Short Trip to the Edge

by Scott Cairns

  Behind the iconostasis lies the altar—marble or wooden or golden—as well as (off to the left) the table upon which the elements are prepared before being brought to the altar for the consecration of the Holy Mysteries. In most cases, one can glimpse an array of ancient icons keeping watch over the interior of the altar space as well.

  We weren’t there long before I recognized the familiar hymns that conclude the vesper service, and as the choir sang those hymns, each of the monks filed up to venerate the central icons on his way out. When they had finished, the pilgrims followed suit.

  When the monks had exited, Nick and I stood for a moment not sure exactly what to do. Then we followed the last of the pilgrims and joined the monks out in the courtyard just as the bell rang out to call us to trápeza, the communal meal.

  We learned the routine as we went. First the monks filed in, and thereafter the pilgrims, following them inside, were directed to separate tables, where bowls had already been filled and laid out at each place, along with communal bowls of olives, baskets of bread, pitchers of water, and—unless it’s a day of fasting—wine. The meal was simple potatoes and fish, roasted together in olive oil and garlic. I would have licked my bowl clean if I’d been alone.

  The rule at trápeza is, for the most part, silence. Monks and pilgrims alike are encouraged to eat silently, thoughtfully, if at a fairly brisk pace—listening all the time to a single reader who is reading, most often, from one of the lives of the saints. If I knew a good deal more Greek, I might have gathered more from these readings; as it was, as I cleaned my bowl, sneaking looks at the monks’ tables, I began to learn something of their life together.

  When the meal was over, the abbot lifted a bell near his plate and rang it three times. On that signal we all stood for the abbot’s blessing; then, following the monks—who filed out in something resembling hierarchical order following their abbot’s lead—we pilgrims filed out, leaving behind only those monks with kitchen duty to complete their work. As I approached the doorway, I realized that the abbot himself now stood to the right, bowing very low to all who exited, and I saw that, across from him, on the left, three other monks—those who had sat with him at the front table—stood as well, bowing low to those who passed between them and the abbot. As I exited through their strange gauntlet, feeling more than a little self-conscious, I saw that the abbot’s hand was raised to us in a sign of blessing.

  As the physically and emotionally demanding days on the Holy Mountain began to wear away at my habitual reserve, this simple, humble, and humbling gesture would actually bring an ache to the throat. It’s a curious thing.

  The servant of all, Jesus says, is the greatest of all. He who exalts himself shall be humbled; he who humbles himself shall be exalted. These sometimes neglected paradoxes of the faith are simply and powerfully embodied—one might say, insisted upon—on Mount Athos. You really can’t miss them.

  As we entered the courtyard that first evening at Philothéou, still aching and still plenty damp from nearly six hours on the road, Nick suggested that we check in with Father Iosíf, his family’s friend and the second to the abbot of Philothéou. I tested my lower back and felt the slight twinge that told me I should take care or suffer a spasm. I was thinking, Just so we don’t have to hike anywhere to find him.

  After a little further misdirection, we found our way to Father Iosíf’s offices. We found, as well, a huddled circle of monks, all of them leaning over—curiously enough—a Web page on a computer screen. One monk, looking extremely sober, was nodding slowly as he spoke into the phone. Almost on cue they appeared to notice us standing in the hallway and waved us into the room. We were warmly greeted and offered seats, whereupon the circle immediately dispersed, leaving us suddenly with Father Iosíf and one assistant—the same monk who would eventually show us to our room.

  We were more than a little puzzled as Father Iosíf began to express sorrow that our visit had come at such a sad time. We had no idea what he meant.

  He was quiet for a moment, sat again behind his desk, then told us that the Patriarch of Alexandria and his party had been lost at sea when their helicopter went down.

  I was certain I had misunderstood him, but Nick’s response was a grim assurance: “What?” he said in English. “Today?”

  During the long afternoon that Nick and I had been wandering in the general direction of the monastery, while we were, often enough, heading in the wrong direction, we had heard the chop and thrum of a helicopter circling overhead. I remembered our joke—that the helicopter was probably searching for us.

  We learned from Father Iosíf that these actually had been search helicopters. Within moments of our leaving Karyés, where the monastic community had been in bustling preparation to receive Patriarch Petros of Alexandria, the Chinook helicopter bringing the Patriarch and his company to Mount Athos spun out of control and went spiraling down, disintegrating onto the surface of the Aegean. Patriarch Petros, Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Carthage, Metropolitan Ireneus of Pelusim, and Bishop Nectários of Madagascar—much of the hierarchy of the North African church—were among the seventeen souls lost at sea.

  We were stunned, as had been, one supposes, the monks of Mount Athos, at least initially; but, as we spoke with the fathers about the tragedy, I couldn’t get over how they seemed to be taking it. Their sorrow was evident, in their words and in their faces, but there was something else being manifested here, a something else that it would take me many more days to articulate, or even to adequately recognize. They were also—it seemed to me—glad.

  Father Iosíf turned to other matters. He asked about our families, asked Nick about his older brother (a Cretan iconographer with whom Father Iosíf had attended seminary); he welcomed us warmly and made it clear that we should stay at Philothéou as long as we wished. We had planned to stay just two nights, so that we might visit other monasteries as well.

  As we were stepping to the door, Father Iosíf caught my eye and pointed to a photograph on the wall facing his desk. The photo was, quite frankly, striking; it was a simple depiction of a monk, but a monk whose eyes seemed lit up, as if he were facing the sun, or had swallowed it.

  “Yéronda Ephrém,” Father Iosíf said, with sudden affection in his voice, causing his voice, for the briefest moment, to break. He explained that the yéronda—the elder—was the former abbot of Philothéou, and that he had gone to America to establish monastic communities there.

  The monk asked if I had ever been to Saint Anthony’s Monastery in Arizona, where the beloved yéronda now lived and served.

  I admitted that I had not, and even as I spoke those words, I had an acute sense that I was confessing an embarrassment, an incongruity: by coming first to Mount Athos, I had disregarded the local in favor of the exotic, ignored the near in favor of the far. And it’s not as if I hadn’t heard of Yéronda Ephrém and his monastery; back home our parish chanter, Seraphima—a woman who lives, essentially, a monastic life among us—had spoken of this very elder. He was, in fact, her spiritual father, a man she had come to count on for help with her own life of prayer.

  Father Iosíf’s eyes fixed briefly on the photograph, and in that moment, seeing the slightest tremor near the corner of his mouth, I made a note to speak to Seraphima about her elder as soon as I got back home.

  4

  In the early watches of the night…

  Our small room at Philothéou—holding but two narrow beds and a bare table—overlooked the monastery’s timber yard, several acres of chestnut logs stacked high and awaiting transport to Dáfni. Dusk was settling in quickly, and though it had been a hot day, the wind was picking up, blowing a chill into the room through the open window. Our damp clothes didn’t help matters, so we changed into dry T-shirts and jeans, and we settled in, speaking little, puzzling over the strange events of a very long day. It seemed as though we had left Ouranoúpoli weeks ago.

  We were also deeply exhausted, our backs in knots. Nick dug into his pack for the ibuprofen; we dosed
up mightily, then turned out the lights. I was asleep in about a minute, the words of the Jesus Prayer on my lips.

  At midnight I woke to leg cramps and cold; the single blanket on the bed wasn’t nearly enough. Shivering in the darkness, I felt through my pack for another shirt and for my rain parka and put them both on. As I was doubling up my blanket, I startled to the realization that the prayer was still on my lips, still moving through my mind. I may have been shivering and wincing from muscle spasms, but in that moment I was about as happy as I’d ever been, maybe happier, to discover that the prayer was beginning to take hold. Finally.

  I was still praying, though also grinning, as I warmed up, gradually stopped shivering, and dozed off again.

  Shortly after 2:00 a.m., I was awakened by a curious clatter—a rhythmic, staccato hammering on wood. It was the sound of the sémantron or, as some call it, the tálanton, a long board of cured chestnut wood, carved to provide a handgrip in the center and a resounding doughnut of hardwood at each end. This is rhythmically whacked with a mallet by the monk assigned to wake the community and to call the other monks (most of whom are already awake and praying in their cells at this hour) to prepare for midnight services.

  This rhythmic hammering commences about forty-five minutes before the service begins, concluding with a single hard whack at the end of the rhythmic riff. Thirty minutes later, the rhythm will be repeated, concluding with two whacks, a spondee indicating that services will begin in half an hour. A final riff begins roughly fifteen minutes later, concluding with three sharp whacks. For the slow pilgrim who is more than a little out of his element and suffering exhaustion, this sequence can serve, more or less, like the snooze button on an alarm clock.

  Fifteen minutes later, give or take, a similar rhythm is articulated on the bilo, a horseshoe-shaped iron bar, sounding very like a midpitched bell, announcing the actual beginning of the prayers. No more snoozing. Get to church.

  If the dark enclosure of the narthex had been hard to navigate when we’d entered for vespers the previous afternoon, it was abysmally difficult now—a sea of black. I pushed open the heavy wooden door to enter and had the strange sensation that the door was still closed. I reached one hand into the void and stepped forward. In the far left corner, near the icon of the Theotókos, a single oil lamp offered a meager bead of amber light. I waded uncertainly toward it through the murk, and as I did, my eyes dilated just enough for me to observe that I was not alone. Most of the stalls lining the three walls of the narthex were already occupied by monks, seated and praying, though some seemed to slump so low in their stalls—a blur of ink in the midst of deep shadow—that I wondered if they might have been sleeping there.

  As I reached the lamp stand, my eyes had adjusted enough that I could see that the monk directly to my left was gripping a long black prayer rope, and that its knots were being drawn slowly between his thumb and fingers at a steady clip.

  Wherever I worship—at my home parish, visiting in another parish, or, as it turns out, even on Mount Athos—I always light three candles, praying as I light each for my wife, our daughter, our son. I lit three candles with the oil lamp’s flame and set them in the stand, then venerated the icons in the narthex and entered the sanctuary.

  Here again, the darkness was a little daunting—one oil lamp about twenty feet away near the festal icon to the right, and one near the icon of the Theotókos on the left. I moved from right to left, venerating each of the icons in turn, then found a niche behind the semicircle of stalls making up the left-hand choir, peering over the backs of the stalls to where the reader was arranging on the chanters’ stand the several books he would be using during the services.

  Back home, I’m usually the one who reads these particular psalms—the six psalms of orthros—at our Saint Luke’s Parish, so the fact of their being intoned in Greek was not so great a liability. In fact, I savored the wash of sound, knowing fairly well their import, but hearing, as well, a mysterious otherness attending their being sung this way, as if in that confusion of sounds they became less like petitions and more like communion—that is, more nearly occasions of prayer.

  These prayers began a little before 3:00 a.m. They would continue—with the midnight office blending into orthros, blending into the hours, the typicá service, and leading into the Divine Liturgy—until nearly 8:00 a.m. Early in the midnight office, I began to notice a troubling phenomenon that would attend me intermittently through almost every katholikón service of this first pilgrimage: I kept seeing things.

  Actually, what I saw were people—people who, I’m fairly certain, were not there.

  Every time I’d shut my eyes—which happened fairly often, given that this was all happening in the middle of the night, in a vertiginous, dark vault, during chanted services that stretched on for hours—it appeared that someone was standing before me, facing me, and, I think, speaking. I would startle, open my eyes, and find no one there—only the monks, the other pilgrims, the dark expanse of the katholikón seeming to spin as the prayers continued.

  Minutes later, I would close my eyes, and someone—the same figure? someone else?—would be standing before me, speaking. I could never quite tell what was said. I don’t think I ever exactly recognized the speaker. I could not even say that it was always the same person. On a few of those occasions, I seemed to be facing an entire crowd, all of them speaking at once.

  What should I make of this? The odds are pretty good that under the demanding conditions of these midnight prayers—for which I was, clearly, not yet prepared—I was simply falling into something approaching a dream state as soon as I closed my eyes. That’s what I am tempted to make of it now: that my subconscious was uncommonly active under these rarefied circumstances.

  Still, at the time, it was more than a little unnerving, and set me all the more earnestly into saying the prayer. This phenomenon would continue, off and on, throughout my first pilgrimage. Only toward the end of that first trip, after the seventh or eighth day, was I able to observe my visitor or visitors more or less calmly, with something approaching dispassion, then open my eyes, returning to the service and to my prayer within it. The experience would become less frequent, less intense, with subsequent visits to the Holy Mountain, but I never have shaken the feeling that, especially within vaults of the expansive katholiká, the very air of Mount Athos is full, heavy-laden with presence. It is, in short, a place where the “cloud of witnesses” is powerfully apprehensible, palpable, welcoming—seeming to breathe and pray the endless liturgy along with those of us who intermittently happen by to join them.

  Here, as with the celebration of the Divine Liturgy throughout the world, the seamless transition from the preparatory services to the Eucharistic service is indicated with the priest’s intoning Evlogiméni i Vasileía tou Patrós kai tou Yioú kai tou Agíou Pnévmatos. That is more or less to say: Blessed is the kingdom of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

  With these words the priest announces our temporal entry into that very kingdom and our joining, once again, in the ceaseless prayer of the angels and the saints. One of the reasons that the Orthodox, even in America, tend not to make much of a fuss over folks coming late to services—bumbling into church in the middle of things—is that, implicitly for them, once an altar is consecrated, the offering of invisible worship from that place is understood to be ceaseless. The angels and the saints—that same cloud of witness—are forever joined in con-celebration. When, through liturgía—the work of the church—we join with them, we are inevitably arriving in the middle of things.

  On that first morning, as the liturgy approached its familiar focus of the Eucharist—the Holy Mysteries—I grew a little nervous. For most of a year I had been looking forward to this moment of receiving communion on the Holy Mountain.

  As you may or may not know, in the Orthodox Church communion is shared from a common cup, usually a single chalice borne by a single priest. In his left hand, the priest grips the holy chalice and grips—twined betwe
en the fingers holding the cup—the corner of a scarlet cloth. In his right hand, he holds a golden spoon.

  As each communicant arrives before the priest, taking one end of the scarlet cloth to hold beneath his chin, that communicant is expected to speak his or her Christian name aloud. Hearing that name, the priest says some version of “The servant of God—insert name here—receives the Holy Mysteries.” This makes manifest an essential understanding of Orthodox faith, that we are included in mystical union with the Mystical Body of Christ but are nonetheless known by name. Analogous—albeit in meager measure—to the unity of God in Three Persons, we share a common being without forsaking our personhood, one’s hypóstasis.

  On Mount Athos the monks receive the Mysteries first, followed by those pilgrims who also have prepared to receive them. We had been invited with the words Metá fóvou Theoú, písteos kai agápis, prosélthete. With the fear of God, faith, and love, draw near.

  In the eight years I’ve been Orthodox, I confess that certain of these words have never quite sunk in—until this moment on Mount Athos, which taught me something, in particular, of the fear of God.

  As I stood behind the stalls of the left-hand choir, peering over the top at the line of monks now venerating the icons on their way to the cup, I whispered a communion prayer and prepared to join them. The fear of God, until this moment, had always struck me as something of an archaic cultural artifact, perhaps even a poor translation. I have approached with love and with, I suppose, my own poor measure of faith; on occasion, I have approached—or have chosen not to approach—with shame; but fear had always proved elusive in this context.

  What I learned as I approached this cup behind that line of monks and pilgrims was that the fear is real, and that it is absolutely appropriate, though it is—I should take care to point out—a very curious species of fear.