Short Trip to the Edge

by Scott Cairns

  It is, I learned, a fear that draws rather than repels, a fear that trumps every other concern. In short, as I said my Christian name, Isaák, and as the fierce-looking priest-monk—his face made luminous by the wavering flare of beeswax candles—lifted from the golden cup an also luminous bit of wine-soaked bread upon a golden spoon, I realized that even if I had been convinced that those appalling Mysteries touching my tongue would annihilate me, I would open my mouth just the same, lean in, and partake.

  I opened my mouth. I leaned in. I received the body and blood of Christ on my tongue.

  And I survived.

  I walked away crossing myself, a little shaken, finally tasting fear—if a new species of fear, a fear coupled with joy. Saint Isaac, my “name saint,” says that “the fear of God is the beginning of virtue, and it is said to be the offspring of faith.”

  If I retain nothing else from this or any journey, I hope to hold on to that fear.

  For one powerful moment, I actually had thought those appalling Mysteries would annihilate me—which is to say, in that moment I finally believed them to be what they are. And fear was born. May virtue be its fruit.

  The liturgy concluded with the prayers before the icon of Christ, and, lining up on our way out, we each received bits of blessed bread, antídoron, from the priest’s hand as he blessed us.

  As we walked out into the violet light of a new day, inhaling the crisp air of a glorious Mount Athos morning, I felt as if I might burst. The air was laden with the scent of flowers, the birds were pouring out song, and the sleepiness I’d battled throughout much of the midnight services was replaced by a giddy elation.

  It seemed only fitting, then, that we should enjoy a bit of wine with our breakfast.

  As Nick and I filed behind the others into trápeza, I recognized modest carafes of white wine distributed among the bowls of garlicky potatoes and squid, the platters of olives and feta. I slipped onto my bench beaming. I poured out thanksgiving as the prayers were said and as the readings began. At the sound of the bell, I filled my steel cup with cool wine and, catching Nick’s eye, signaled a toast to his health, stin iyá sou! I was slightly less enthused when—filling my mouth with a first, greedy draft—I realized I was drinking retsina, bane of Greek festivals across America, the one false move possible to make when ordering at a Greek restaurant. In my eight years among the life-savoring Greeks, I’ve developed a nearly fanatical taste for virtually all the pleasures of the Greek table, with this one notable exception. Retsina is—forgive me, beloveds—a sin against grapes.

  I drank it just the same, and tried not to wince.

  After trápeza we rested in our room for an hour or so, then set off, gratefully without backpacks, for Moní Karakálou, a three-mile walk along an ancient cobbled path through dense forest. When we emerged into a clearing an hour later, we were met by what looked like a pristine medieval castle rising up from a surround of equally pristine monastic gardens, all of it poised atop a slope facing the turquoise calm of the sea. Within the gates we found a spotless stone courtyard—distinctly unlike the patchy grass and packed dirt of Philothéou—surrounding the monastery’s flawless sixteenth-century katholikón. Despite its age, Karakálou has the look of a monastery that was freshly painted yesterday, as if the monks here might be Swiss converts, or retired gardeners from Versailles.

  Well, they are neither. The oldest are actually monks from Philothéou, who, years before, had come to a failing, decrepit Karakálou in hopes of restoring it to a thriving community. That’s exactly what they did. I was now beginning to notice that the monks of Philothéou had been responsible for a good many such missionary activities in recent years, both on the Holy Mountain and abroad.

  Once inside, Nick startled me by asking the gate master if there might be a priest available for confession. I hadn’t so much as thought of such a thing, but for Greek nationals, apparently, confession with a pnevmatikós—a word that means spirit-bearer, and implies both confessor and spiritual doctor—is a staple of a pilgrimage to the Holy Mountain. When Nick’s confession had been arranged, he asked the priest if there might be someone to hear my confession too, a pnevmatikós who spoke English.

  I was relieved to learn that there was not.

  Confession is an element of the ancient church that has remained difficult for me to embrace, despite my developing awareness of its necessity. That is to say, I understand how essential it is to admit to our failures, our sins, how helpful it is to receive counsel for avoiding similar failures in the future, and how sweetly the assurance of forgiveness works as a powerful and life-renewing gift. Still, though you can take the boy out from among the Baptists, it is something else to excise an embedded sense of Baptist individualism from that boy’s dim wits—even if he would welcome the surgery. Why, my inner Baptist child complains, why do I need a priest for this? There is but one mediator between God and man, he says, thumping my heart, and that is Jeeeeesus.

  Amen.

  Still, something subtle and necessary happens—and happens uniquely—in the sacrament of confession. Something that we need to let go of is finally relinquished when, and only when, we speak of our sins to another flesh-bound brother or sister—something that is not relinquished when we confess from the privacy of our closets. Self-protecting pride—the source of all sin—is given up, given away. That mask we each so carefully maintain in the presence of others is necessarily set aside, if only for a moment.

  It is, brief as it may be, a very humbling and a very freeing moment.

  I have learned to appreciate the sacrament, but generally that appreciation is registered afterward, seldom beforehand. Nick, on the other hand, had been looking forward to this opportunity all along; guilelessly, he had assumed I was similarly eager.

  The English-speaking pnevmatikós was not available, thank God. I let it go at that, though I spent the next hour or so staring out at the sea, grilling myself about my ambivalence, while somewhere in a nearby chapel Nick fearlessly shed his pride, along with whatever other sins he’d hauled along.

  When he returned—grinning ear to ear, in fact—we walked the tailored grounds as we waited for vespers to begin.

  I’ve never been to a vesper service that didn’t strike me as beautiful. The particular beauty of Psalm 103 is unfailingly heart-breaking. The sweetness of the vesperal melodies, the pathos of evening prayers that bring together thanksgiving, praise, and supplication—especially the earnest prayer for the salvation for all humankind—can melt a heart of ice. That said, the vespers at Karakálou were the loveliest I had ever heard. Even Nick, who’s been around the liturgical block a time or two, said the same.

  We stayed at Karakálou for the evening meal of orzo and olives in a refectory alive with a peculiar evening light that made luminous the air itself, as well as the life-sized icons covering the length of all four walls and the ceiling. Then we strolled back the three miles to Philothéou, barely speaking a word.

  I had been on the Holy Mountain only a little more than twenty-four hours, but already a palpable calm was settling in. Along the way, I said the Jesus Prayer, modifying it to speak the names of my wife, daughter, and son at the end of each petition for mercy.

  Crossing ourselves, we entered the monastery gate and made our way to our small room. I lay down on the narrow bed and was asleep almost immediately, midprayer.

  5

  …in remembrance of me.

  Our second Divine Liturgy at Philothéou continues to haunt me.

  Unlike the previous day, when muscle cramps and cold had kept me from resting well during the night, I woke from our second night on Athos with the first stuttering percussions of the tálanton, and I was immediately awake, as if cold water had been poured across my face. The air was crisp, the sound of the tálanton brisk and echoing in the hallway.

  I hurried to dress in the dark. Not sure if Nick was intending to go to orthros and, given that his back had been hurting him, not sure he had been able to sleep well, I slipped out the door
without waking him.

  The air was even sharper out in the courtyard, but not as biting as the night before, nor as windy. I pushed open the huge wooden door and slipped into the narthex of the katholikón. Again, I stood for a moment just inside the door to get my bearings, allowing my eyes to adjust to the deep darkness. A single lit taper in the candle stand trembled in the rich well of the narthex, and in that faint light I could see that three or four monks were already settled into their stalls. I venerated the icons with greater care and with less self-consciousness than the day before, and entered the sanctuary to venerate the several icons inside. At the icon of the Theotókos, I paused to light a candle and felt someone right beside me reaching to do the same. It was Nick, grinning in the candlelight, whispering “Kaliméra, phíle mou.”

  We found stalls in our familiar corner behind the left choir and settled in to pray with the reader, who was just then beginning the psalms. Again, I was struck by the status of the psalms as prayer rather than recitation. And here in the middle of the night, the luminosity of the reader’s candlelit face—young and sparsely bearded—manifested a strange intensity mixed with softening adoration. Some moments later, a second reader arrived, taking his place at the stand in the center of the opposite choir, and then, as the hymns began—the kathísmata, evlogitária, odes, lauds—the two choirs continued filling with other psáltai and other readers. Orthros continued with surreal beauty and led directly into the doxology, which then led to the appalling announcement of the Divine Liturgy: “Blessed is the Kingdom of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, now and forevermore”—words that join, ever and again, the visible body to the invisible body and its unending hymn.

  On this day—perhaps because I was, as I say, slightly less self-conscious, slightly less stunned, slightly more able to follow along—the Divine Liturgy felt seamless, of a piece, and utterly gripping. I had a good sense of how those first emissaries to Byzantium felt, the ones who reported back to their Ukrainian Prince Vladimir: “We did not know if we were in heaven or on earth.”

  As the liturgy moved to conclusion with the Holy Mysteries—more beautiful, it seemed, than even the day before—I prepared to partake of communion. Monday is generally a fasting day on Mount Athos, and, apparently, the resident monks will not receive communion on fasting days. Therefore—I soon learned—if on a fasting day a pilgrim didn’t make his way to the chalice as it was presented, the chalice would, most often, be immediately returned to the altar. Perhaps this sense of our having to hurry contributed to the horror of what then happened.

  I was still peering from my stall, back behind the left choir with Nick, when I saw the first of the pilgrims moving toward the chalice uplifted in the priest’s hands. I had turned to make my way to the front when I heard shouting, something in Greek, loud, angry-sounding. It was the priest who was shouting, and quite sternly, to the man before the chalice. Nick told me later that the priest was saying, “Open your mouth.” The surreal beauty of the liturgy turned immediately into surreal shock. I saw the priest raise the spoon to the pilgrim’s lips and then saw the priest’s face go ashen with horror. And then he was shouting something else, not angry this time, but pleading. This time, says Nick, he was begging, “Don’t move, hold still.”

  Immediately, two monks appeared at the pilgrim’s sides, gripping his shoulders and holding him absolutely still, as the priest covered the chalice with the scarlet cloth and, without moving his feet, handed the chalice back through the royal doors to the deacon, who returned it to the altar. From the choirs, three other monks arrived with lit candles, moving in slow motion, inspecting the floor, the pilgrim’s clothing, his shoes.

  Somehow or other, the Holy Mysteries on the end of that spoon had fallen. And this is what I beheld: for the next half hour—during which time I barely breathed—the priest picked up every possible bit of the elements that he found on the pilgrim’s clothes and shoes; he picked up every stray bit of anything he found on the marble floor, be it the Holy Mysteries or candle wax, lint or speck of mud, and placed it in his mouth. The pilgrim was now openly weeping; one of the monks holding him relaxed one hand to pat his shoulder. When the priest was as certain as he could be that nothing remained on the floor, the trembling pilgrim was led through the left-hand deacon’s door and back to the area around the table of oblation. Another monk arrived with a glass vessel, from which the priest poured an abundance of thick liquid. He then set a lit taper to the pool, and the entire marble floor before the royal doors came alive with blue flame.

  When the flames burnt away, the monks and pilgrims were called forward to venerate the icons, and to receive antídoron and a blessing from the priest’s hand.

  We then fled to the courtyard.

  Unlike the day before, we all stood—monks and pilgrims alike—in awkward silence for what seemed a very long time. The bell sounded for trápeza, and, following the monks’ lead, we filed through the refectory doors. Just before I entered, I turned back to look toward the katholikón and saw the man who had spilled the Mysteries being escorted through the church doors by a young monk. The monk held one arm around the older man’s shoulder, showing him a warm smile, as well. The man’s dress shirt was missing, and he seemed to be limping.

  It took me a moment to notice that he was missing a shoe.

  Spilling the Holy Mysteries—allowing the very Body and very Blood of Christ to fall to the floor—is not a commonplace. That said, the quickness of the monks’ response and the surprising deftness with which they dealt with the event suggested to me that they had witnessed something of the sort before. The shirt, I learned, and, presumably, the shoe were to be burned; the man was treated with care and genuine warmth, and led to trápeza by a solicitous monk.

  I ate my potatoes and olives quickly, barely tasting them. Something of the fear I’d apprehended the previous day returned and nibbled at my thought, accompanied by a vague, if passing, sense of dread. If there had been wine—even retsina—I would have drained my cup in a single draft. I studied the orange in my hand without eating it, and when we’d been released, I received the blessing of the abbot and hurried with Nick to the gate for our ride to Karyés.

  We’d been told that a ride would be along immediately after trápeza. It would be a taxi service supplied by one of the Athonite monks; so when we found a Land Rover warming up in front of the gate with a monk behind the wheel, we assumed it was for us.

  Nick asked the monk if he was going to Karyés. When the monk said he was, we got in. I sat in the passenger seat while Nick hopped in back. Even though the monk seemed a little surprised to see us, he shrugged and began to drive—but only for a few yards before stopping again and rubbing with the back of his hand at the windshield, which kept fogging up in the cold. Glancing at the dashboard controls, I saw that, given their settings, we’d be there until mid-May before that window cleared up. I offered one of my few Greek words, signómi (excuse me), and reached to fiddle with the controls; the windows cleared immediately. The monk beamed at me, saying “Dóxa to Theó,” and we tore off with surprising speed, which I took to be incentive to recommence the prayer in silence.

  After a few minutes, Nick struck up a conversation with the monk in Greek, and in so doing learned that he wasn’t the taxi-monk at all. He was, instead, the monastery’s representative to the governing body at Karyés, having been called to meet regarding the helicopter tragedy of two days before.

  After a few moments of awkward silence, we were all laughing as Nick explained the misunderstanding and we zipped down the gravel road toward Karyés.

  The father dropped us at a fork in the road so we might have a closer look at the expansive ruins of Saint Andrew’s Skete before heading into town. Although it is a “skete,” Saint Andrew’s is much larger than many of the ruling monasteries, covering about fifty acres. It was abandoned in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, fell into disrepair, and suffered extensive fire damage in 1958. Then, in 2001, the monastery of Vatopédi, to which t
he skete belongs, allowed a brotherhood of monks from Philothéou to settle there and set to work, restoring the katholikón and many of the buildings. They have accomplished a great deal in relatively little time. The katholikón was locked, but from the outside it appeared to be huge.

  We could have stayed the night at the skete and met with the monks who had settled there, but I was eager to extend my diamonitírion to the full ten days I had counted on; and we were both eager to get to Grigoríou and Simonópetra, where we hoped to make contact with two monks whose names we’d been given by my friends Chris Merrill and Nicholas Samaras. So Nick and I headed into town for a little paperwork before we caught the dusty bus to Dáfni.

  Near the Protatón, at the administrative offices of the monastic republic, we found the person to do the deed—a small and slightly officious man in a brown uniform—but when Nick asked him to add six days to my permit, he frowned and said, according to Nick, “That’s too long. No.” Even I understood his stern Ohi. Then he spun on his heels and disappeared through one of several doorways leading to a honeycomb of offices.

  Nick looked perplexed, and I took all of this to mean that I would have to rethink my plans, try to make the most of what little time I was given. We sat for a while, strolled around the entry hall, checked the clock to see that we wouldn’t miss the bus back to Dáfni. In about twenty minutes the official returned and handed me my diamonitírion. I looked at the dates he’d filled in and saw that he’d granted me the full ten days. I blurted out, “Ne, ne, efharistó!” (“Yes, yes, thank you!”), and he nodded, finally meeting my eyes. He asked if I was Greek. When I said, “Óhi, íme Scotzézos-Americanós,” he asked, smiling now and nodding, if my mother was perhaps Greek. “Signómi, óhi. Íne Anglída-Americanída,” I replied. His smile evaporated. He shrugged, wished us both good health, shrugged again, and went back through a side door to his hidden offices.