A writer and documentary film-maker who usually craves control and fears stillness and solitude had mixed feelings as he embarked on a silent retreat at the legendary St Beuno’s Jesuit Spirituality Centre in north Wales. He is still coming to terms with what happened next

Two days into my eight-day silent retreat and I am walking the seductively alluring Clwydian hills around the village of Tremeirchion. En route back, I call off and stand outside the Rock Chapel, a small structure fashioned by a group of students led by Ignatius Scholes in 1866.

Gerard Manley Hopkins possibly stood here, looking west to Snowdon, I was thinking; from such vistas he may have been inspired to write of “the dearest freshness deep down things” in “God’s Grandeur”.

Forty-eight hours into my stay, I was straining to hear the voice of God and all I was registering was the high-pitched whining monotony of my own chronic tinnitus.

I’d arrived at St Beuno’s after a 10-mile bike trip from Rhyl station in a state of strange, curious apprehension. A silent retreat was a first for me. My mind kept wandering back to an episode in the 2005 BBC2 series The Monastery, filmed at Worth Abbey in Sussex. In the final instalment, a young man named Tony was overcome by a very powerful sense of the holy, of being blessed, an “event” that promised to radically alter his life priorities.

By nature I am a control freak, with my hand always firmly on the gear stick. I didn’t want to risk anything like that happening to me. And I suspect that’s why the spectre of so much silent unstructured time loomed as a threat.