Short Trip to the Edge

by Scott Cairns

  Nick said the fathers would be resting for a couple of hours before the morning meal, but that coffee would be waiting for us in the archondaríki if I wanted some. I did want some, so we made our way there, finding a few other visitors already enjoying their morning jolts—both coffee and rakí. The loukoúmi remained untouched.

  As casually as I could, I asked Nick about his plans.

  Smiling, he told me he might be staying at Simonópetra; he said he had a few things to clear up back home but expected to return after the holidays, maybe for good.

  We left it at that, though I was very keen to hear more about his decision. Something about his candor actually made me careful not to press him; it was coupled, even so, with a curious quality of uncertainty, as if he didn’t see where this path would lead him, or even what he should say about it. Our conversation reminded me of how a poem comes into being: one begins to speak, then trusts the words to lead the way.

  We enjoyed our coffee in relative silence and watched the daylight fill the courtyard.

  After trápeza, Nick enlisted me to help with dish washing. It turned out to be pretty wet work. We donned knee-high rubber boots, strapped on thick rubber aprons, and went at the stacks of stainless steel bowls, platters, and cups. I noticed that the water wasn’t especially hot; in fact, by the time we were on the last load, it was cold.

  I asked Nick if this was going to pose a health problem. Nick said he’d asked the same question when he started washing dishes some weeks earlier. “Father Ioásaf told me it wouldn’t kill anybody.” He smiled and kept at sloshing out a stack of bowls. Nick—I was beginning to notice—also shares my taste for irony.

  It was a Wednesday, a fasting day, so there’d been no oil in the meal—no oil, therefore, on the plates. They seemed to come pretty clean. I guessed the cold-water wash probably wouldn’t kill anybody, not today anyway.

  When we’d finished and hung up our gear, Nick let me know that Father Ioásaf had asked us to come to the music room for a visit. “He’s written a poem,” Nick said. “He’d like you to see it.” Again, he was smiling.

  Thank God, the poem was actually pretty good, lovely even—a short lyric about sunlight on clouds as seen from the Mount Athos peak. As we talked about the poem, and about many other things, Father Ioásaf uncovered a tray he’d brought along, revealing three bowls of jellied fruit—our reward for having helped with the dishes.

  From there, Nick led me down to the monastery’s actual library—a well-protected, well-lighted vault deep in the cleft of Simon’s rock. That’s where I met Fathers Porfýrios and Makários. Both are active scholars, working largely in editing and translation, respectively. It was Father Porfýrios, however, who determined to give me a tour, and to lead me through a crash course in modern and contemporary Greek poets, assisted by the canny translation skills of Dr. Nick.

  I confessed to Father Porfýrios that the only modern Greek poets I knew well were Elýtis, Seféris, and the great Alexandrian Greek, Kaváfy. He approved my selection but suggested that I was missing out on a great deal. Long story made short: after an intensive two-hour tutorial, I resurfaced with a list that will probably keep me busy for at least ten years. He also gave me the name of a professor in Thessaloníki that, he said, I must meet. Later that day, on my way to trápeza, he would pull me aside to hand me a letter of introduction addressed to that professor.

  I spent most of the remaining afternoon alone. Strolling with the borrowed book in hand, thumbing through it, I slowly realized that this was the same Yéronda Iosíf whose brotherhood had led the restoration of a great many monasteries and sketes here on the Holy Mountain. The same elder, that is, whose young disciple, Yéronda Ephrém, had served as abbot of Philothéou and now lived in Florence, Arizona, having established some nineteen men’s and women’s monasteries in the United States.

  Among the several photos in the book was one of Elder Joseph’s crypt set in a tiny chapel at New Skete, near Saint Anne’s Skete. I determined to visit it during this winter pilgrimage.

  That evening, following vespers, trápeza, and the veneration of the holy relics, Father Iákovos called me to his side and suggested that I meet him later for a visit. I was eager to agree, and he told me how to find his dental office. Besides a range of other duties, Father Iákovos, it turns out, also serves the monastery as its tailor and its dentist. I’m not kidding.

  I gave Father Iákovos time to change out of his “church clothes” and into the simpler working garb, then wandered down the cobbled path to his office. He was waiting for me, seated on the balcony overlooking the sea. He had made tea for us; it was what the monks call mountain tea, a mixture of mint, floral herbs, and a stalky item tasting of chamomile.

  I figured it was time to cut to the chase. I told Father Iákovos why I’d come. After years of saying the prayer, I still hungered for unceasing prayer; I didn’t think I had made much progress—except, perhaps, an increasing hunger to know always that sweet sense of God’s presence, which I have tasted only fleetingly, intermittently.

  My frank admission seemed, initially, to stun Father Iákovos. Then he smiled. And then he seemed to relax—which probably seems like a funny thing to say about a man whose abiding, genuine calm I had already noted, had already been deeply impressed by. Still, he seemed even more calm now, as he settled back in his chair with a pleasing sense of gravity and with…well…stillness.

  He said, “This is very good.” His eyes were shining, his face bright with what I took to be joy. “I’ll tell you what I can tell you,” he said.

  He placed a hand on his chest, just above his abdomen. “You have to hold on to Him,” he said, “with all your strength.”

  He brought his other hand there too and made a tight, cupping gesture with both hands—one above the other—saying, “You have to plead with Him to meet you here,” his hands parting now and opening so that he was making an oval with his forearms—the right arm low across his lower abdomen, the left arm reaching across his chest. He leaned forward and held his arms there, indicating effort, and said, “And when He arrives, you must hold on to Him, and not let go.

  “Like Jacob,” he said, “you must hold on to Him.”

  And then he sat up straight, still holding his arms before him as if to indicate a womb. “And like Jacob,” he met my eyes with new intensity, “you will be wounded.

  “Like Jacob, you must say, ‘I will not let You go unless You bless me,’ and then the wound, the tender hip thereafter, the blessing.”

  I couldn’t talk. I only nodded.

  “He is everything,” Father Iákovos continued, “and ever-present. He is never not here,” he said, touching his upper abdomen, “but when you plead to know He’s here, and when He answers you, and helps you to meet Him here, you will be wounded by that meeting. The wound will help you know, and that is the blessing.”

  “I came here to find a spiritual father,” I said. “A father to guide me in prayer.”

  I think he may have blushed.

  I saw, at any rate, that I had made him suddenly uncomfortable. “Would you mind,” I kept talking, hoping to get through this awkward moment, “if, off and on, I were to write to you, asking questions as they come up?”

  He was embarrassed for me, I think. He was searching for words. I had had no idea my clumsy admission would so quickly dissolve the moment of our conversation. “Yes,” he said, “you may write.” And then, “I say that because I know you won’t write unless you must.”

  I was at a loss. My turn to be embarrassed. “Yes, Father, yes, of course. Only if I must.”

  “You should find a father closer to home,” he said.

  So there it was. Hard on the heels of what was, surely and by far, the most helpful, most illuminating moment of guidance I had yet received on the Holy Mountain—and the first downright mystical experience of my pilgrimage to date—I managed also to bring about one of my journey’s most awkward moments. I didn’t have a clue, at the time, why Father Iákovos would have so
suddenly shut down our conversation the way he seemed to.

  I didn’t know then, for example, that Father Iákovos—a monk for many years—was not yet a priest nor, presumably, designated a pnevmatikós, a confessor. I didn’t realize that, perhaps, for those reasons, he was not exactly in a position—by Athonite standards—to offer guidance as a spiritual father.

  So, puzzled, feeling suddenly sheepish, and mentally kicking myself for having brought so abruptly to a close a heart-opening conversation with a wonderful and doubtlessly Spirit-bearing monk, I slugged down the rest of my tea, received his warm embrace, and scuttled up the slope to the guest house, where I said my prayers and fell into bed.

  I kept thinking, I’m just not ready, not worthy. I’m kidding myself.

  I bore into the prayer with all the effort I could muster, trying to fend off the approaching—very familiar—melancholy by breathing the Name.

  My wake-up call rang out on cue, the tálanton resounding through the guest-house hall this particular morning with unusual energy, like a woodpecker on steroids and speed.

  I dressed and hurried out, finding the prayer on my lips. In the dark, I climbed the stone causeway to the katholikón and settled into my habitual corner before most of the others arrived. One of the younger monks was preparing the lamps and candles, clipping wicks, and readying the hymnals for the readers and chanters.

  From behind me, in the exo-narthex, I heard the reader begin the prayers. It was at this moment that I felt—as I spoke the words of the Jesus Prayer under my breath—an odd sensation that I had felt only once before.

  Years before, early on in this business—maybe six months into my adopting the practice of the Jesus Prayer—something had happened in my chest.

  It was my day to stay home and write, and I was home alone. Marcia was out shopping, and Liz and Ben were at school. I’d put my books aside and had been standing before our icon wall, saying the prayer for maybe half an hour when something strange began: I felt an immediate and pronounced bubbling, a strong fluttering near my heart.

  I thought, actually, that I was in serious trouble, that maybe this was what a heart attack felt like. I stood very still, brought my hands to my heart, and waited for the lights to go out.

  The lights didn’t go out. The bubbling sensation continued for a few minutes longer, then faded away, leaving me standing there, perplexed but grinning.

  I’m not sure how to describe it any better than that, having never even tried to speak of it before, not to anyone. All I can say is that, following this experience, my deliberate repetitions of the prayer have become easier and that, since then, I’ve never gone a day without startling to find the prayer circling my thought. From that day, as well, I began to wake at night to find the prayer on my lips.

  Even so, other desired fruits—an abiding stillness, dispassion, the continuing sense of God’s nearness, a conscious charity toward others—have continued to wax and wane, to come and go. When they come, they are very sweet. When they go, it is as though I’m back to square one.

  Father Lev Gillet, among many others who appear to know about these things, cautions us not to depend on feelings to confirm the efficacy of our prayer. Such feelings can be deluding, misleading, even manufactured. In fact, though a sense of the sweetness of prayer—midprayer—is a very welcome sense, Father Lev suggests that greater spiritual progress is realized during those dry spells when one perseveres, saying the prayer regardless. “This apparently barren prayer,” he writes, “may be more pleasing to God than our moments of rapture, because it is pure from any selfish quest for spiritual delight.” It is, he counsels, “a prayer of the plain and naked will.”

  That moment, at the beginning of services in the katholikón atop Simon’s rock, my “prayer of the plain and naked will” seemed to recall that puzzling sensation I’d experienced many years before. This time, I didn’t fear a heart attack, but I did feel briefly like a spectator of my own experience, noting a trembling, a flutter low in my chest.

  Once again, the sensation grew faint; I wondered if I had only imagined it, though it did leave behind an uncommon awareness of my heart—or of that warm and warming locus just beneath it. That awareness attended me throughout the midnight services and orthros and became acute at the culmination of Divine Liturgy, when the priest set the Body of Christ to my tongue.

  After liturgy, I slipped back to my room to rest until trápeza. The book about Elder Joseph lay on the table by my bed, and I pored over it, finding this witness of the elder’s teachings recalled by one of his disciples:

  As the Holy Fathers tell us in their writings (he always meant Abba Isaac [of Syria] whom he had as his inseparable companion)…do not be timid especially now in the beginning when you are starting out, so that you may call forth divine grace…. When at last the mind is assured of the presence of help for those who believe, then it enters upon another kind of faith, not the introductory faith as in every believer, but the “faith of contemplation,” as the Fathers call it. This is the first stage…. Happy will he be if he has someone to guide him and support him and assure him that, by the grace of God, he is making progress.

  Elder Joseph, by his own admission, had no such helper; but he carried with him a volume of Saint Isaac’s homilies, from which he received the support and assurance he needed.

  I was roused from my reading by the bilo ringing us to trápeza. I was the last to arrive but was led again to a place at the center table, where Father Galaktíon and a few other monks—visitors?—stood awaiting the abbot’s prayer.

  When the prayer had been said and the reader began, we pulled the benches out and settled in to our breakfast of bean soup. I kept thinking over the counsel of Elder Joseph, his implicit admonition to seek a spiritual guide and his admission that such guidance may be supplied from the fathers themselves.

  At the head of our table, Father Galaktíon—a monk in his eighties, with snow-white hair and beard—ate slowly, thoughtfully. His pleasant face, fixed in a kind smile, seemed almost to glow in the strange morning light of the refectory. At the next table near the head, Father Iákovos bore a similar demeanor as he picked at his plate. At the other end, Nick sat with his chin resting on his clasped hands; I was fascinated by his bemused look, wondering what he must be thinking as he surveyed the hall where, if all went according to plan, he would be receiving most of his meals for the rest of his life.

  When we’d finished and the bell was rung, we all filed out between the abbot and his assistants, receiving Yéronda Eliséos’s blessing. I hurried from there to my room to gather my things and pack up for the hike down the slope to Grigoríou.

  The sky—which had been absolutely clear, teeming with stars even, when I’d clomped along the wooden balcony on my way to church—had clouded up a good bit during trápeza. By the time I had my gear packed and loaded, the wind had picked up as well, and a sheet of black cloud stretched out across a suddenly gray and choppy Aegean.

  I was cinching up the belly strap of my backpack when Father Iákovos found me in the guest house, tapping lightly on the door. He presented me with an English translation of The Authentic Seal, the first volume of the collected writings of his former abbot, Yéronda Aimilianós. “Read the second part first; read it right away,” he said, “the part on prayer.”

  And then he handed me a fax from Vatopédi acknowledging my reservation for a stay there during the following week. “Take this with you, just in case. They sometimes want to see the actual paperwork.”

  He walked me down the slope to the edge of the monastery gardens, where we embraced, kissed, said our farewells. I turned down the footpath, squeezing through a passel of grazing mules. Over the sound of their bells, Father Iákovos called out, “Good journey, Isaac.”

  The clouds continued to threaten, but the rain didn’t arrive until nearly an hour later, as I was entering the gate of Grigoríou for yet another homecoming.

  10

  …the midst of the feast…

  Fathe
r Damianós was washing cups in the archondaríki kitchen when I arrived, dropping my pack to the stone floor of the balcony. “Isaac!” he hollered and, raising a finger to say just a minute, immediately set to brewing a pot of drip coffee for us to share. As he scooped out enough ground coffee for a good stiff pot, he commenced asking about my time up the hill.

  Winter on Athos brings its own array of pleasures, especially for me. The rains, low clouds, and wafting mists all bring to mind the landscape of my youth, the landscape of my imagination—that strip of evergreen forest between the Cascade Range and the Puget Sound of Washington State. And the ready offer of hot coffee—and lots of it—was perfectly in keeping with the scene.

  I told Father Damianós about meeting “Dr. Nick” and about my amazing visit with Father Iákovos. He too loved the way Father Iákovos had invoked Jacob in describing the way we must—as he now put it—“insist” on knowing God’s presence.

  Over our cups, I pulled out my map and asked Father Damianós to help me plan the rest of my trip. I knew that after my two nights at Grigoríou, I’d be heading to Saint Anne’s Skete, but after that things were still pretty much up in the air.

  His first thoughts were “the Feast of Saint Andrew! You must go to Saint Andrew’s Skete for the vigil Sunday night!”

  Done.

  Like Father Iákovos, he suggested that I try to get to Vatopédi; I showed him the fax that Father Iákovos had given me, to which he responded, “Perfect.” So, with the map spread out on the kitchen table, we charted a course that would take me from Grigoríou to Saint Anne’s Skete, where I’d spend Saturday night and celebrate Sunday liturgy. From there I would hike the coastal trail to New Skete (where I would stop to pray at Elder Joseph’s tomb), to Saint Paul’s Monastery, where I’d catch the boat to Dáfni and then the bus to Karyés, arriving in time to settle in at Saint Andrew’s Skete for my first Athonite vigil on Sunday night. Father Damianós urged me to try to return to Grigoríou as well, pointing out that my last night on the Holy Mountain would, coincidentally, be the night of the vigil for the Feast of Saint Nicholas.