by Scott Cairns
We scrambled down the steps, stuck our heads in the door of Dimitri’s shop to say our good-byes, then hurried to catch the bus to the port. We hadn’t been able to secure rooms at Simonópetra but had arranged two nights at Grigoríou before Nick would catch the boat back to Ouranoúpoli; he had business to attend to in Athens—including arrangements to have our parish’s Gospel book bound in silver and gold. After Nick had gone, I’d be on my own for six days.
The bus dropped us in Dáfni with about an hour to wait for our boat, the Agía Ánna, during which time I had further opportunity to pilgrim-watch. I also had plenty of time to consider why I had come here in the first place, and to entertain an array of second thoughts.
Although I had come to find a spiritual father who could assist me in prayer—counsel me in my increasing desire for a life of prayer—most of my energy had, so far, gone into dealing with logistics and culture shock. The journey had been intermittently strenuous, disturbing, and beautiful—and I had found that since my arrival the prayer was very often on my lips—but I had some doubt that I would find what I had come for.
For one thing, I had yet to meet a monk who spoke English; and I was realizing that my Greek was just barely good enough to order breakfast, or annoy a local official.
Our boat ride from Dáfni to Grigoríou was so brief that our arrival caught us a little by surprise. As the ferry was making the turn into the cove protecting the arsanás of Moní Grigoríou, Nick and I scurried to the lower deck; we found a good-sized crowd of pilgrims waiting there to disembark, as well as a crew of men preparing to carry off a mixed load of goods: bushels of leafy produce, sacks of potatoes, heavy bags of concrete mix, bundled lengths of rusty rebar.
We all crowded into the lower hall of the archondaríki, where we found a table loaded with customary guest-tray fare: cold water, loukoúmi, Greek coffee, and rakí (better known, in its milder form, as ouzo), which offers—it turns out—a refreshing, late-morning jolt. We were met (I wouldn’t say exactly welcomed) by an exceedingly stern-faced monk barking what sounded like a much-practiced litany of instructions, none of which contained any words I recognized. This monk—I would learn much later—was Father Damaskinós, an estimable polyglot, inexhaustible dry wit, and accomplished writer. He is also—when he’s not herding pilgrims like cattle at Grigoríou—a missionary to Zaire, where he has labored for many years serving the agricultural development of the region. He has also supplied a wealth of liturgical translation from Greek to the local tongue.
When he had finished his cranky litany, I took courage to approach him, asking in elementary Greek if he, perhaps, spoke English and could translate some of what he’d just said. His face tightened; he gave me a quick look up and down, shook his head, and walked away without a word.
Eventually, we were given a room to share with two other men, and when we’d stowed our packs, Nicholas and I hit the trail to Simonópetra. Our plan was to see what we could of the cliff-top monastery—though there was “no room in the inn”—and to make contact with Father Iákovos, a monk that my friend Nicholas Samaras had insisted we meet.
Simonópetra—all seven stories of it—is perhaps the single most dramatic edifice on the Holy Mountain, poised as it is on the very tip of “Saint Simon’s rock,” an outcropping of granite rising more than a thousand feet above the sea.
The downside was that we would have to hike up to it. The trail begins steeply enough, but at the end of the hour-long trek, it gains—I’m guessing—nearly a thousand vertical feet in about as many steps. Long story short: we were aching and, once again, dripping wet when we entered the small courtyard beneath the archondaríki.
We found water in a stone fountain there and inhaled a liter or two; then we slipped into the shadows to exchange our sopping T-shirts for dry ones. At the top of the wooden stairs leading to the guest master’s post, we met a young monk who welcomed us and gave us seats on the balcony overlooking the sea; he brought us loukoúmi, water, and rakí. As he was setting off to boil Greek coffee, we asked him if Father Iákovos was available. He blinked in surprise but said he would check.
We were well rested and somewhat cooled down by the time Father Iákovos climbed the guest house steps to meet us. He was a relatively small man with a manifestly sweet spirit; his smile and piercing eyes lit up as he welcomed us, embraced us warmly, and asked where we were from. Something about his immediate interest in us made me uncharacteristically shy for much of this first visit. His concern for us was humbling; he tried unsuccessfully to secure us a place for the night, asked the names (and the name days!) of our wives and children, encouraged us to come back when there might be room for us to stay. He gave us a tour of the katholikón, where repairs following a recent fire were nearly complete; he led us to vespers in a small chapel deep in the rock upon which the monastery is built. Then he led us to trápeza, and thereafter escorted us to the veneration of the relics, where he whispered to us an English translation of the presiding priest’s Greek explanations of each.
This was my first experience with the veneration of relics, and I was keen to understand. Over the past eight years, I had come to understand something of the Orthodox reverence for the dead, that is, for what we call the beloved departed. A great many of the subtleties of Orthodox faith—its not-exactly-Western appreciations of the body, of beauty, of communion, of the immediacy of the kingdom of God, and of the life-giving presence of the Holy Spirit—are figured, embraced, and practically demonstrated in this uncommon reverence. Once, in fact, when I had glimpsed how such reverence for the dead is inextricably connected to an abiding faith in the resurrection, I pursued the matter further in a poem that had, at the time, surprised even me.
Here’s how it ends:
…Every altar in our churches bears
a holy fragment—bit of bone most often—
as testament to the uncommon and genuine
honor in which we hold the body—even
shattered bits of it, even when its habitant has,
for all appearances, gone hence. Each mute relic
serves as token both of death and of life’s appalling
ubiquity—even there. It helps to bear in mind
the curious and irreparable harm the Crucified
inflicted upon the nether realm when graved
He filled it with Himself, and in so doing, burst
its meager hold and burst its hold on us—all
of which has made the memory of death lately
less grim. Gehenna is empty, and tenders
these days an empty threat. Remember that.
Well, I was remembering a good bit of that as I listened to Father Iákovos. The narrow table before the royal doors held a large piece of the True Cross in a cruciform reliquary of silver, relics of Saint Anne (the Theotókos’s mother), of Saint Panteleímon, of Saint Tryfon, the skull of Saint Sergius, the left hand of Saint Dionýsios, and the left hand of Saint Mary Magdalene.
I crossed myself and brought my lips to the small oval opening where the back of her hand was visible in its silver reliquary. I kissed the Magdalene’s hand, the right side of my mouth meeting the cold metal and the left side of my mouth pressing against the hand itself. And then I startled to the abrupt contrast between the cold metal and her quite warm hand, and startled to the sense that this hand, removed from a bone box in the first century, was not only warm, but tender as living flesh.
Make what you will of that.
I take it as a token of life’s appalling ubiquity. And even now, writing about this months later, I still feel the warmth of that hand on my lips.
At Father Iákovos’s encouragement, I passed my prayer rope to the priest so that he might bless it with the relics.
As I say, it was my friend, the poet Nicholas Samaras, who had insisted we get to Simonópetra to meet Father Iákovos. The two of them had been in seminary together; and as we visited with Father Iákovos, we discovered that he had also been in school with our priest back home, Father Dean
. He had also been there with Father Joseph, a kind and tireless priest from St. Louis, who had traveled regularly to serve our community before Father Dean arrived; and they had all been in seminary with the chancellor of our diocese, Father Dimitri.
Big faith, small world.
Before we headed down the trail again to Grigoríou for the night, Father Iákovos led us to the cave where the monastery’s founder, Saint Simon, had lived for many years as a hermit prior to the series of visions that would lead to his founding the monastery and establishing the community there. Nowadays, a small chapel is set in the cliff face, protecting the cave; but the cave opening itself is little more than a chink in the granite, rising some four or five feet and opening to a small void roughly four feet high, five feet wide, and maybe seven feet deep. This is where Saint Simon Myroblite—the Myrrh-Gusher—entered the kingdom of God, even in the midst of life.
In other words, this is the very spot on earth where a living Saint Simon became prayer.
As we prepared to hike back down the trail to Grigoríou, Father Iákovos asked again about our wives and our children; he wanted to remember their names, as well as ours, in his prayers.
We embraced—his eyes were like bright black coals—said our good-byes, and clambered down the dusty trail in silence.
There are two guest areas at Grigoríou, a lower guest house near the pier and a second wing of rooms within the walls of the monastery itself, poised about a hundred yards uphill. For our first night, Nick and I had been given beds in the lower house. Down here, we would not hear the tálanton, so I set my travel alarm for 3:00 a.m. and fell asleep saying the prayer. It seemed like no time at all before the alarm sounded, and as I lay there aching and weary from three days of Athonite life, I wondered if I could sleep in today, arrive a little later in the services.
None of the other men was moving—a couple were still snoring—so my conscience wasn’t nagging me too terribly as I closed my eyes and dozed off again. That, evidently, was all it took to rouse my conscience, which then poked me pretty hard. I woke again in seconds, nearly suffered whiplash as I sat up, feeling that I had left something important undone. As I sat in darkness on the edge of the bed, I took a couple of deep breaths and said my morning prayers under my breath as I dressed.
I pretty much ran up the stone steps of the mule path and into the interior of the monastery; I slipped into the narthex just as the reader began the midnight office.
The katholikón at Grigoríou is slightly smaller than that of Philothéou. It is also slightly less dark. I found my spot—what was becoming my habitual spot—in a stall immediately behind the left-hand choir, and settled in to pray. Within moments, I was lapsing in and out of the same, very weird, waking-dream state that would confront me intermittently on this trip. I was also beginning to feel the throb of a caffeine-withdrawal headache. Let this be a lesson to us all, especially to caffeine addicts like myself: dose yourself in increments along the way, or you will surely pay. In time I learned to fill one of my water bottles with a cool mix of Nescafé, which I sucked up whenever the telltale ache began in the tender fuse box at the top of my spine. Cold instant coffee. Desperate measures for desperate times.
But back to church.
A young novice was being taught to chant, and his discomfort was evident. He gripped the readers’ stand as if it might run off, and kept adjusting the oil lamp overhead as if more light would help him find the pitch. He was mostly flat most of the way through, and struggled to find an approximate melody to suit the tone. In Orthodoxy there are eight liturgical tones—with certain, ethnically inflected variations—in which the services are sung. Most Orthodox services are, for the most part, sung or intoned throughout. For the preliturgy hymns, in particular, the tone changes every week, and this week we were enjoying tone one, even if this morning none of us was so far exactly enjoying it.
By the time we made it to orthros, other psáltai had arrived, mitigating the ordeal for the young novice, as well as our ordeal of hearing him. The young man stayed at the stand but was happy to sing under his breath, trying to memorize the complex riffs of Byzantine chant, tone one.
Nick arrived at the beginning of orthros, and slowly the katholikón filled with pilgrims. At one point I looked around wondering where most of the monks had gone.
The Divine Liturgy was beautiful, as always. When I went to partake of the Holy Mysteries, I stood before the cup, said my name, Isaák, opened my mouth, and closed my eyes.
Nothing happened.
I opened my eyes to find the priest studying me as he held the spoon firmly in the chalice. Quietly he asked, “Íste Orthó doxos?” (“Are you Orthodox?”) I stammered, “Ne, ne, íme! Íme Orthódoxos, Orthódoxos Americanós.” He nodded, raised the golden spoon, saying, “The servant of God Isaák receives the Holy Mysteries.”
I crossed myself, received antídoron from a platter on the readers’ stand, and slipped back to my corner.
In the courtyard, after breakfast (our breakfast wine this morning was red, and quite tasty), Nick and I asked some of the monks if Father Damianós was around. My friend, the poet Chris Merrill, had struck up a friendship with Father Damianós, a monk from England, during his previous visits to the Holy Mountain, visits that were for him a time of healing, and about which he has written a beautiful book. Chris had encouraged us to seek out Father Damianós, who’d been the guest master during Chris’s various stays at Grigoríou and was now, we learned, the host of the upper archondaríki. When he’d been pointed out to us, we pretty much cornered him in the courtyard outside the trápeza; he seemed happy to be caught.
6
…freely you have received…
Father Damianós is, I’m guessing, a man in his late thirties or early forties; his ready, smiling hospitality and casual manner make him seem, intermittently, much younger. His British accent also seemed something of an incongruity here on this Greek peninsula, if less so as my time on Mount Athos eventually led me to perhaps half a dozen men from Australia, one from New Zealand, and several other Brits.
He invited us to the kitchen for coffee, and we spent the rest of the morning there at the kitchen table, swapping stories, until Nick headed down the hill to meet the first of the two boats that would take him back to Ouranoúpoli. At one point, Father Damaskinós—the somewhat stern host of the lower archondaríki—came in to fix a pot of tea. He looked my way and said, “Bon jour,” almost smiling. When his tea was ready, he poured his cup and turned to go, calling out, “Guten tag!”
Throughout the total of four days and nights I would spend at Grigoríou during this first trip, I would never get a single word of English out of Father Damaskinós—although I was told he was fluent. He greeted me each time we passed, but always in a different language—French, German, Dutch, Italian, and one or more African dialects. He didn’t smile much, but I could see he was enjoying himself.
Father Damianós arranged for me to move to the upper guest house, where he served as host, and we were therefore able to visit off and on throughout that day and the following morning. He has the calm demeanor of a man who has found his place, has found his home here amid the rigors of monastic life. I asked him where I should visit for the remainder of my stay, and he suggested that I backtrack to Karyés and use the microbus to get to Megísti Lávra—Great Lavra—then hike along the base of the mountain at the southern edge of the peninsula. That way, he said, I could get a good sense of the environs of the most ascetic of the Athonite monks, the hermits of Vígla (the area around Lavra and Skíti Timíou Prodrómou at the peninsula’s southeast tip) and of Katounákia (between Kafsokalývion Skete and Saint Anne’s Skete at the southwest tip).
So that was the plan. Before I set off to meet the boat to Dáfni, however, I took courage to speak to Father Damianós about my reasons for coming to Athos. I told him about my relatively faltering prayer life and my desire to find a holy man to guide me.
He seemed startled, then evidently moved. “This is very good,�
�� he said. Then, as we sat over our mugs of American-style drip coffee, he said that he didn’t know of any such men living on Mount Athos now.
I was floored, and must have shown it, because he hurried to say, “Don’t misunderstand, there are many holy monks here, many wise and holy men, but those who have the gifts you’re after are not likely to be found.”
I was slightly less floored, but still a little puzzled. “What do you mean?” I asked him. “They’re not here at all, or they’re not where I’d find them?”
His eyes met mine with what I took to be compassion, and he said, “I just don’t know where to send you.”
This was not such good news. I puzzled for a moment about the many ways such a statement might be meant, but kept my puzzlement to myself. I saw that it was time to set off. Father Damianós offered to keep some of my things—books, gifts for home, extra clothes—so I wouldn’t need to haul them in my increasingly heavy pack. He also asked to borrow my copy of Saint Isaac of Syria’s “second part,” a collection of homilies that had only recently been recovered and translated into English. At that point, the book hadn’t yet been translated into Greek. With that offer, Father Damianós also made sure that I’d be stopping in again at Grigoríou before heading home. I asked him to put my name on the guest list for my last two nights on Mount Athos, and headed to the pier.
The routine was much the same as before. Board the boat, cruise to Dáfni, grab a spanakópita and a coffee at the patio café, and shove my way onto the bus for Karyés. This time, when I hit the parking lot I sought out the microbus for Great Lavra and piled on with a good many others. The microbus—a Mercedes—had seating for twelve, but we squeezed sixteen men inside. The driver would have fit more inside if there had been other takers. He had personalized the dashboard with all manner of saints’ cards, prayer ropes, crosses (woven, carved, or stamped out in varicolored plastic), and seemed to be saying something under his breath throughout most of the nearly two-hour drive to Lavra. It wasn’t until we were nearly there that I leaned in to hear what he was saying—Kýrie Iisoú Hristé, eléison imás, a short form of the Jesus Prayer.