by Scott Cairns
I can’t be sure, but I think that I saw one hanging from the left wrist of actor Tom Hanks during a Late Show appearance with David Letterman. Honest.
They are, commonly, black wool, tied in strings of thirty-three, or fifty, or a hundred or more hard, square knots (sometimes wooden beads), usually held together in a loop by a cross-shaped gathering of knots and a tassel.
The knots or beads are for focusing on repetitions of the prayer.
The cross is kissed reverently at the beginning and the end of each cycle through the rope.
The tassel is for wiping your tears, which, if you’re lucky, will eventually accompany your prayer.
Using a prayer rope is not essential in the practice of the Jesus Prayer, but it helps. Focusing on moving your thumb and forefinger from one knot to the next actually assists in focusing on the words of the prayer, mostly because this simple activity of the hand helps keep the mind from wandering elsewhere. This is but one example among many, I suppose, of the Eastern Church’s insistence that the attitude and activity of the body are not unrelated to the actions of the soul.
Other examples of what I think of as the full-body faith include making the sign of the cross; “venerating” the cross, the icons, and the relics with a bow and an actual kiss; and making full prostrations during private prayer, and even—during certain prayers and hymns of Lenten and Holy Week services—making those prostrations publicly.
In general, Christians in the West can be a little slow to appreciate the full-body character of Orthodox worship; in my own case, a lifelong habit of living in my head, approaching prayer as if it were a species of thought, had reinforced a sense that faith was an idea—a really good idea, granted, but primarily an activity of the mind.
The Church in the East has taught me, albeit very slowly, that the Christian faith is not at its core a propositional faith; Christianity is not, finally, about what we think. It is about what we are, and what we are becoming. It is necessarily an embodied faith, a lived faith, just as God’s love is necessarily an embodied, enacted love, an incarnation. In the early church, the words for practice (praxis) and faith, or vision, (theoria) were understood as distinct terms for two things that could, frankly, never occur separately—or, as Saint James so aptly puts it: faith without works is dead.
Small as it is, the prayer rope does its bit to re-pair the inherited schism within the human person, helps to connect the actions of the mind with the actions of the body, helps, even—in the words of Saint Isaac of Syria—to bring the mind into the heart.
In The Way of a Pilgrim, the pilgrim, grieving for his failure to acquire a reliable habit of prayer, complained that “At first it seemed as if things were moving along. Then a great heaviness, sloth, boredom, and drowsiness began to overcome me, while a mass of thoughts closed in like a storm cloud.” To this plea, the staretz replied: “Take this chotki and use it while you repeat the prayer…whether you are standing, sitting, walking, or lying down, continue to repeat: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me!’ Do not speak loudly, do not rush, but without fail repeat it three thousand times each day, neither increasing nor decreasing this number on your own. Through this exercise, God will help you to attain the unceasing prayer of the heart.”
The number of repetitions, according to tradition, matters far less than simple obedience to a rule. I say simple, but it is absolutely the key, this obedience. Certain novice monks of Mount Athos begin with but a thousand repetitions. And there are abundant warnings that, while anyone can benefit from a rule of repetition, excessive repetitions without the assistance of a guide will most often lead to discouragement and failure.
The elder sent me away, giving me his blessing. He told me that while learning this prayer I should come often to him to reveal my thoughts in honest confession; to arbitrarily take up the prayer without conversation with a guide would be unwise, bringing little success.
So, back to my journey.
That I am a sinner is no great surprise, as I’m sure it is no surprise to anyone who knows me. That I might ask for mercy has been also a long-held, long-embraced comfort. That I might become less of a sinner, less distracted, less broken, and more Christ-like (but never seemed to do) has been the nagging thorn in my side to date, pricking at my heart during my stillest moments—even and especially during prayer itself.
This disparity was the focus of my trouble that day on the Chesapeake beach, and it has become the escalating chagrin of the nearly ten years since then.
Unlike, say, the Sunday school teachers of my youth, I wasn’t so much concerned with being saved from hell as I was with being saved from habit.
Could be what I needed was a guide.
3
…so great a cloud of witnesses…
Along the way to Philothéou, the trail skirted a small hut with granite walls and a heavy slate roof—clearly ancient, abandoned, sunken under centuries of weather. The melancholy of the anonymous life (or series of lives) spent here—solitary, uncelebrated, and full of ceaseless toil—struck me speechless. Nick wasn’t saying much either.
The prayer of the heart—it is said—brings solace, and a peace that surpasses understanding. Saint John Karpathos speaks of a “new heaven of the heart in which Christ dwells.” Saint Theophan adds, “These practices, if followed even reasonably aright, will not allow you to grow despondent. For they bring spiritual consolation such as nothing else on earth can give.” Passing alongside that anonymous plot, I was hoping this was so.
After about an hour of an almost hallucinatory sweetness, intermittently pressed by an almost hallucinatory melancholy, the cobbled path through chestnut forest ended at a broad road of crushed granite. The scarf of dust wafting along its surface told us that a vehicle had just passed.
Nick and I examined the undergrowth on the other side to see if the trail picked up there, but we found only brambles and a steep slope descending and decided we should follow the road in the general direction we had been going, keeping our eyes open for any sign of the trail picking up again.
It didn’t, not for a long time.
Through an effective combination of inattention, the pinching burden of heavy packs, the dearth of road signs, and the fact that, once we hit the gravel road, Nick and I hardly stopped yacking, our “two-and-a-half-hour walk” from Karyés to Philothéou stretched into a six-hour slog. We got good and lost, and utterly exhausted.
The maps—we had two of them—were only moderately helpful for this stretch of road. And the lack of road signs at key intersections left us to make a series of poor guesses and missteps. Once, early on, as we stood at a crossroads scratching our heads, a monk in a Land Rover happened by.
When greeting a monk, the convention is to say “Evlogíte,” which implies something like “Bless me, Father,” to which the monk will surely respond, “O Kýrios,” emphasizing the Lord’s blessing. We exchanged these greetings, and Nick got the directions we needed for the moment. Still, our confidence diminished as the crossroads multiplied without any subsequent interventions.
Every step was accompanied by the thought that we would likely be retracing it after the next turn dead-ended, and we did find ourselves retracing a good number of those steps as midday wore on into late afternoon.
Intermittently throughout our trek, we heard the sound of a helicopter circling. After the third pass over, we made jokes about it: the monks knew we were lost and were searching for us.
Finally, at nearly 4:30 p.m. we came upon a signpost indicating the trail to Philothéou. Bleary-eyed, weak-kneed, and dripping wet, we snapped photographs of each other in front of that reassuring sign.
A good hour later—and three hours past when we had planned to arrive—we stumbled up the steep trail, the final slope. Absolutely spent—my back was in spasms at this point—and soaked through, we entered the clearing at the top and beheld the high walls of the monastery. By the time we had made it around to the single gateway, it was nearly 6:00 p.m., with not a soul to be seen. The
n just inside, we saw a young monk striding our way, hurrying on his way out the gate. Nick asked him for directions to the archondaríki, the guest house; without slowing, the monk looked straight ahead and blurted something that sounded very like a Greek rendition of “Ask someone who gives a damn.” Nick chose not to translate.
As we eased our heavy packs to the ground in the courtyard, we heard chanting.
Hymns. Vespers, in fact. The service was well under way, so we ditched our packs just inside the low wall of the courtyard font—the phiále—and hurried into the katholikón.
Just as with my first steps onto the Holy Mountain, here again circumstances had led to my rushing into an experience that, previously, I had hoped to approach with greater awareness, greater attention. And I would have hurried inside had the darkness not stopped me in my tracks.
This was my first experience of an Athonite church. And though I’d entered in a state that was far from ideal—harried, hurried, confused, aching, and soaking wet—the effect was immediate and palpable. First off, as I stepped from late afternoon sun into the dark narthex I was effectively blinded. Not all the churches on the Holy Mountain are as dark as the katholikón at Philothéou, but many are. The combination of dark icons covering virtually every inch of every surface—a darkness made all the deeper by centuries of soot (from beeswax candles and resinous incense)—and the relatively few candles lit for this moment of the service had me standing just inside the doorway for a good sixty seconds, blinking, straining to see what was before me.
Once my eyes had adjusted, I made my way to the icons in the narthex to venerate them—that is, to approach each icon, making the sign of the cross before it, to bow, touching one hand to the floor, and to set my lips to the icon’s cool surface. That’s what we call veneration, honoring the Image of Christ our God in the image of the saint. In my Protestant days, I would have been uneasy about this, but back then I wasn’t exactly diligent about honoring the Image of Christ our God anywhere, in strangers, in neighbors and friends, not even in myself. I’m getting the hang of it, finally, and it started with the icons.
Visitors to Orthodox churches—both at home and here on the Holy Mountain—will no doubt feel shy about entering a strange church and strolling up to venerate the icons while the service goes on around them. That’s only normal. We are—O beloved—a self-conscious people, no? Most of us would far rather slip into strange circumstances as unobtrusively as possible.
Understood.
Still, get over it.
For the Orthodox, although it may appear to be something of a faux pas (although surprisingly commonplace) to arrive late for a service, and although it may appear to be a greater faux pas to walk up to venerate the icons while the service is under way, it is far worse—you’ll have to trust me on this—to enter a church without thus venerating the holy images there. If you show up late, you pretty much have a choice between two disconcerting deeds: either embarrass yourself slightly further by honoring our holy antecedents (Christ and His saints) in the midst of prayers, or shame yourself and dishonor the saints by attempting to slip in unnoticed. Embarrassment is probably better than actual shame, and way better than dim-witted disrespect.
There are, even so, certain moments in a given service when you would do well to wait a bit before wandering to the fore—during the censing of the icons, the procession or the reading of the Holy Gospel, the procession or the consecration of the Holy Mysteries—but at any other time, get yourself up there to honor those who, as we like to think of it, would pray with you, and unceasingly.
In the Baptist community in which I was raised, the idea of saints didn’t figure much. In fact, the presence of these “others,” my connection to them, the possibility of my communing with them, asking for their prayers—none of that made its way into my conscious life or into my prayer. The closest I came to any such awareness during my first forty years occurred with the death of my father, when—among other, mostly puzzling emotions—I began to sense that I might keep speaking to him, even though he had, as I now think of it, fallen asleep.
A more general sense of “the presence of our beloved departed” came about quite unexpectedly. Between my “Presbyterian period” and my “embracing the fullness of the faith,” I put in some time among the Episcopalians.
When my family and I first moved to Virginia Beach, we set out to find a church—that is, a Presbyterian church. We visited a good many, every flavor of Presbyterianism then available in the Tidewater area of Virginia. I won’t go into any great detail about that sequence of disappointments, but suffice it to say that Marcia and I never found a fit, nothing quite so right-seeming as our sweet community at Trinity Church in Denton, Texas. Personally speaking, the Presbyterian bodies in Virginia Beach felt a little too like the Baptist church of my youth—a little cranky, a little suspicious, more or less besieged.
At any rate, thanks to our Cape Henry neighbors, the Powells—Rob, Cathy, Page, and Nancy—we found our way to All Saints Episcopal Church, where we met a generous, welcoming community and, in Father Stan Sawyer, a well-read pastor with a very welcome sense of humor.
Besides offering us our first deliberate taste of sacramental theology, the community of All Saints (whose name is, I now realize, very significant) supplied the occasion for my first apprehending the appalling presence of the cloud of witnesses, before whom we necessarily stand, regardless of our habitual obliviousness to the fact.
It happened more or less like this: I had made my way to the altar for communion, as I had many times before. This morning, as the Eucharist was placed in my hand, as I stared at that thin wafer with sudden apprehension of what I held, I heard Father Stan say, as he had always said, “The body of Christ.”
As the cup came around, I took that wafer between thumb and finger and dipped it into the chalice of wine, accompanied by the deacon’s words: “The blood of Christ.”
I placed those appalling elements on my tongue and returned to my place in the nave, where I knelt to pray with uncharacteristic concentration. Then, though my eyes were closed, I began to notice the flickering effect caused by the passing of others who were returning to their seats. As they walked down the aisle immediately to my right, they passed between me and a glorious stained-glass window on the other side of the aisle, through which, all this time, brilliant sunlight was pouring. As others partook at the altar, the priest’s words continued, echoing throughout the sanctuary, “The body of Christ.”
As those words resonated, I beheld the flickering shadows of those moving by my side. I startled, first, to the realization that these men, women, and children were the body of Christ, and then, as suddenly, with the help of flickering shadow, I startled to the realization that these represented, as well, the body entire—the living and the dead, the cloud whose presence I had, until this moment, failed to acknowledge.
But back to the katholikón of Philothéou. As my eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness and I could see beyond my nose, I saw a great deal at once. The first thing I registered was a lush beauty, golden surfaces, flickering candles and oil lamps, Byzantine icons reaching high along each wall and up into the overarching dome. Almost every inch of ceiling and wall surface, from the exo-narthex to the curve of wall around the altar, was covered in hand-painted iconography—beloved saints, hagiographic narratives, and biblical scenes. Most Athonite katholíka are structurally similar, varying for the most part only in terms of scale and proportion, and occasionally varying in numbers of narthexes and adjacent chapels. The heart of the church is the four-columned, domed sanctuary, with a cruciform floor plan. The cross of that form is a Greek cross, mind you, parsed into four equal quarters, with the central entry opening at the foot of that cross.
So, imagine a huge Greek cross laid flat. Lining the outer edges of the lower leg and both arms, narrow stalls of heavy dark wood have been installed, facing, of course, into the center. Recently, my friend Stelios has helped me notice that these stalls are placed in such a wa
y—lining the walls—that the worshipers face one another; that is, you may not always see what goes on inside the altar space, but you will nearly always see the faces of those around you.
These wooden stalls are ingeniously constructed—with seats that fold either partly or completely out of the way—to support worshipers in a variety of sitting, standing, and leaning positions throughout the long services, which regularly last four to five hours and can, during a festal vigil, stretch well beyond eight. Remember, these are monks; they live for these prayers. The liturgical work of the church is their life’s work.
Pilgrims generally find a stall in the area of the cross’s base or in the narthex, which is also similarly lined with stalls. The monks, especially those who are actually serving—as readers, chanters, or orchestrators of the candlelight—find places in the cross’s twin arms, which make up the facing choirs proper. Transecting the cross’s upper quarter, about a third of the way up, stands the iconostasis, the icon-bearing wall protecting the altar area. The iconostasis has a center, double door directly before the altar and two side doors, or deacons’ doors, on either side. On Mount Athos, the oldest iconostases are constructed of intricately carved white marble or white granite; others are constructed of intricately carved wood, and most are layered in gold. Many brass candelabra, brass candle stands, and a good many icons—especially the “miracle-working icons”—are also covered in gold. Most miracle-working icons—and each monastery has an array of these—are housed in finely wrought settings that duplicate in gold and silver the figures on the icon itself. These settings leave openings through which the faces and hands of the figures are visible.