by Scott Cairns
It was one of the sweetest, most lovely churches I’d yet seen. We lit candles, venerated the icons, and were able to stand praying for a good and peaceful quarter of an hour before the monk who’d let us in said he had to get back to the archondaríki.
Back on the trail, Lefthéris shook my hand, pointed the way I was to go, and, calling out, “Ya sou, phíle mou!” headed down the slope toward the shore, where his Father Pávlou awaited him.
I tried not to be jealous.
7
…a reed, shaken by the wind…
Alone again, I grinned to discover that much of the ambivalence haunting me during my time at not-so-great Great Lavra had dissipated—owing, no doubt, to the immediate kindness of Lefthéris, our warm welcome at Timíou Prodrómou, and the lush quiet of the skete’s katholikón. I actually started singing as I hiked, growling out a sequence of Greek hymns from the Divine Liturgy.
I had walked about an hour when I stopped to fill my water bottle from a plastic spigot spliced into the black water hose that ran along much of the trail. As I sat cooling off, I noticed some twenty yards down the shaded trail what looked like a blue plastic grocery bag tied to a branch. At first, I assumed some pilgrim had dropped it—there had been a surprising bit of litter along the trail—but then I noticed a bowl at the base of the tree. A Tupperware bowl with a lid, no less. The blue bag, it appeared, was meant to call attention to the bowl.
This, I gathered, was how hermits survived here at the farthest end of the peninsula, an area of no roads and few trails, where even the ferryboats don’t land. It is what the Athonites refer to as the desert, and this bowl was how one such hermit procured food to supplement the greens he gathered to boil for his meals.
I dug into my pack to pull out the last of my trail mix and left it in the bowl. As I continued down the path, I called out, “Evlogíte!” If anyone answered, I didn’t hear him.
About an hour later, I came across a similar bowl at the base of another tree. I didn’t think I had anything to leave but then remembered the jar of peanut butter at the bottom of my gear.
Slipping the pack to the ground, I turned to see a man approaching from the direction of Lavra. It was Sohsen, the Zen monk, walking in sandals, carrying only a staff and a small cloth satchel slung over one shoulder. He waved, smiling as he approached, then took my hand to shake it when he got close, saying, “Good to meet you now, Isaac.”
I offered him water from my bottle, and we sat for a moment together, cooling off. Then I dropped the peanut-butter jar into the bowl, swung up my pack, said “Ya sou” to Sohsen, and headed off. Over the course of the next three or so hours, we met just about every time one of us stopped to rest; we shared water, apricots, and several comic attempts at conversation.
Alone again, with Sohsen somewhere behind me, I was pretty worn out when the path began a downward slope. Turning into the first descending switchback, I saw the sea, the southern end of the Holy Mountain’s western shore, and, well down the slope between me and the sea, what looked like a hillside village—Skíti Agías Ánnis, Saint Anne’s Skete.
I was even more worn out, and dripping wet, when after a full hour of switchbacks in a steep, knee-popping descent, I wobbled through the entry gate to the small courtyard between the Kyriakón and the archondaríki. In one corner, under the shade of a simple wooden gazebo overlooking the sea, a group of men sat sipping rakí and coffee; one of them was a monk, who looked to be about my age. They all turned to wave hello as I dropped my pack and began to dig into it for a dry shirt. The monk called out something in Greek, to which I called back, “Signómi, then milaó pollá Eleniká!” He must have caught the accent, for he called back, “Plenty of time to change later! You won’t offend us! We’re not offendable. Come refresh yourself!”
That sounded like very good advice. I leaned my pack against the stone wall and joined the men in the shade. The monk asked, “So, my good man, do you have a reservation for the night?” When I told him I hadn’t, he said, “Well, in that case, you’ll have to be punished. Sit down and take your punishment.” He slid the tray of rakí to where I could reach it.
There were, all told, eight of us around the table—the monk, a Father Cheruvím, six Greek men from Thessaloníki, and I. We visited with Father Cheruvím for much of the afternoon; he switched readily from Greek to English as needed, and over the course of our visit told me that he had grown up in Seattle, that he was researching and writing a history of Orthodoxy in America, and that he too had gone to seminary with my friend Nicholas Samaras, as well as with Father Iákovos, Father Dean, Father Joseph, and Father Dimitri. Much later, during the return boat ride of my third trip, I learned that at this meeting Father Cheruvím was also the dikéos of the skete, the community’s elected leader. Whereas the abbots of monasteries are elected for life, the dikéos of a skete is elected annually by the older monks of the community.
At one point, he turned to me and asked directly and seemingly out of the blue, “Who is your spiritual father?”
This cut me to the quick. I’m sure that my face must have shown something of my surprise and puzzlement. The demands of hiking strange and difficult terrain, the many mixed feelings I’d had in response to the pilgrims and monks at Lavra, and the nagging (and increasing) sense that I was on a wild-goose chase had all left me, at least for the moment, distracted from my purpose in coming here in the first place—which was to find a spiritual father.
I wish that I had been ready to say, “Funny you should ask. I’m actually trying to find him.”
Instead, I stammered something like, “I confess to my priest,” to which he smiled and slid me a second shot of rakí. Within moments, it occurred to me that my answer could have sounded slightly militant to Father Cheruvím; after all, in some circles there has been a long-standing tension between those bishops and priests who serve parishes and those monastics who honor the tradition of the elder, the staretz, the yéronda. Something of this tension is articulated as early as Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, where a good number of the local priests (and certain of the monks themselves) manifest resentment toward the devotion that the local folk show to Father Zosimás, who also serves as their confessor. I would have made certain Father Cheruvím hadn’t misunderstood me, but there wasn’t time; someone else had arrived. Sohsen was at the gate.
The looks on the faces of the other men nearly made me inhale my rakí. As it was, my eyes teared up as I tried to keep from laughing, and tried to keep the burning liquor from rising up and out my sinuses. They could hardly believe their eyes.
Sohsen leaned his walking staff near my backpack and walked toward us beaming. Father Cheruvím stood to greet him, and as he did Sohsen brought his hands together in reverence and bowed low. Then he reached to kiss Father Cheruvím’s hand.
The men were stunned, and Father Cheruvím was visibly moved by the gesture. He responded by saying, in English, “Welcome,” and by kissing Sohsen on both cheeks.
“Come,” he said, gesturing to the group, “join our little gathering, brother.”
Sohsen joined us at the table, and we all settled in to enjoy coffee and sweets.
Off and on, during our visit, another tray of sweets or coffee would arrive. We were all pleased to be served—except, perhaps, for Sohsen, who, as the cups were drained, gathered them onto a tray and slipped into the kitchen to wash them.
Father Cheruvím watched him with great interest, and apparent admiration.
At one point, one of the Greeks—a retired restaurateur who, I gathered, was staying at the skete all summer and helping in the guest-house kitchen—brought out a cupboard door he wanted to resize for a new cabinet. He laid it flat on the table under the gazebo and commenced to saw it. Rather, he commenced to saw at it, trying to remove a three-inch strip from one side. He wasn’t doing very well, and a couple of pilgrims sidled over to help him. They too had a hard time making much headway through the hard chestnut panel.
From where he sat, Sohsen was studyi
ng the situation with what looked like a trace of a smile. He didn’t move at once but watched closely. In turn, each of the three men struggled with the saw, sweating profusely, making little progress, then setting the saw down for the next man to try. As soon as the third man had relaxed his grip on the saw, Sohsen was standing beside him gently taking it from his hand. In a flash, he had stepped atop the table and was standing right on top of the door. He braced himself and began sawing.
The saw went through the length of the board like butter. It took him about a minute and a half to finish the job.
When we were assigned rooms, once again Sohsen and I were put together. This time, however—in stark contrast to the barracks of Great Lavra—we were given a beautiful little room with two beds, a writing desk, and a heartbreaking view of the southern slope of the skete—as well as the peak of the Holy Mountain itself to the left and the blue Aegean to the right.
There was no general vesper service here; Saint Anne’s Skete remains an idiorrythmic community, and the fathers customarily observe vespers in one of the chapels or in their cells. Even so, after trápeza we were all escorted—Sohsen included—into the church to venerate the icons and the relics there. Prominent among the icons is a wonder-working icon of Saint Anne holding the infant Theotókos, which is lined with dozens of photographs of young children and newborns. Father Theóphilos, companion to Father Cheruvím and the monk who seemed to be the primary guest master, told me in English that these photographs were sent by men and women who had previously been unable to have children. As it turns out, this is one of the skete’s primary missions to the outside world; from here, the monks send a small box of blessed items—a length of ribbon, a vessel of holy water, a vial of chrism, and square bits of antídoron—to any couple who asks for them. They send along as well a booklet of prayers and instructions for fasting, taking the water and the antídoron, using the ribbon and the chrism before attempting to conceive. The monks also pray before the wonder-working icon for the couple’s fruitfulness.
The photographs were astonishing—dozens of lovely children lining a beautiful icon of the Holy Mother. “That’s a lot of children,” I said to Father Theóphilos.
“These are just the photos for this month,” he said.
We then moved to a narrow table that Father Theóphilos had set before the royal doors of the iconostasis. As we watched, he brought out, one by one, an array of relics, reverently placing them on the table’s scarlet cloth.
Saint Anne’s Skete was actually founded, sometime around 1689, to preserve one of these relics—the left foot of Saint Anna, the mother of the Theotókos. This relic remains central among the many protected at the skete, and I must admit that a curious sweetness, a warming of the heart, attended my veneration of it. From the moment I had arrived at Saint Anne’s, I had felt something of this sweetness. I had attributed the sensation to finally being able to sit down after a long and grueling hike, and to the warm welcome I’d received from Father Cheruvím. I had even thought that the aesthetic power of the place—it is, after all, absolutely beautiful—made me imagine a particularly sweet presence there. When I kissed the relic—which, incidentally, smelled strongly of heady spice—all other explanations were replaced by a powerful sense that the saint herself sweetened the entire place.
Don’t worry; I don’t expect you to believe me.
Then again, it hardly matters.
Suffice it to say that, on this first trip, Saint Anne’s Skete proved to be one of my favorite spots; I planned to return. One cannot fail to sense the deep peace of God’s presence there. And Saint Anna, whose life had, previously, registered only slightly in my thinking, has become a saint to whom I daily speak.
The evening concluded with our visiting quietly in the broad alcove and patio between the guest house and the church. The monks had disappeared, the pilgrims had become, for the most part, introspective, and the evening settled in like a cool garment over us as we watched the sun disappear into the deepening blue of the Aegean. The peace was something you could touch, breathe in, could taste and see.
I woke at about 3:00 a.m. to see that Sohsen had already gone out. I said my prayers and headed to the chapel for the midnight hours. This was my first experience of liturgy in one of the small chapels on the Holy Mountain. These chapels are, for the most part, where most monks celebrate the Divine Liturgy on most days. There are exceptions (the monks at Simonópetra being a notable exception), but the monks of many monasteries begin the midnight services in the central katholikón, only to disperse toward the end of orthros to continue the liturgy itself in these small, intimate chapels, where a handful of monks—sometimes as few as two—celebrate the Eucharist.
This morning, six pilgrims gathered at the cemetery chapel with about the same number of monks. One chanter and one priest led the service simply, quietly, and at a lovingly attended pace. The reading, the chanting, the censing all took on a notably sweet and intimate quality there in the roughly two hundred square feet of the nave and narthex. I had found a stall in the back left corner of the nave, and I could have stood there forever.
As midnight prayers blended into the orthros, and then into the Divine Liturgy, I said the Jesus Prayer under my breath, more alert than ever to the powerful sweetness I felt here at Saint Anne’s. Off and on, I noticed I was weeping and was not sure why—no sobbing, no choking up, just a steady flow of tears down my face, wetting my beard. The uncommon beauty of worship—the intimate closeness, the frankincense, the simple chanting, the sense that I was part of a centuries-long prayer—became an apprehensible ache in my chest.
During the cherubic hymn (the slow hymn that attends the Great Entrance, the procession of the elements for the Eucharist), I sang along softly in Greek, and during the litany that followed, I noticed Father Theóphilos studying me from his stall near the psáltis’ stand. I worried for a moment that I shouldn’t have joined in singing the hymn, or that I hadn’t sung softly enough…or something. I worried that I had made some kind of faux pas that caught the monk’s attention.
I was wrong. As the litany concluded, and as the psáltis intoned the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Father Theóphilos crossed directly over to me and set a hand on my arm; into my ear he whispered, “The symbol of the faith, do you know it?”
“The creed?”
“Yes, the creed. Do you know it?”
“Yes, I know it,” I whispered back.
“Very good. You say it now, in English, please!”
I didn’t have time to defer. We’d come—that very second—to the place in the liturgy when the Nicene Creed is recited. Panicked, and fearful that I’d forget something, I spoke out, as firmly as I could, attending to the words as, perhaps, I had never done before.
When I had finished, Father Theóphilos patted my arm, beaming. “Yes,” was all he said. He returned to his place near the psáltis as the liturgy continued. When it was time to recite the “Our Father,” once again Father Theóphilos was at my side, asking me to recite the prayer in English.
Being asked to recite these two moments of the Divine Liturgy is, by the way, a special honor given to visitors—most often to visiting priests. That Father Theóphilos decided to offer this honor to an English-speaking pilgrim is itself a symbol of the uniquely welcoming spirit of Saint Anne’s Skete.
I received the Holy Mysteries that morning feeling giddy. After the service, we filed out and met up under the gazebo for coffee. I was hoping Father Cheruvím would show up in the guest area before I left. He didn’t, and I kept wincing at the thought of having missed what seemed to be my best chance yet to find a confessor, and a spiritual father.
I did, however, have a warm and helpful conversation—over biscotti and coffee—with Father Theóphilos, mostly regarding the miracle-working icon and how folks went about requesting prayers for conceiving children. I kept thinking that my own children might find the information useful somewhere down the line.
Later on, as I started off on the trail toward
Agíou Pávlou (the Monastery of Saint Paul), I kept turning around in the path for yet another glimpse of the heartbreakingly lovely Skíti Agías Ánnis, which is, even now, fixed in my heart as a uniquely sweet, powerfully holy place set upon an entire mountain of sweet and holy places.
I had hoped, as well, to catch a final glimpse of Father Cheruvím.
8
I have called you friends.
Along the way to Saint Paul’s, the trail cut into the ridge above Néa Skíti (New Skete), which is more formally, if seldom, called the Skete of the Nativity of the Theotókos, indicating a strong connection to Saint Anna, as well. Whereas Saint Anne’s Skete—just a mile or so to the south—is a dependency of Great Lavra, New Skete is a dependency of Saint Paul’s. Like Saint Anne’s, New Skete is idiorrythmic, and though I didn’t stop there on this first pilgrimage, I was struck by the beauty of its expanse, its chapels and kellía spread out across a steep, forested slope reaching to the sea.
For a half mile or so, I shared the trail with a dozen mules, who seemed to enjoy staying just ahead of me, snagging mouthfuls of greenery as they sauntered along. At a second fork leading down to New Skete, they took the low road back and left me to finish the morning hike alone.
The walk to Saint Paul’s from New Skete was almost completely along a level path, a welcome break from the steep descent that had sorely tested my knees at the end of my hike the day before. The weather was also slightly cooler, so when I arrived a couple of hours later in the broad canyon holding Saint Paul’s, I was still relatively fresh and eager to explore the rugged terrain there. This late in the summer, the “river” that formed the canyon was little more than a stream; judging, however, from the breadth of the riverbed and from the enormous boulders that compose and surround it, I had a good sense that the springtime runoff here must be quite a sight.