Declaring that it had been ‘the best choice I have ever made’, Tony Burke spoke about his participation in the BBC TV series The Monastery two years ago, when he addressed a Greencoat Forum in London on 22 May, 2007.
He was one of five men who spent 40 days being filmed with the monks of Worth Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Sussex, broadcast in four ‘reality TV’ programmes. The five men had been chosen out of some 500 applicants and the programmes drew unexpectedly large audiences. Burkes’ story of his experiences riveted his audience in the London centre of Initiatives of Change. A journalist and advertising copywriter, and recovering alcoholic, Burke said, ‘The biggest reason I decided to take part in The Monastery was because of some very unhappy events over the preceding two years. A few months prior to going to Worth Abbey my life had fallen apart.’ His drinking had spiralled out of control and he was taking drugs regularly. ‘I was completely unreliable and erratic. I used people. I abused trust, friendship and love. And I was getting into trouble with the police.’ He had been arrested by riot police in full body armour ‘for jumping through the back windscreen of a Mercedes parked nearby after a massive drinking binge. And two months earlier I was arrested after stealing a mini-cab and taking police on a high-speed police chase when a drug deal went disastrously wrong.’
He hit rock bottom as he sat with a litre of vodka ‘in a small concrete room at the back of my parents’ garage in Essex at 10 am, rocking drunkenly on my heels with tears streaming down my face, seriously considering taking my own life.’ He could have hanged himself from the roof beam. Instead, he blacked out and remembered nothing for hours. ‘That was the turning point, because I haven’t drunk since that hazy episode on that moment on 26 February 2004.’
He spent several weeks detoxing in a rehabilitation clinic in West London, ‘and thinking very seriously about how I was going to rebuild my life. I made a solemn pledge that I would never drink again.’ He found that ‘a different world apparently existed where people went to bed early and washed their clothes and ate vegetables and took showers’. But he was not sure how long he could keep up his new life.
He joined the Benedictine monastery in 2005, straight from a freelance job at a soft-porn TV channel where he had mixed with ‘some of the most unpleasant men I’ve ever had the misfortune to meet’. He went to the monastery ‘to finish my rehabilitation’ and get a fresh perspective on life. ‘God and the premise of faith and religion was something I hadn’t given a second thought to in the 29 years leading up to that point.’ Burke outlined the monks’ commitment to silence, obedience and humility, the latter being, in Burke’s view, ‘the most important and the reason why it was vital for me to leave behind my selfish, indulgent sense of self and immerse myself in a sense of community’.
‘The key moment came for me on day 38 of the 40. After much prayer, meditation and inward reflection, something shifted inside me and I had a profound experience with my mentor, Brother Francis. It was like coming up on Ecstasy. It was a feeling of light-headedness and paralysis—a surge of emotion which reduced me to tears and a knowledge that whatever I had been trying to contact or access had replied or at least let me in. I remember attending church directly afterward visibly shaken.’ It was enough for Burke to say, at that time, that this was an experience of the Christian God, though he also told the forum that ‘I still to this day do not know what hung in the air that night.’ Faith and prayer, he said, ‘are still very important to me’, though he now has no formal religious affiliation. ‘For me it is about being a good person, doing the right thing by people and being aware of where I’m going wrong. It’s about feeling that connection with something completely omnipotent, something which humbles me daily and gives me a reason to carry on the good work… And when I feel myself slipping back into my old mindset I can step into a church and I sit a while in silence with my hands together and I pray that things keep moving me in the right direction.’ Whether or not he is praying to God or simply ‘the god in me’ remains a moot point for Burke. ‘When I left the monastery I thought I had all the answers. Two years on I realise that I have none of them and my personal spiritual journey has only just begun.’
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