The Crossway

by Guy Stagg

  We met in Karyes, the village capital of Mt Athos. He was bent over a map of the local hiking trails, while a friend marked out their route. Although a few battered minibuses taxied pilgrims between monasteries, most people travelled on foot. These two were aiming for Iviron, on the peninsula’s eastern coast, which was my own destination that day. When I asked if I could join them, they seemed reluctant. Perhaps it was embarrassing to meet someone from Britain, because their pilgrimage no longer felt secret, but after a pause they invited me along.

  Leaving Karyes we passed groves of walnut and hazel and entered the woods. The air was green here, the sunshine filtering through the canopy and the greenish shadows warm. A few shafts of light parted the branches, catching on the split cobbles and shining streamwater at our feet.

  The friend was called Stephen. He had massive forearms, stamped with tattoos, and a chest shaped like a steamer trunk. At first I found him daunting, for his features were set in an ugly grimace, but then he started telling me about his wife. Stephen explained that he used to be an atheist, until he married a Cypriot woman who wanted to raise their children Orthodox. Soon they were attending church together. ‘Half the time I’d no idea what was happening. Eventually I stopped trying to understand, just followed everyone else. That’s when it started to click. All the history, tradition, weird bits – only make sense during the services.’

  ‘Those are the best converts,’ said Johnny. ‘Take a rational decision and you’re doing it wrong. The point of Orthodoxy’s not understanding: the point is union with God. You can’t think your way into that.’

  Was Johnny a convert too?

  ‘Religious vagrant, that’s what I am. Church of Scotland, Church of England – until one Sunday I went to the Divine Liturgy and thought I was in heaven.’

  As we descended to the shore, my companions kept talking. They were an unlikely pair: two sailors who had served together in Portsmouth and the Clyde, off the Persian Gulf and the Somali coast. But last month Johnny had resigned from the navy, and when summer was over he would begin studying at an Orthodox seminary in New York State.

  Stephen was also leaving – to retrain as a plumber.

  When Johnny asked why I was visiting Mt Athos, I told him that I wanted to learn more about Hesychasm. While hiking across the Balkans, I had visited a few dozen Orthodox churches, but was confused by their dim, dense interiors and their endless chanted services. The more I experienced of Eastern Christianity, I said, the less I understood, until I began to doubt my whole pilgrimage.

  Johnny replied that nobody came to Mt Athos by mistake. Then he started discussing the hermits who lived in remote corners of the Holy Mountain, mentioning theoria, Philokalia, and the uncreated light of the Transfiguration. But, when he realized I wasn’t following, he said, ‘First lesson any convert needs to learn is: forget everything you know about Christianity.’

  ‘And the second lesson?’ I asked.

  ‘Moderation,’ said Stephen.

  Our path flattened out near Iviron, running between terraced vines and vegetable plots. Bumblebees droned in the flower banks or moved ponderous through the shrubs. Most of the peninsula was untended, but each monastery lay in a cultivated pocket. This one was set back from the sea, surrounded on three sides by hills. Its walls were cliffs of stone crowned by double rows of saffron cells. Through the gates stood a crimson church, the katholikon, at the centre of a flagged courtyard. There were more saffron cellblocks bordering the yard, as well as a guest block the size of a manor house and the crumbling remains of a keep.

  Before we were shown to our rooms, Johnny took a slim paperback called The Way of a Pilgrim from his rucksack. ‘Orthodoxy’s an eastern religion: you need a guru for the tough stuff,’ he said, handing me the book. ‘But, if you want to understand Hesychasm, this is the place to start.’

  My cell had a wooden desk, a wooden bed and a wooden chair with a wicker seat. A balcony looked down on the allotments, where a pair of monks were putting away their tools and beating the dust from their robes. When they went inside, I could hear nothing but the chattering cicadas and the scuffling sea. Otherwise the evening was calm as the slow movement of clouds.

  For the next hour I sat on the balcony, reading Johnny’s book. It told the story of a young Russian obsessed by St Paul’s instruction to pray without ceasing. He begins living as a strannik to learn how this might be done. Soon an elderly mystic teaches him the Jesus Prayer, a contemplative technique whereby the words Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me are repeated so many times they become instinctive. This is the prayer of the heart: the central practice of Hesychasm.

  Once the pilgrim perfects the Jesus Prayer he decides to travel to Jerusalem. On the road he meets all sorts of people – some with moving stories to tell, others with religious teaching to share – but his progress is repeatedly interrupted and he never manages to leave Russia. Yet, as the book makes clear, learning the prayer was the true pilgrimage.

  I went back inside with the last of the evening light. As the day drew in, the scene began to simplify. Though it looked like every other cell I had stayed in, it was easy to imagine that this room was my own. And I wondered what more I could need in the world, and why I would go anywhere else.

  The Way of a Pilgrim might have been the model for Rasputin’s memoir. In both texts the narrator is threatened by a wolf, healed by a peasant and comforted by nature. The introduction to Johnny’s edition claimed that the book’s author was a strannik who roamed round Russia in the mid-nineteenth century before ending up on Mt Athos. Here his story was written down by a brother at St Panteleimon, becoming the most popular work of Orthodox spirituality ever published. It also provides a manifesto for Hesychasm, showing how a lowly pilgrim can experience the deepest mysteries of the faith.

  I tried to read on, but the words smudged and my attention flagged. After all, I had no idea what these mysteries meant and found little guidance in the book’s earnest passages of spiritual instruction. Yet I was charmed by the pilgrim narrator, whose willed innocence seemed familiar to me – at once hopeful and reckless. Like the young Rasputin, he was walking to learn how to live. And later that night, lying in bed, I found a paragraph Johnny had underlined which hinted a way forwards.

  Everything drew me to love and thank God; people, trees, plants, animals. I saw them all as my kinsfolk, I found on all of them the magic of the Name of Jesus. Sometimes I felt as light as though I had no body and was floating happily through the air instead of walking [. . .] And at all such times of happiness, I wished that God would let death come to me quickly, and let me pour out my heart in thankfulness at his feet.

  At four in the morning I was woken by a hollow knocking sound: a hammer beating against a wooden beam. It was the simandron, calling the monastery to prayer. I put on my clothes, left my cell, and followed the pilgrims into the dark mass of the katholikon. There was no light in the nave except for the flicker of candles and a seeping oil lamp, yet from the doorway I noticed Stephen’s hulking shape as he circled the icons, kissing some and kneeling in front of others. Johnny went after, repeating each gesture with a sweep of his arm and a flourish of his wrist.

  I stayed near these two for much of the service, imitating every time they crossed themselves – thumb, index and middle finger, pinched together and brushed from right to left, once, twice, three times in a row. Otherwise I could see little of the church, apart from a few items bobbing up from the gloom: the silver-screened icons lining the nave and the carved foliage decorating the iconostasis. Monks fluttered back and forth like shreds of black taffeta, sometimes ringing a bell, or shaking a censer, or crowding the choir stalls, or ducking into the sanctuary. And the chanting was endless: it did not cease.

  Soon my eyes were heavy from lack of sleep and the air heavy with incense. To keep myself from drifting off, I went outside and walked a lap of the monastery. The courtyard contained a domed fountain, a bell tower with a bare clock face, a strip of tatty cypress trees and a chapel with
a wrought-iron awning – all emerging from the night.

  For the next hour I sat in the church’s narthex, a narrow arcade with banks of leaded windows. As the sun lifted through the sky, the windowpanes cast squares of coloured light over the interior, turning from the frescoed scenes of apocalypse to the fans and foils that jigsawed the floor.

  I kept listening to the service, but though I noticed shifts in the plainsong, I could not work out when matins became the hours, or the hours became the Divine Liturgy. When I went back into the church, wisps of silver smoke cobwebbed the chandeliers and from somewhere nearby I heard the shimmer of brass bells. One of the brothers was orbiting the iconostasis in vestments of spun gold, while three more sang from the choir. Yet I wasn’t sure if they were reciting the epistle, the Gospel, or the sermon, the Litany of Peace or the Litany of Supplication, the Holy Hymn or the Cherubic.

  Some time around seven the room became still. The shuffling stopped, the coughing went quiet, and the monks stood erect. Together they recited the creed, together the Lord’s Prayer. Communion. Thanksgiving. Blessing.

  Stephen sighed, his face filling with relief. At last the service was done.

  Every day on Mt Athos started this way. Each night I stayed at a different monastery and each morning stirred to the hollow knocking of the simandron. One morning I slept through the alarm, waking to discover my dormitory empty and a deep tremor rising from outside, Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison, Ky – ri – e – lei – son.

  I planned to spend the services deep in thought, waiting for some sudden revelation. But I was too tired to think, my mind sluggish with boredom. Instead I invented games to pass the time: scoring the monks’ beards out of ten, say, with added points for thickness, whiteness, and moustache length. Or guessing the pilgrims’ nationalities from their appearance: expensive watches and knock-off trainers, jeans of black denim and jackets of desert-coloured cord. A few times I daydreamed and once stared at a candle for so long that I lost all sense of time: no boredom now, nor any guessing games, nothing but the weeping wax and a buttery light which seemed to last and last and last.

  During those mornings, what was knotted within me began to work loose. I had not forgotten that weekend in Thessaloniki, but while on Mt Athos I was glad for the relapse. The thing I feared most had finally happened. My sense of anxious expectation was gone. And the monasteries felt like a refuge, for here I could do myself no harm. Although I had been overwhelmed by the crowds in Rome and intimidated by the churches in Greece, I enjoyed standing anonymous among these pilgrims. I realized it was not faith that made the mornings precious, but the patient practice of a ritual. And I found comfort in the structure of the days, the unchanging routine.

  Johnny had explained the monks’ schedule to me. As well as rising before dawn to spend four hours in church, the brothers attended afternoon and evening services and passed an hour in private prayer. The rest of the time they cleaned, cooked, mended and farmed. They ate two meals a day, fasted two hundred days a year, and went to bed around nine each night. The monastery clocks ran on Byzantine time – meaning midnight began at sunset – and dates were fixed to the Julian calendar. This routine had not changed for a millennium, Johnny boasted, and it seemed the discipline was part of the draw. ‘They’re dead to the world,’ he told me at one point, eyes wide and blinking.

  I meant to ask Johnny if those new to the faith were attracted to its most demanding forms because anything gentler gave too much space for doubt. And if, by leaving the navy to join a seminary, he was exchanging one regimented institution for another. I also wondered whether the severity of the regime was relief from some other anguish, one that went unsaid. Or whether Orthodoxy’s unbending traditions gave comfort after long years of uncertainty.

  But I never found out, because after Iviron the two friends went south, while I headed north along the coast. However, the following morning I met Fr Constantine, who answered some of my questions.

  Vatopedi was a grand old monastery the size of a small village. Classical and Byzantine cellblocks framed the central courtyard, along with wooden staircases, metal walkways and galleries of flaking stone. The cobbles in the yard were subsiding, and the ground sagged like the floorboards in an ageing farmhouse.

  Fr Constantine’s office was in a dilapidated quad in the western corner. The room was dominated by a pair of cabinets, their drawers filled with sheets of marbled paper and lengths of cream and ivory mountboard, while the shelves behind contained rolls of buckram, leather and silk, as well as goatskin parchment and calfskin vellum. Every other surface was covered in books: textblocks with hand-sewn bindings, manuscripts bundled in ribbon, and the shrivelled covers of ancient codices.

  Fr Constantine was Vatopedi’s bookbinder. He was a large, loafing figure, his white beard woven with grey, like Father Christmas gone to seed. A French convert, before coming to Mt Athos he had worked as a journalist in Paris, an archaeologist in Israel, and the head chef of an Islington restaurant.

  ‘The best French restaurant in London,’ he told me, testing a peacock-pattern lining against a page of maroon bookcloth. ‘That is what the Guardian said.’

  ‘What was it called?’

  ‘It is a play by Noël Coward. I used the name.’

  ‘Hay Fever?’

  ‘A decadent one.’

  ‘Private Lives?’

  ‘No, I will not say.’

  ‘Easy Virtue?’ I was running out. ‘The Vortex?’

  ‘Non. All gone. Gone since I came to Vatopedi.’

  Fr Constantine put down the bookcloth and rootled around on his desk, searching through bundles of needles, spools of thread, a pile of red pressing boards and a plastic case of paper drills. Eventually he found a tin of tea behind a box of scalpels and shears. It was Fortnum & Mason Earl Grey Classic.

  ‘The one thing I keep.’

  As the monk filled a teapot, I opened my notebook. There were questions I was planning to ask – about Hesychasm, about the Jesus Prayer – but my host had no interest in answering them. When I mentioned The Way of a Pilgrim, he snuffled and snorted. When I outlined my pilgrimage route, he turned back to his work. But when I stopped talking, his face filled with pleasure and he began to tell stories. And what stories they were! As we drank the tea, a decade of anecdotes came bubbling out. We toured round Soho in the early eighties, sharing liquid lunches with the painters at the French and evenings at the Coach with Jeffrey Bernard. We went to the first nights of West End shows, being rude to Alan Bennett – ‘You are an odd man, but you make me laugh’ – and charming to Maggie Smith – ‘I have some letters that Mr Coward wrote your husband, but oh dear they are naughty.’ One rambling tale took place in his restaurant on the evening Diane Abbott became the first black woman elected to Parliament. It involved the new MP, two members of the shadow cabinet, a crate of champagne and an argument with a famous actor: ‘Too famous, I cannot say . . .’

  Every time I recognized one of the names, Fr Constantine would scrunch up his eyes with delight. But when I asked why he gave it all up, he would pour more tea and begin another story. Most of these stories – wine tastings and whisky tastings and road trips in the company of restaurant critics – ended with a mishap in a pub or bar, until I started to guess the answer.

  A door on the far side of the office opened onto a balcony. The Aegean lay in the distance, its surface dark as liquorice. I thought of Christos, the sailor who longed for the sea; and Michael, the communist who wanted never to return home; and Fr Constantine, the gourmand retiring into austerity. Perhaps it was chance, my crossing paths with these three, or perhaps some half-conscious instinct drew me towards them. I wasn’t sure what linked the men, or whether their experiences shared anything with my own – beyond a vague desire to leave ourselves behind. Yet the deliberate rhythm of life here made this coincidence feel fated, as if there was a lesson for me to learn. And Johnny’s voice played over in my thoughts: Nobody comes to Mt Athos by mistake.

  Did Fr Constantine mo
urn the life he left behind? Or did the disappointment and regret make it easier to cut ties? Or perhaps he came to Mt Athos with a sense of liberation rather than loss, for despite everything that was missing on the Holy Mountain – most of the brothers managed without computers and phones, televisions and radios – there was freedom in their poverty. During my own stay the simplest things had become pleasures. Metal bowls of boiled vegetables and twice-baked bread, with jugs of spring water so chilled they left me gasping. An afternoon nap in a dormitory of pilgrims – from Bulgaria and Cyprus, Romania and Greece – on a mattress no thicker than my wrist. High ceilings, wide walls, and wooden shutters sifting in the breeze. How little we need to be happy. How little we need to survive.

  The tea was finished, Fr Constantine swilling the last sip round his mouth. ‘It’s true,’ he concluded, ‘I was not a good little boy. So maybe you see why I had to become a monk.’

  ‘But it sounds like you miss it.’

  ‘France I do not miss. Journalism, restaurants – non.’ He was searching his desk again, hiding the Fortnum’s tin behind boxes of tools and spools of thread. ‘But London I miss. It’s true. And the theatre too. And those little sandwiches from Marks & Spencer.’

  Before I left Vatopedi, Fr Constantine wrote a name on a piece of paper: Skiti Agios Andreou. ‘Near Karyes,’ he explained. ‘If you go there, ask for Fr Philotheos. Oxford philosopher, you know! But now a monk. Any questions, Fr Philotheos will answer.’

  I was already planning to visit St Andrew’s. Although a minor foundation – the lesser monasteries on the Holy Mountain were known as sketes – it had played a major role in the worst crisis of the republic’s recent history. Built in the nineteenth century to accommodate the growing number of Russian monks, it was dominated by an overblown basilica – the largest on Mt Athos. On the eve of the First World War the cellblocks housed some seven hundred brothers, but during the twentieth century the supply from Soviet Russia dwindled and eventually the buildings were abandoned.