by Scott Cairns
Most on board were chain-smoking cigarettes, and I had gotten a pretty good nicotine buzz off the secondhand smoke. A cloud of Mediterranean gulls and sandwich terns had trailed the boat most of the way, and many on board were tossing them torn-off bits of breakfast; quite a few were teasing the birds to get close enough to photograph their being hand-fed, resulting in a number of nipped fingers. Everyone without a beer seemed to have a camera. Several juggled a coffee in one hand and a camera in the other, sipping and snapping in intervals. One unusually tall man with a buzz cut wore what looked like an oddly orange kaffiyeh around his neck; he spent the boat trip lounging across a bench, playing a Jew’s harp, oblivious to the lot.
The pilgrims were giddy; the day laborers, nearly sullen. Me? I was about as awake as I have ever been, feeling the cool morning air against my face, leaning ahead into what was coming, soaking up every possible detail along the way.
Preparing to disembark at Dáfni, Nick and I hauled our gear to the iron stairway leading to the main deck, and I was nearly sent tumbling down the steps by two young men pushing ahead. A young monk grabbed my arm so I could steady my heavy backpack and regain my balance. When I said, “Thanks,” he blinked, surprised at my English. Then he smiled.
He fairly shouted, “Welcome, meester!”
I had planned to be fairly deliberate about the moment of my arrival on the Holy Mountain, had planned, even, to attend with reverence to my first steps from the boat’s ramp to the dock. As it happened, I was too busy staying on my feet; by the time I was thinking again, Nick and I had been moved by the pressing herd a good fifty yards in the direction of two idling buses that would haul us up and over the steep ridge to Karyés.
At that point, I did manage to slip to the side, take a deep breath, and look around. For all the bustle and confusion, the moment was sweetened when I noticed a monk with snow-white beard and hair sitting in a corner of the café patio, eyes on the komvoskíni he was fingering, knot by knot. His lips were moving.
Even here—it appeared—in the most distracting spot on the Holy Mountain, a man might pray. As I rejoined the cattle drive, I gave it a try myself.
The bus was awash in dust, smelling of dust, tasting of dust, packed with sweating pilgrims. The windows, also dust-caked, were impossible to see through clearly; still, as we made the climb from Dáfni to Karyés, I was able to glimpse occasional dwellings, the odd monk trekking along the road, and quick takes of the glittering sea below. Within thirty minutes, we had topped the ridge and were descending into the broad valley that cradles Karyés, the governmental center of Mount Athos—and undeniably the second most distracting spot on the Holy Mountain. As our bus rattled over a bridge at the edge of town, I was surprised to see what looked like an immense abandoned monastery to the left of the road. Opening my map to see what it was, I learned that this was Saint Andrew’s Skete. I had read a bit about Saint Andrew’s; originally a Russian skete, it was abandoned early in the twentieth century, largely as a byproduct of the Russian revolution, and had only recently been reoccupied by a handful of monks from Philothéou. Unrelated to the brotherhood, the sprawling skete also appears to house what seems to be a religious academy for boys and young men from mainland Greece—something of a prevocational seminary. Nick and I made a note to check out the skete on our way back through. We would be heading in the opposite direction today, walking to Philothéou itself.
Soon the bus pulled into a large parking lot in Karyés, where, once more pressing through a very pushy crowd, we collected our bags from beneath the bus and made our way toward the center of town.
Until recently, pilgrims to Athos were relatively few and the only motor vehicle available to them was a single, decrepit bus that would haul them from Dáfni to Karyés. From there everyone had to hoof it, walking the (mostly) cobbled footpaths—monopátia—from one community to the next. Hardly a week goes by nowadays when I don’t come upon yet another essay, article, or letter bemoaning the “improvements,” an ease of travel that has brought with it, allegedly, a dearth of actual pilgrims.
Most pilgrims, this day, were hurrying directly from the large buses to find seats within the fleet of microbuses and vans that would fetch them to their various monasteries.
Nick and I had planned all along to walk to Philothéou, our stop for the first two nights; in fact, it was with some measure of pride that we reported as much when asked—and we were asked this repeatedly. We bumped and angled through the crowd of pilgrims and the gauntlet of drivers—who at the moment seemed very like carnival barkers—and toward what appeared to be the heart of the village.
Once free of the crowd and in the relative calm of the nearly vacant square, we discovered a renewed sense of having arrived. We stood in the narrow, cobbled road between shops and looked at each other, grinning. Nick said, “Hey, we’re really here!”
Then we hunkered down at the side of the road to consult the map, just to be sure we knew where here was.
Like most diamonitíria—the official documents permitting entry to Mount Athos, and without which you won’t so much as get a foot on the ferryboat—ours had been issued for a four-day visit. Our plan was for the two of us to spend a couple of days and nights at Philothéou, where a family friend of Nick’s served as second to the abbot; we would then decide where to spend the next two days, after which Nick would leave for Athens, and I would continue my pilgrimage alone. As I hoped to stay another six or seven days beyond the first four, I would need an extension of my diamonitírion. Karyés is the place to do this, so we ducked into one of the several shops to ask which building held the office I needed. The shopkeeper, Dimitri, was happy to help; he even offered us cold water and loukoúmi (known outside of Greece as Turkish delight) as we lowered our packs. Walking us down the cobbled road a few meters past his shop window, he pointed across the road to the Protáton (First One)—the tenth-century church that continues to serve the community of Karyés—and the yellow government building nestled on the slope to the right of it.
We hurried up the steps to see about my extension but were met at the door by half a dozen Athonite police in dress uniform and several suspiciously hierarchical monks in full array. For all we knew, this was how these guys dressed all the time, so we started to slip by them to enter the building. With a tone that sounded very like anger to me (though Nick assured me it was more nearly surprise at our foolishness), one of the police officers asked us where we thought we were going.
Nick explained our purpose, and the officer—still shouting and speaking very quickly—said we’d have to come back the next day.
Turns out, the Patriarch of Alexandria, the hierarch of the entire church of Africa, was at that moment making his way by helicopter to the Holy Mountain accompanied by several other African bishops and their attendants—a party of fifteen, plus a couple of pilots. This was, of course, a very big deal, while one American pilgrim arranging an extension was clearly not. I would have to travel back this way before my first four days were up.
We returned to Dimitri’s shop to fetch our backpacks and to get directions for the two-hour hike to Philothéou.
“You’re walking?” Dimitri asked, incredulous.
“Well, yeah. Isn’t that the best way to see Mount Athos?” I asked.
He smiled. “It’s the best way to see a lot of Athos that you hadn’t counted on.”
He suggested we might want to rethink our plans and travel via microbus; he insisted that the monopáti were very confusing unless you’d been down the trails before. When we insisted that we wanted to walk, he just shrugged, then encouraged us to stay on the road, which was more likely to get us there than the monopáti, none of which was well marked. He was smiling—maybe even shaking his head a little—as we said our good-byes and headed out.
The day was very warm—well over 90 degrees—but the shaded trail beneath the canopy of chestnut trees was remarkably cool, the air spiced with honeysuckle, chestnut, and pine. The trail at this point was actually cobbled, and
foot-worn stones of granite and marble stretched far into the chestnut forest.
I couldn’t keep from grinning. I was walking where actual saints had walked, men whose memory we keep as part of the liturgical life of the church, Saint Gregory Palamás himself, Saint Sílouan, Saint Nikódimos, Saint Sávas, and dozens of other beloved saints, as well as countless holy men whose names are known only to God. In retrospect, it may seem a little silly—at least sentimental—but for much of that first hour, I kept my eyes on my boots as they crunched along that path, clambering over the very stones that holy men had walked upon, stones that holy men had long ago set in place. And I said the prayer as I walked.
The prayer is the Jesus Prayer. And it is as simple as can be.
Its most lengthy version is a mere twelve words: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Other forms are simpler yet. Some practitioners say only Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me. Some, on occasion, say simply Jesus, the form recommended by one of my favorite modern authors on the subject, Father Lev Gillet, known more widely by his nom de plume, “A monk of the Eastern Church.”
The point, in any case, is to repeat the prayer, not so much to invoke Christ’s presence—which, one comes to understand, is unfailingly here—as to accustom our own hearts to an awareness of that presence—always.
This tradition, as it has developed, is the Christian East’s response to Saint Paul’s charge, recorded in his first letter to the Thessalonians, that believers “pray without ceasing.”
The resulting tradition is one that, over the centuries, developed as a practice by which Christians—of any stripe, frankly—might actually be able to do what they’re told, might accomplish the astonishing admonition to pray ceaselessly. What the fathers and mothers of the church learned along the way was this: an established practice of deliberate, overt repetition of the prayer leads to the establishment of an habitual, internal repetition, and that repetition—this is the kicker—trains the one who so prays to be increasingly aware of God’s unfailing presence.
This awareness, it so happens, is the gate swinging open to the kingdom of God, here and now.
We often speak, more or less carelessly, about God’s nearness, as if this nearness were ever anything but absolute. If we took a little more care with our language—more care with how and what we read, write, and speak—we might better understand that the issue has less to do with God’s drawing nigh, and everything to do with the degree of our own apprehension of what is always so: His absolute proximity. He is nearer, always, than our breaths; without His constant presence and agency, we would cease to be. Those moments when He seems far away are the moments when our own, solipsistic delusions are in full force and dim the eye.
There is, of course, a lot more to it than that, but let’s leave the matter there for the time being. This provocative tradition—the Jesus Prayer—is also widely known as the prayer of the heart.
My own meandering path to the Jesus Prayer began in late 1974 when, as a college freshman, I read J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey over Christmas break. That novel happens to be about a young woman suffering what I would now recognize as a spiritual crisis.
At that time, I too was experiencing something of a crisis. In my first semester at college, I was trying to sort through some of the untenable baggage of my beliefs without abandoning the faith altogether. In the midst of that crisis, I took to reading.
In the midst of her crisis, Franny is depicted as clutching a “small pea-green clothbound book” and moving her lips soundlessly. We don’t learn until relatively late in the novel what that book is or what she is doing. The pea-green book, as it turns out, is The Way of a Pilgrim, and the lovely Franny—with whom, incidentally, I fell in love as I read the book—is saying the Jesus Prayer.
Salinger’s character Zooey—Franny’s brother—presents a fair synopsis of this little book in Franny’s hands, and that synopsis piqued my interest enough to read The Way of a Pilgrim for myself soon thereafter. When I did, I discovered that the pilgrim of the title was himself something of a reader, and a diligent one at that. He wandered the steppes of Russia praying and reading; he was also, intermittently, pursued by wolves, persecuted unjustly, befriended or mugged or exploited by a wide array of proximate Russian folk, and mentored by a bona fide staretz—that is, he was guided in his successful journey to prayer by a holy man, an adept at the Jesus Prayer. In his backpack the pilgrim carried only “rusks of bread,” and in the breast pocket of his cloak he carried two books: the Holy Bible and a copy of something called The Philokalía.
Well, I knew of the Holy Bible, sure enough, but I didn’t know beans about The Philokalía, hadn’t so much as heard of it—and I certainly didn’t know how to pronounce it (fee-lo-kah-LEE-ah, in case you’re wondering). Mostly, I was puzzled by what I perceived to be its centrality to the staretz, to the pilgrim, and to the Jesus Prayer tradition they represented. In the words of the staretz:
The sun is the greatest, most brilliant, most excellent luminary of the heavens, but you cannot attend it with the naked eye. You need a piece of treated glass, which, though a million times smaller and duller than the sun, allows you to examine this magnificent emperor of the heavenly luminaries—admire it, and attract its fiery rays. In the same way, Sacred Scripture is a brilliant sun and The Philokalía is the necessary piece of glass which enables our access to the most sublime source of light.
The Philokalía (a richly chewy Greek title that, roughly translated, indicates in one economical package a love of the good, the beautiful, the exalted) is a compilation, a gathering together of otherwise discrete writings by a wide array of holy men—monks for the most part. The title itself was first coined by two famous Cappadocians—Saints Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzus—as the title for their own careful selection of the works of one unjustly assailed Origen. Over subsequent centuries, the word was recycled as a fitting title for other collections of works written to assist spiritual practice.
The earliest texts included in what we now call The Philokalía—those attributed to the solitaries Saints Isaiah and Evagrios—were written in the fourth century, and the latest were written in the fifteenth. Most were written originally in Greek, but two—those by Saint John Cassian and Saint Gregory the Great—were originally composed in Latin. All were gathered into a Greek language edition by Saint Nikódimos of the Holy Mountain (that is, of Mount Athos) and Saint Makários of Corinth, and published in Venice in 1782. Soon thereafter, the staretz Paisii Velichkovski, an Athonite monk who had left Mount Athos to serve as abbot of the Neamtu monastery in Moldavia, translated sections of that work—along with a couple of very worthy additions—into the Slavonic version, Dobrotolubiye. First published in Moscow in 1793, this Dobrotolubiye was the edition pored over by our pilgrim as he wandered the Russian steppes on his journey to ceaseless prayer.
From the original Greek edition, a full, five-volume Russian translation was made by Saint Theophan the Recluse and, beginning in 1877, was published serially on Mount Athos, at the Russian monastery of Saint Panteleímon. G. E. H. Palmer and E. Kadloubovsky brought out a selective English translation of the Russian text in 1951. In 1979, Palmer, Bishop Kállistos Ware, and the poet and translator Philip Sherrard began publishing their English translations of the original Greek text compiled by Saints Nikódimos and Makários; four of the five proposed English volumes are available in that series today.
This version of The Philokalía—the one you can get your hands on—offers both a developmental history of the Jesus Prayer tradition and many centuries of practical assistance to the pilgrim who would learn to pray—whether he or she sets out on that journey at the age of forty, or fifty, or any age.
But back to the prayer itself, the prayer of the heart.
I said above that it is a very simple prayer, but, to be fair, it is also laden with complexity. Many fathers and mothers of the church have observed that it contains—in its few words—the whole of the scriptu
res. Some have said, similarly, that it contains all theology in a nutshell. At the very least, it holds the core of Orthodox Christology. The believer who prays Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God has already made a powerful confession, affirming both the concurrent human lordship—the God-to-man, condescending anointedness—of Jesus and His innate divinity. The man or woman who speaks the prayer is also invoking the holy name itself—Jesus, a name that is, as we say, above all others, the name of the one by whom all humanity, forever, partakes of divinity and is healed of spiritual death, pretty much regardless of their noticing.
The second half of the prayer, the petition proper, is no less laden with import, and no less allusive to scriptural prototype. Have mercy on me, a sinner brings together the pleas of the publican, the thief, the leper, and the blind man. Have mercy on me, a sinner both bears and bares a hidden truth; it also—quite expediently—owns up to it.
Saint Hesýchios, one of my favorites among the fathers of the Philokalía, writes, “With every rainfall, the earth grows softer; just so, the Holy Name of Christ increasingly softens the heart, gladdens it with every prayer.”
I should say a little something here about the prayer rope—the chotki for the pilgrim of The Way of a Pilgrim and the komvoskíni for the Greek monks on Mount Athos. Whether or not you would recognize them, you may have seen them, even in America. If you are Orthodox, you may even wear one, or know folks who do; it’s very likely that they’re available in your parish bookstore, on your parish book table.