by Scott Cairns
The rest of that afternoon and the following day afforded a chance to be especially deliberate about prayer, and deliberate about cultivating the stillness that had become intermittently available to me. During this time, I began to notice something else about prayer and stillness in my life. Neither had developed in ways that were noticeable from day to day, but I could not deny that they were developing. The way—it now became clearer to me—was inevitably a slow one, with prayer and stillness becoming only slightly more apprehensible as you go.
After trápeza on Saturday morning, I packed up, again leaving spare clothing and books with Father Damianós. On board the Agía Ánna for Saint Anne’s Skete, I studied the shoreline as we passed Dionysíou, Saint Paul’s, and New Skete along the way.
From the arsanás of Saint Anne’s, the hike to the skete was more demanding—more unremittingly steep—than even the rugged trail rising from Grigoríou to Simonópetra. In less than a quarter mile “as the crow flies,” the gain in elevation exceeded a thousand feet. It took me more than an hour to reach the gate—stopping to gasp at nearly every switchback and, off and on, stepping aside for recurring strings of pack mules hauling goods from the boat. Passing beneath the icon of Saint Anna and the Theotókos over the gate, I crossed myself, bowed low to the icon, and stumbled in.
There was only one person in the courtyard, a monk filling oil lamps near the pergola. He looked up and said matter-of-factly, “Hey, I recognize that face.”
It was Father Cheruvím himself.
“Evlogíte,” I said, approaching to kiss his hand. “I’m Isaac.”
“Yes,” he said, “you are.” He looked up from the oil lamp in his hand, “I got your letter.”
From home between journeys—about two months earlier—I had written him about my search for a spiritual father, my desire for prayer. “Yes,” I said, “I hoped you had.” I didn’t say it just then, but I had also hoped he would have written back in the meantime.
Finishing with the lamps, and mopping up a good bit of oil he’d spilled on the stone wall, he said, “Come, I’m ready for coffee; I’ll bet you are too.”
As we sat in the kitchen, I learned that he was preparing to make a trip himself, heading to New York to meet with some elder or other regarding his work, a history of Orthodoxy in America. “Travel makes me uneasy,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m a little preoccupied with this trip, too distracted to be of much help to you.”
Another puzzlement. Another minor disappointment.
We chatted a bit longer, mostly making small talk about mutual friends back in the States.
“I think your room is ready for you. I’ll take you to it.”
I followed him to the same room I had shared with Sohsen three months earlier.
“Have a rest,” he said. “Perhaps we can visit later on.”
As it turned out, we never did.
Father Theóphilos showed up later in the day just as a group of pilgrims—six Greek men carrying suitcases—arrived from New Skete. He led us to the Kyriakón, where we venerated the relics, the spice-scented foot of Saint Anna among them, and where I venerated the miracle-working icon of Saint Anna. The icon was surrounded by a fresh batch of miracles—children’s photos, thank-you gestures from dozens of new parents.
Going directly to my room after trápeza, I stood for a while on the balcony outside my window as the evening settled in. A covey of doves was circling the skete as if lost. When I could no longer follow their circling in the deepening dusk, I returned to my bed, puzzling over my search, feeling once again a little discouraged, but falling asleep with the prayer on my lips.
I woke well before the midnight service, and, because the weather had taken a cold turn, I bundled up before heading to the courtyard. From the terrace there, I watched clouds race across the sky over the sea, alternately revealing and obscuring the brilliant field of stars behind them. When I heard chanting wafting up on the wind from somewhere down the dark slope below, I made my way to the cemetery chapel.
Inside, a solitary priest was preparing the altar; he was saying his prayers aloud and didn’t notice my slipping in. I found my familiar stall in the left corner of the nave and settled into prayers of my own.
In time, Father Theóphilos showed up to assist the priest, and a chanter arrived minutes later. By the time we were ready to begin the midnight prayers, one more monk had arrived, as had one other pilgrim—six men total.
It was a very sweet service, slow-moving and quiet, a series of prayers spanning most of four hours but seamlessly arriving at the Holy Mysteries, which I received in this tiny chapel, actually trembling.
Outside again, now in gray daylight, I inhaled the crisp air deeply, waking to a curious sensation of hope. Father Cheruvím was nowhere to be found, Father Theóphilos and the other monks had dispersed to their kellía, and I had a long day—including a tough hike—ahead of me, but I felt, frankly, cheerful. There wasn’t any breakfast to be had, so I filled my water bottle and hit the trail. It was, all else aside, Sunday morning—a likely enough day for resurrecting hope.
In less than an hour, I came to the fork leading down the slope to New Skete and made my descent, following a grip of half a dozen mules who insisted on staying a few steps ahead of me, even as they continued to browse on the laurel.
Twenty minutes later, the trail led onto a dirt road, where I found a workman notching rails for a fence. “Pou íne to táfos ya Yéronda Iosíf?” I asked in tortured Greek, seeking directions to Elder Joseph’s tomb. He rattled off a sentence or two I didn’t understand, but pointed as he did so. I went in the direction he pointed.
In minutes I was standing outside the tiny chapel where Elder Joseph the Hesychast reposed. It was a whitewashed stone hut with a tile roof, much smaller than I had imagined, T-shaped, with the narthex facing the sea and forming the wide end, and the narrow length composing the nave, which held the elder’s crypt along its left-hand side.
The door actually had a key in it, but turn it however I tried, the lock wouldn’t budge. I hoped this wasn’t some kind of sign that I had no business here. The windows lining the hut, even so, were open, and, peering through each in turn, I walked around the chapel. Then, I knelt at the front, settling into the prayer.
The stillness there was very sweet. I knelt for a good long while, and, intermittently, as I prayed, I also asked the elder to help me in my search for a spiritual guide.
By the time I’d climbed back to the main trail, the wind had picked up again, sending thick bands of black clouds west to east—that would be left to right—as I hustled along the trail. The rain, when it came, was light and actually refreshing, and helped me make pretty good time on my way to the Monastery of Saint Paul. Still, I was feeling weak when I entered the monastery canyon, so I didn’t walk all the way up to the monastery this time. Instead, I stopped to venerate the icons at the small shrine midway up, the spot where the gifts of the magi were presented to the monks.
I was hungry by this time—suddenly a little dizzy, even—but all I had on hand was water, and not really much of that. On the other hand, the Agía Ánna would be pulling into the pier soon, and I could grab a bite on board. I rested at the shrine as long as I could, then, continuing the prayer, found the wide gravel road to the arsanás and made it down in time for the boat.
Once on board, I bought two bottles of water, a hot “Nescafé me gála,” and a “toast,” a popular snack made by stuffing a fat, soft hoagie roll with kasseri cheese and ham, then smashing it flat between two searing iron griddles until it crisps. After a few bites of the delicacy, my dizziness went away.
Again, it hit me how few men, relatively speaking, were on the boat—maybe twenty, not counting the crew. A few months earlier, the Agía Ánna had carried well over a hundred each time I was aboard. The wind had picked up again, the whitecaps rising across the sea, the spray blowing clear to the upper deck. As we plowed along, with rough and rolling stops at Dionysíou, Grigoríou, and Simonópetra, I could tell by
the looks on the faces of the crew that, due to the weather, this could well be their last run for a while.
Dáfni was nearly deserted. Most of the shops were open, but for the most part, there weren’t any pilgrims inside. The bus to Karyés (and to Saint Andrew’s Skete, where I’d been directed by Father Damianós) wouldn’t be leaving until the ferry from Ouranoúpoli arrived, so I grabbed another coffee at the café, found a likely table on the patio, and settled in to read a while in Yéronda Aimilianós’s The Authentic Seal.
Half an hour later, however, with the arrival of the Áxion Estín, the scene suddenly changed. Evidently, the feast day of Saint Andrew (whose Old Calendar date correlates to our December 13) had filled the boat to capacity, and easily three hundred men poured over the gangway to the pier—many of them priests and monks from mainland Greece and elsewhere. They made a beeline for the buses—shoving and shouting just like the good old days last summer—so, grabbing my pack, I joined the stampede, not wanting to be left behind.
Saint Andrew’s Skete, as I’ve mentioned, is immense, comparable to some of the larger monastery enclaves. Most of it is also uninhabitable. Of the dozen or more four- and five-story buildings occupying its broad Athonite hilltop, maybe three—as well as the enormous katholikón, the largest on Mount Athos—are in use, and the renovations of those few are not entirely finished. Most often, the skete will accommodate twenty to thirty pilgrims at a time; on a monastery’s or skete’s feast day, however, tradition has it that no one is turned away. The logistical dilemma, then—for the two dozen monks who lived there and those who had come to help them—was where to put about five hundred guests. A surprising number of these guests, it seemed to me, turned out to be Russian.
When I arrived, the hallways were already lined with cots and blankets, as were the walls of the guest-house chapel and those of the guest-house dining hall. And already, at three in the afternoon, most of those cots had men or boys sleeping in them, resting for the all-night vigil that would commence at around 8:00 p.m.
In other words, the place was packed with monks, priests, and pilgrims sitting, standing, or stretched out snoring. The few monks assigned to find rooms for us new arrivals seemed almost giddy at how impossible their job had suddenly become, although their good humor did a lot to keep the whole fiasco pleasant.
And the long wait turned out to be ideal for prayer; in fact, the nearly absurd circumstances actually helped me disengage, settle in, find stillness in the midst of the bustle.
Long story made short: I stood in the entry hall with my backpack from 3:00 p.m. until 5:00 p.m., when we were all called to trápeza. Thereafter, I found my place again and stood waiting until 9:00 p.m., when a Russian monk—actually a novice from St. Petersburg—who had been given a room some hours earlier saw that I was still there and cornered the guest master. From where I stood, I could see the man gesturing at me and pointing toward the hallway he’d just exited.
In another five minutes, I was following the two of them to the room I would share with Viktor, the Russian novice, and, for starters, one other man. Along the way, we walked by lantern light through what looked like bombed-out ruins, crossing planks and ascending fractured staircases to a wing that still had most of its roof. Of the rooms in our wing, ours was the only one with glass in most of the windowpanes; the missing pane had been replaced with a square of wool blanket. The temperature inside the room was well below 40 degrees; fortunately, each bed held a stack of three heavy blankets.
The other man was also a monk; Hieromonk Prochor had been Viktor’s childhood friend and was now a priest-monk. From what I gathered, both served the Valaam monastery—the “Mount Athos of the north”—at its pilgrim offices in St. Petersburg.
Father Prochor didn’t speak much English, but Viktor was nearly fluent. We were able to visit briefly as I hurried to stow my things and join them on their way to the vigil, which was already underway. As we prepared to leave, the door opened and there stood the guest master with yet another monk. My two roommates went to him immediately and kissed his hand. I gathered that he was a hierarch from Valaam itself.
Because Viktor’s Greek was negligible and because the guest master knew little Russian, they conversed in fairly followable English, and I was, therefore, able to witness a curious scene.
The hierarch, a relatively young-looking man, appeared a bit puzzled by the state of the room to which he’d been led. The guest master asked Viktor, “Is the room okay with Vladika?” Viktor asked the hierarch, who seemed to be struggling to say yes. He nodded, he looked around, he half-smiled, he shrugged, then said, according to Viktor, “Yes, it’s okay.”
The guest master rocked on his heels a bit, clearly embarrassed. He said to Viktor, “Please tell Vladika that it’s all we have.” Viktor told him, and the vladika softened immediately, trying hard to appear more sincere as he assured us all that the room was just fine.
We left the vladika with the lantern to prepare for the vigil—during which, it turned out, he was to be part of a number of hierarchical processions—and followed the guest master through the maze that would lead to the courtyard, and from there to the katholikón.
I had been around the outside of this katholikón a couple of times already, first when Nick Kalaitzandonakes and I had wandered the skete during my first journey in September, and then as I’d first arrived here earlier in the day. I’d even been under it; the expansive, main trápeza is located in the basement beneath the nave. Walking around it and eating beneath it had given me a hint of how huge the church would be, but nothing had prepared me for the sparkling reality within.
The katholikón itself is, without question, the largest on the Holy Mountain, its gold-layered iconostasis reaching more than 180 feet across and easily 50 feet high, and the nave itself stretching well over a hundred yards. The intricacy and beauty of the woodcarvings and iconography are mind-boggling. Its dozens of pillars each bear four or more larger than life-sized icons—the Theotókos, Christ, countless saints. Clearly, the katholikón itself is what the monks of Saint Andrew’s Skete have been pouring their hearts into restoring over the past several years.
On this night, the golden candelabrum before the altar—easily twenty-five feet in diameter and stretching more than thirty feet from top to bottom—was aflame with more than a hundred thick beeswax tapers (perhaps a hundred more were not yet lit). Another candelabrum, nearly as big and for the moment unlit, stood midway in the nave above the Gospel stand, and each choir—that is, the arms of the cross, to the left and right of the central candelabrum—held another just slightly smaller than the Gospel fixture; these too were not yet lit.
As the chanting continued from the right choir, I lit my own three candles in the narthex and began venerating icons. I did so for more than half an hour, finally reaching the thirty or so that spread across the width before the iconostasis. Among these icons, midway along those to the right of the royal doors, the skull of Saint Andrew lay—the color of beeswax—in a golden chest. I touched the floor before it and kissed its fragrant brow. I removed my prayer rope from my wrist and touched it to the holy relic.
Leaving the icons, I found a stall (there are more than a thousand here) near the front of the nave and settled in to pray.
The night was, for the most part, very like a dream. A dream of prayer.
That continuous prayer was occasionally…troubled?…softened?…maybe slowed by a fresh beauty that brought me—each time it happened—almost to the surface of consciousness.
This is very hard to write about. I was not unconscious, but I found my attention fixed, for the most part, to the prayer, and slightly less fixed to the hymns and actions of the monks. Candles were lit while others were snuffed and eventually relit in a profoundly Byzantine sequence that I observed as if it had happened long ago. Processions came and went. And all night long I said the prayer. It seemed as if I couldn’t not say it.
At certain points, I seemed to see it.
During several festal hy
mns, the huge candelabrum were fully lit and—with great labor from monks pushing with long steel poles—set into motion, circling in broad, expanding circles. As they spun—like wheels within wheels—the gold-layered iconostasis and the hundreds of golden stands and fixtures throughout the abysmally enormous nave caught that golden light and flickered as if aflame. The air seemed filled with light.
When finally—near 4:00 a.m., I’m guessing—the service grew still and most of the candles were extinguished, I surfaced.
I looked around and saw that the hundreds of worshipers had dwindled to a handful. I saw that the handful were, for the most part, very old monks, dozing in their stalls.
After venerating the icons before the iconostasis and the skull of Saint Andrew (the golden chest was now closed), I walked out into the night.
The sky was exceedingly clear, filled with stars and sporting what looked like a frost ring circling the moon. I was shivering when I finally found my way to the room. I took off only my boots and crawled beneath the heavy blankets. I must have fallen asleep immediately.
A few hours later, I was awakened by Viktor coming in to tell me that the Divine Liturgy was starting soon and that he knew I’d want to be there. I followed his penlight through the dark of the ruined wing and down the creaking staircase. Outside, the sky was just beginning to pale in the east.
The katholikón was almost fully lit again, and it appeared that everyone had returned. The hierarchical liturgy—including more than twenty priests in procession—was extravagantly beautiful, and as we lined up for the Eucharist, it seemed to me that we were well over five hundred strong.
I received the Holy Mysteries, and turned to find both an enormous platter of antídoron and another even larger platter of heavy bread soaked in what must have been honeyed wine.