ambrose's guest-house door, and for all kinds of reasons; the visitors' book at Glenstal contains comments which range from a cryptic "Pax Vobis" to an ecstatic "This is the gate of heaven". One young guest summed up his stay as "Wicked", with a hasty "in the good sense" tacked on afterwards by way of explanation.
Not even St Benedict could have foreseen how some of the less appetising offshoots of late 20th-century capitalism - German backpackers, say, or executive stress, or the record industry's sudden fascination with liturgical music - would impact on his carefully thought-out rules for living a decent monastic life. With more than 40 resident monks and the 200-plus boys of the abbey's boarding school to be catered for, space is at a premium at Glenstal, but Father Ambrose never appears to lose his kindness, his cool or his sense of humour. Every guest, the rule of St Benedict declares, is to be received as Christ. "And as my predecessor used to say," Father Ambrose tells us with a glint in his eye, " `that's grand - if we don't like him, we can always crucify him'."
This ready wit is, for the visitor, one of the most striking aspects of abbey life. It may be something you develop when you devote your days to the search for God - or it may just be something you need to stay sane in a monastery. The faces seated behind the Lshaped arrangement of tables in the refectory are indicative, to a man, of strongly individual personalities, and since Benedictine monks take a vow of stability and join one particular monastery for life, running away from any personal difficulties which may arise in daily life is not an option, as Father Gregory - a student of psychology - explains.
"People come here and they see the castle and they see the grounds and they see what is a pretty happy, normal, thriving community and they hear the liturgy, which can be quite beautiful, and they think this must be very idyllic," he says. "But the difficulties come from the sense, first of all, that it may not have much purpose. If you lose the central thread, which is searching for the presence of God - or, perhaps, resting in the presence of God - then it could become a bit goalless, or lacking in inner sweetness, or in anything which would carry it through.
"The day is punctuated by periods of organised prayer, because it revolves around the celebration of the divine offices; but there's a good deal of emphasis on internalising the rules. It's not just a question of following the form, but of reaching some kind of freedom of the spirit, so that, for instance, you don't have to go to the services or take part in the daily activities - but you do it because it's part of the satisfaction of living here."
At half-past six on a late March morning, Glenstal Abbey is shrouded in the sort of darkness which makes it difficult to locate your alarm clock and very, very tempting not to even try; but in the chapel the monks are stuck into Matins, the hypnotic murmur of the liturgy punctuated by the occasional robust Kyrie which, sung in a sturdy tenor, lights up the service like a shaft of rogue sunlight.
"It's very hard to sing at half-six in the morning," admits Father Henry, bursar of the abbey and one of a trio of monks at Glenstal who are generally credited with the process of musical consciousness-raising which has gone on at the monastery over the past decade. "And it can't be very easy to listen to, sometimes, either . . . " Father Henry, who made a serious study of Gregorian chant in Germany, is both erudite and enthusiastic on the subject. He demonstrates the latest thinking on plainsong dynamics, and explains how Glenstal's sound has evolved from the rather ethereal chant inherited from the monastery's "parent" house in Belgium - "our early recordings sound tres francais", he declares - to a much chunkier sound influenced by the distinctive way in which Irish monks pronounce the Latin texts. Father Henry is convinced of the importance of a beautifully-sung liturgy, and would disagree - at least partly - with those who argue that since monastic office is, above all, a matter of individual and collective prayer, aesthetic or artistic values don't apply. "Of course it can't be absolutely perfect, and in a house of non-musicians you can't insist on rehearsal," he says. "But I wouldn't say that it's not a performance. It's not a performance in the sense that theatre is a performance - but you try to perform it as well as you possibly can."
Father Paul, who combines his own interest in Gregorian chant with a passion for musical theatre, and is the composer both of this year's smash-hit school musical, based on The Count Of Monte Cristo, and a number of the English-language offices in daily use in the chapel, agrees. "We probably don't practise as much as we should, but in a way the offices are like practising four times a day because you get to know people's voices very well. You know when they're going to take a breath; you know when they can't reach a note, and someone else will supply it. And that comes across on our recordings, that it's a lived chant and we're singing as a unit."
As to whether the current popularity of Gregorian chant recordings is indicative of a general hankering after spirituality in the wider world, Father Paul confesses he is somewhat sceptical. "I'm not sceptical about people liking it - I'm just sceptical about putting a religious spin on that, necessarily. For a lot of people, it's just nice background music that's sort of arty. But for a monk, it's a very integral part of prayer. We're exposed to an awful lot of music during the day - we don't even realise it, I think, until you suddenly look back and see how much of your time you actually spend singing!"
When not singing, monks are required to engage in useful, productive activity. Idleness - "the enemy of the soul", according to St Benedict - is frowned upon; which, as Father Peter tells us, makes retirement a somewhat abstract notion. Not only does he, at 80, still teach PE to the children in the local village, he has also, for the past two years, been the custodian of the monastery shop, where - to his undoubted amusement - he finds himself selling CDs of the monks as well as books, postcards, medals and candles. "When I received the habit on the 8th of September, 1936," he says, "there were three of us, two from Belfast and one from Kerry - and the ceremony was delayed so as to coincide with a feast-day, because our arrival doubled the number in the choir."
Deep in the forest, meanwhile, Brother Ciaran is producing glorious hand-turned wooden bowls in mind-boggling quantities. With the mixture of meticulous thoroughness and contagious enthusiasm which appears to be characteristic of Glenstal, he takes us step by step through the process which turns huge hunks of timber - monkey puzzle, yew, walnut from the garden of the Bishop of Limerick - into ageless artefacts. He shows us the dehydration chamber and tells us about mobile sawmills and the joy of working with ancient wood in a quiet place.
What he doesn't tell us, though we subsequently discover it for ourselves, is that he is the possessor of a fine lyric tenor voice which helps to make the mid-day Community Mass ("community" as in "monastic" - forget folk guitars and think soaring unaccompanied chant allied to graceful, almost balletic ritual) into a thing of austere, simple beauty.
It is almost time for us to leave. But The Irish Times has expressed a desire to see the herb garden, and Abbot Christopher Dillon has set aside a hectic schedule which appears, at any given time, to include major decisions about the abbey's future such as whether the guest-house should be expanded or the chapel rebuilt, financial juggling of the virtuoso kind, projected visits to other communities in various places including Glenstal's "protege" project in Nigeria and God (yes, God) knows what else in order to give the guided tour.
There isn't much to see in a herb garden in early spring: worse, all the gates appeared to be locked except one which could only be reached by clambering over a precarious-looking heap of building rubble. The Lord Abbot didn't hesitate for a second - and it was well worth the climb, for the garden, like Glenstal itself, is a rare and special place. It seemed crass to shatter the afternoon sunshine by asking whether he was worried that the emergence of his monks as the latest stars in the showbiz firmament might somehow harm the abbey, or whether he felt Glenstal could, on the contrary, reach out to a troubled world by means of beautiful music, but his reply is as calm as the day.
"For us the problem - if there is a problem - is the risk that what is essentially prayer should be produced as a concert piece. As far as damage is concerned, I would be more concerned about tourism, where people are so mindlessly voracious for the ultimate experience that they risk destroying the very thing they're coming to enjoy. They come in, you know, and say `where are the ruins? Every monastery has ruins'. I'm tempted to invite them to look around at the monks . . .
"I don't see us as reaching out; it's not the business of a monk to be doing the pastoral thing. You can't be outgoing like that and keep the fire going inside. But in a world of great political and religious confusion, we can provide predictability and regularity and an environment where people don't have to explain themselves. The monk's task is to maintain a certain intensity of spiritual presence in the here and now. As for the role of music in that, some monks are tone-deaf and others see it as an optional extra. But good liturgy goes hand-in-hand with good music - and on a good day, the music itself conveys something which can't be put into words."