The monk who loved Buffy

So are millions of others. But what sets Mark apart is having to squeeze his passions into his spare minutes between praying.

As a monk at Worth Abbey, Mark spends several hours each day worshipping.

Vigils start at 6.30am and there are three more sessions of prayer before Compline, or evening prayers, at 8.15pm.

For most people, the rigour of this daily routine would seem both challenging and dull. And, shattering the monastic tradition of silent stoicism, Mark Barrett agrees.

He has written a book about the spirituality of everyday living, called Crossing, which uses a monk's daily routine to symbolise the journey of life.

Rather than wholeheartedly celebrating the monastic way of life, the book starts out by exploring the boredom and confusion of this routine.

In the introduction, the monk and teacher writes: "'Don't you get bored, praying five times a day?' my students ask me.

"'Yes', I tell them. This always stops the conversation in its tracks, because it is not what I am supposed to say."

Mark has been a Benedictine monk more than half his life.

At 44, he has moved away from the confusion of youth and into the maturity of adulthood among the brotherhood of the abbey - but he admits to having doubts and fears.

He says: "It is not true to assume we live a religious life because we have found God.

"That suggests we are already at the end of the story when really we are at the beginning. We are all still searching for God.

"Many people are convinced the clergy are professionals who have some secret hotline to heaven.

"Priests are often reluctant to share with lay people the fact that they encounter difficulties with praying, partly out of shame and partly out of a fear of discouraging them.

"But I think it is encouraging to know everyone struggles on in much the same way. There is no hotline to heaven."

Mark has received condemnation for his somewhat unorthodox views.

He says: "The one serious question mark about the book was a review in a Catholic newspaper. I think they saw it as letting the side down. But most people have said they found it helpful."

Mark's decision to share his views in public is brave and unconventional. But then, his decision to become a monk in the first place was pretty unconventional.

He says: "As a child, my religious background was pretty much non-existent.

"I had occasionally been bundled off to Sunday school, which I hated, and that was about it.

"Later on, I became interested in the Occult. As many teenagers are, I was fascinated by ghosts and magic.

"It was long before Harry Potter came along, but I suppose it was the same sort of fascination so many people have with him."

Mark's attraction to the Occult was harnessed by his RE teacher.

Remaining sceptical at every stage, he started to learn about the history of religion and the theology of Christianity.

There was no way he planned to join his Yorkshire school's Christian Union, which he saw as "fanatically evangelical".

But he was starting to wonder whether there might be something in the "religion thing".

He says: "I was interested in religion and I wanted to explore it but didn't know where to start.

"I was going nowhere near my own background of the Free Church, they were no fun. And the Church of England seemed too familiar.

"Then I had an encounter with a very attractive girl who was the only identifiable Catholic I knew. She made it seem cool. Plus, I was intrigued by the history and richness of the Catholic tradition."

By the time he went off to Cambridge University to study English, Mark was a committed Catholic. Even then, he had no intention of becoming a monk.

He says: "I thought, when I left university, I would go into advertising or something like that. Before I went off into the world of work, though, I had an itch I wanted to scratch."

Mark already knew about Worth Abbey in Turners Hill, which was established in 1933 as an offshoot of the larger Downside community, near Bath.

As a Benedictine abbey, one of the most important aspects of the monks' work at Worth was education.

In the mid 50s, 750 boys were educated in the two communities. By the late 50s, Worth became independent from Downside and expanded its operation.

A small band of monks established a new community, complete with a mission and farm, in an impoverished valley in Peru.

By 1971, the Abbey had set up a scheme, where young people interested in the monastic way of life could live and pray with the monks for up to a year. Mark took advantage of this offer.

For the first few months, he felt he had found his spiritual home and decided to stay.

Then, as he realised the full implications of becoming a monk, he changed his mind.

He says: "One encounters different wobbles at different stages of life. There isn't just one moment of crisis. But there's no way of getting away from the fact that, for any young person, the fact of celibacy is a very big issue."

Despite his wobbles, Mark bit the bullet and joined the community.

But he didn't have to make a lifelong commitment straight away. It was three years before he took his binding Benedictine vows.

He says: "In many ways, religious life is made easier than marriage. You spend up to two years as a novice, which gives you the chance to change your mind. In the end, I decided to stay."

As the years have passed, chastity has begun to seem like less of a challenge. Obedience proved the harder challenge for Mark.

He says: "At a later stage, while celibacy never stops being an issue, obedience becomes more difficult. That's not just jumping when the Abbot says jump, which is easy, it's about obedience to the will of the community.

"You have to be open to, sensitive to and aware of the needs of those around you.

"You need to put that first rather than yourself.

"If I was a married or single man in my 40s in a skilled career, I would expect to have a degree of autonomy over what I did and where I did it.

"Here, you depend on the community for everything. You don't have your own car, you don't have your own bank account, you don't wear your own clothes. You must get on with whatever work the community needs doing."

Despite the ascetic nature of this existence, Mark is in tune with the outside world.

When he isn't praying or teaching at the Worth Abbey school, he likes nothing more than popping round to his friends' homes for a meal or nipping to the pictures.

The idea of a monk sitting in a crowded cinema or gossiping with his mates may seem bizarre.

Mark acknowledges that 20 years ago, when an atmosphere of penance prevailed, this kind of behaviour would have been frowned on. Now, he believes these connections make him a better person and a better monk.

As a teacher of film and media studies to 17 and 18-year-old sixth formers, the monk's cultural awareness is crucial to his ability to do the job.

It was his students who introduced him to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

He says: "I've watched so much Buffy recently, I've got it coming out of my ears. It's good fun, nicely ironic. Full of female empowerment."

The variety of Mark's cultural references also enrich his book.

Crossing is peppered with dozens of pithy quotes from Douglas Adams, Woody Allen and Kenneth Grahame's classic tale, Wind in the Willows.

The final chapter, for example, is centred on Woody Allen's infamous quip: "I'm not frightened of dying, I just don't want to be there when it happens."

In this chapter, Mark explores both the sanitisation of death in Western culture and the difficulty many people have with the idea of 'letting go'.

His belief that true love and spirituality come with the ability to let go, of desire, ambition, a spouse, a child, a parent, is a philosophy with strong overtones of Buddhism.

There are many references to Buddhist thinkers throughout the book, making it less of a religious treatise and more like a New Age exploration of the self.

Mark doesn't seem to mind if his readers are more interested in spirituality than Catholicism. To him, the two are almost one and the same.

He says: "Someone who isn't religious, who doesn't go to church or even believe in God, can still be very spiritual.

"I think anyone who reflects in any way upon their own life is, in some way, on a spiritual journey.

"Quite frankly, religion can sadly get in the way of that.

"I don't think religious people are automatically in touch with God, and non-religious people are automatically not in touch with that force behind the Universe, whatever that is, that we call God.

"In a way, it doesn't matter what we call it, just that we agree there's something there."

Crossing is published by Darton, Longman and Todd, priced £8.95.