Short Trip to the Edge

by Scott Cairns

Vatopédi is, I’m guessing, the best-protected monastic community on the Holy Mountain. If you arrive, as most pilgrims do, by the main road from Karyés, you’ll pass a police checkpoint more than a mile from the monastery gate; and unless your name is on their list of pilgrims with reservations, you won’t get any closer than that. The monastery gate itself is perhaps the most carefully controlled on Mount Athos; for example, this was the only monastery where I actually had to hand over my diamonitírion, which the gatekeeper then called to verify. For a number of reasons—not the least of which is the fact that Britain’s Prince Charles is a frequent visitor here—Vatopédi is a very busy monastery, bustling with many monks, visiting clergy, and pilgrims. The guest area features a machine—actually two of them—that will automatically brew Greek coffee to the pilgrim’s customized taste: glykys, métrios, skétos—sweet, middling, or pure. Moreover, like Simonópetra, Vatopédi manifests a decidedly international flavor (a good number of Cypriots), and is—once you’ve cleared both gates—very welcoming to guests who have reservations.

  One other item that I considered to be of increasing interest: Abbot Ephrém, the abbot of Vatopédi—like Yéronda Ephrém of Philothéou and of Saint Anthony’s Monastery in Arizona—is the spiritual child of Elder Joseph the Hésychast, about whom I’d been reading during my stay at Simonópetra.

  Once inside, I found my way to the waiting room, where a roaring woodstove was keeping off the chill from the sea. The guest master found my name on the list and asked if I’d be wanting a place on the microbus to Karyés the next day. Then, much to my surprise, he asked if I’d be wanting to see a priest for confession.

  “You have a priest who speaks English?” I asked.

  “Yes, kýrie, of course.”

  I wasn’t ready for this. Confession remains, as I’ve said, a scary proposition. Still, without thinking much about it, I said yes.

  “Very good,” the monk said. “I will find you during vespers and take you to Father Palamás.”

  He led me to my room, an amazing little studio apartment, complete with kitchenette; I saw that I would be staying here alone. The guest house at Vatopédi is more like a European hotel than any of the guest quarters I had yet been in, with common washrooms at either end of the hall, but with absolutely pristine two- and four-person rooms, all of them apparently remodeled quite recently.

  My purpose in coming to Vatopédi was to pray. During my last conversation with Father Iákovos, he had encouraged me to come here; and he had faxed my request to the guest master himself. For all I knew, his arrangements had led to this solitary room, where I might spend uninterrupted hours in prayer. Now that I knew I would also be making confession in the evening, I was all the more eager to settle in and prepare for that opportunity.

  Late in the afternoon, the tálanton stirred me from my meditation, calling us all to vespers. Inside the katholikón—clearly one of the most richly ornate on the Holy Mountain—I found that the monks had set up chairs for the pilgrims to use. The central nave is wide enough that they were able to place three rows of wooden chairs on either side of the passage between the choirs and the narthex while still leaving ample room for processions to move between them.

  I found a seat on the aisle and struggled to attend to the service even as I anxiously awaited confession. I didn’t have to struggle for long; early in the service the guest master tapped my shoulder from behind and signaled for me to follow him.

  He led me to the small chapel to the left of the central nave and told me Father Palamás was inside.

  He was. A tall, surprisingly young-looking monk of, I’d guess, forty-something stood waiting by two chairs near the icon of Christ. I kissed his hand saying “Evlogíte.”

  He blessed me, saying “O Kýrios!” and indicated that I should take a seat. In slightly Greek-inflected English, he asked me to begin.

  Here, I thought, was my chance finally to take care of some old business. I told him that there were sins in my past that, because I hadn’t named them specifically in confession before, continued to burden my conscience.

  He asked why I hadn’t named them in confession before this, and I answered that my priest—my first priest, the one who had chrismated me when I became Orthodox—had always encouraged a more general confession. At the time, I had been relieved; but in the interim, memory of these past sins had, off and on, continued to eat at me.

  Father Palamás said, “Listen,” and met my eyes intensely with his, “the greater sin is not trusting in forgiveness.” He continued, “Judas sinned when he betrayed Jesus Christ. Peter sinned when he denied Jesus Christ. Both could have been forgiven, not just Peter. The sin that destroyed Judas was refusing to believe he could be forgiven.”

  Hearing those words was like—as they say—a weight being lifted. Nodding, I confessed my nagging sins, and then I also confessed my doubt.

  And even as I spoke of it, my doubt was also lifted.

  I knelt, and Father Palamás draped his stole over my head to pray the prayer of absolution. I felt his hand of blessing touching my head in the sign of the cross, then felt him take my hand to help me to my feet.

  I left almost laughing, and stood grinning in the narthex as vespers concluded. It never fails: I walk into confession anxious; I walk out relieved. This was the first time, however, that I had walked out feeling absolutely elated, knowing that for once I had also left my doubt behind.

  On my way to trápeza, I was met by a monk who appeared to be striding in a deliberate beeline to me from across the courtyard. As he drew near, he put out his hand to shake mine, saying in clearly American English, “Hi, I’m Father Matthew.”

  “I’m Isaac,” I said, surprised to be so jovially met. “Where are you from?”

  He was from Wisconsin, and we chatted only briefly as he led me to trápeza. As he left me at my table, he said he’d show me around later on, after the veneration of the relics.

  Following our meal of garlicky orzo and squid (the wine was a soft rosé), I crossed the courtyard, entered the katholikón, and venerated the icons as I made my way to the table placed before the royal doors. The priest brought out half a dozen reliquaries, one at a time and showing great tenderness toward each. He handled them as one might carry a fragile infant and kissed each reliquary before placing it on the table’s scarlet cloth. He then opened each in turn and kissed them again.

  In seconds I was surrounded by other pilgrims as we all pressed forward to see what lay before us. From the press behind me, I felt a hand pulling at my sleeve. It was Father Matthew, drawing me aside to whisper an English translation of the priest’s explanations of the relics there: among them, a large fragment of the True Cross, a length of the reed on which Christ was offered vinegar, the right hand of Saint Catherine, the skulls of Saint John Chrysostom and Saint Gregory the Theologian, and—most compelling—the miracle-working belt of the Theotókos.

  Again, I offered my prayer rope to the priest so that he might bless it over the relics. Thereafter, Father Matthew took me on a personal tour of the monastery, the several miracle-working icons, and a few of the smaller chapels. Along the way, he pointed out the archaeological dig going on within the monastery walls—something of a rarity, but nicely indicative of the spirit Vatopédi shares with Simonópetra, where scholarship and study are encouraged. The library, for example, holds more than twenty-five thousand printed volumes and more than two thousand ancient manuscripts. Like the community at Simonópetra, the monks at Vatopédi appear to be international, educated, and interested in the pilgrims who come to them—not that they would let any of those virtues deter them from their primary pursuit: becoming prayer.

  As we said good-night there in the courtyard before the katholikón, Father Matthew pointed out several other rarities, bits of pagan sculpture and architecture that—having been unearthed during the excavation for the katholikón—had been incorporated into the stonework of the church itself. “The point is,” he said, “Christ makes all things new,” even the broken bi
ts of pagan temples.

  Back in my room, I settled in to read further in the book Father Iákovos had given me, The Authentic Seal of Yéronda Aimilianós. The yéronda proved to be a perfect companion for a quiet evening in pursuit of prayer.

  In the elder’s words I recognized much of what Father Iákovos had been teaching me, in particular about the agonistic nature of prayer, for the yéronda also refers to Jacob’s experience with the angel. When we finally start to pray, the yéronda writes, “we experience prayer, initially, as a wrestling match, as a struggle.”

  But he makes an interesting distinction that I had not yet noticed:

  A struggle, not in the sense that it is difficult to pray, that I have to struggle to gather my thoughts and overcome my sleepiness or the weariness in my knees…. Not struggle in the sense that I am hungry and I want to go and eat, but I say, “No, I shall continue to pray.” I do not mean that struggle. That is the ascetic struggle and is something different—another thing altogether. I am not speaking of the struggle we have with ourselves, but the struggle we have with God. I wrestle with God. It is quite clear…. When I do not have the sense of this struggle with God, I have not even begun to pray.

  It occurred to me, therefore, that I had not even begun to pray.

  I suppose I had suspected as much.

  Just the same, I was finally beginning to gather the difference between, say, the struggle to overcome my own weaknesses—appetites, laziness, muddled thought—and the struggle to grip God, to insist, as Jacob had insisted, that He bless.

  I read long into the night, poring over the troubling terms of the heavy book in my hands, leaning into the teachings of this old man who had tasted prayer and had helped his brotherhood of monks and nuns taste it, as well. What I learned made me all the more eager to return to Simonópetra and to visit further with Father Iákovos. At the very least I knew I would write to him soon; I hoped he would realize I was writing because I must.

  What I wanted to attain—besides, perhaps, a reliable God-acquiring half nelson—was an ability to discern in prayer, as Yéronda Aimilianós puts it, “when the mouth is speaking, or the heart, or the spirit, because, in the end, it’s not the heart that should speak: it’s the spirit which should speak in the heart.”

  This grappling with God, then, turns out to be a singular means by which God’s presence in the human heart is realized. It is not, finally, my prayer that I’m after, but the prayer of the Holy Spirit in me praying, praying from the restored, noetic center of my person, my one-day recovered nous connecting me to Christ and, as it happens, His existential Body, the church.

  I read until my eyes burned, then spoke my prayers and lay down to sleep.

  Instead of sleeping, I struggled. With my hands pressed hard against my chest, I prayed the Jesus Prayer and labored to get a grip on God, but felt as if He wasn’t giving in. That’s when things seemed to get tougher, but the tálanton rang out soon thereafter to let me off the hook. I threw cold tap water on my face and hurried through cold rain across the courtyard to the katholikón, having not slept a wink.

  Once again, I was one of the first to arrive. A single monk stood praying at a chanters’ stand in the exo-narthex; a single oil lamp near him offered the only light. In that suddenly oppressive gloom, I kept at the prayer, feeling pretty much alone, feeling, frankly, lost.

  I recognized the moment as one of the apparently barren times. The elation I’d known after confession seemed like a sensation from another life, and I hunkered in a wooden stall near the icon of the Theotókos, puzzling over this sudden turn. I felt a little angry even. I felt as if I were slipping.

  And with that thought—my having slipped into melancholy—I recalled a favorite saying of Saint Isaac: “Let us not grieve when we make a slip, but when we become hardened by it.” I had, admittedly, lost some ground when I realized during my vigil of reading how little ground I had gained to begin with. That realization—and my willingness to give in to the melodrama of self-pity—now threatened to do more damage yet, to harden me even against the possibility of future progress.

  At the conclusion of the midnight prayers, I entered the nave, took my place in a likely stall, forgave myself, and—in the midst of savoring a beautiful orthros and Divine Liturgy—found my way back to life. More accurately, I found my way back to the way of life, the journey on which—it suddenly occurred to me—every juncture appears to be but the beginning.

  12

  This sickness is not unto death.

  Father Matthew caught up with me after trápeza to say good-bye. I was tempted to tell him a little about my night, my reading, my surprise attack of melancholy, but we spoke mostly about my plans to return in the spring. He gave me his e-mail address, which, under the circumstances, seemed a comic irony.

  Few of the monasteries are “wired” to the Internet, and those few are very careful with access. I was probably a little slow to catch on but realized that the kind and thoughtful Father Matthew enjoys certain duties and privileges having to do with the procurement of useful items not readily available on the Holy Mountain. He asked if I might send along an electronics catalogue when I had the chance. I said I would.

  I hurried back to my room to pack, then rushed to the gate to meet the microbus. I would ride to Karyés, board the bus for Dáfni, then take the late boat to Xenophóntos, where Father Zosimás was expecting me.

  By the time I made it to the boat, the weather had taken a very nasty turn. Whitecaps covered the surface of the sea. The boat sat rocking so violently in its ropes that the crew decided not even to attempt loading the dump truck that had been idling at the pier. The driver parked the truck and scrambled onboard with the rest of us. Had I been thinking clearly, I probably would have kept going, stayed on the boat until Ouranoúpoli, making certain I’d get to Thessaloníki in time for my flight.

  Well, maybe I wasn’t thinking clearly. At the very least, I wasn’t thinking clearly by conventional standards. All the way to Xenophóntos, I played the options over in my mind. I could disembark, visit with Father Zosimás, taste life at yet another monastery, or I could stay on the boat and spend the night in Ouranoúpoli, arriving in Thessaloníki a couple of days earlier than I’d planned. If I disembarked, I would also be able to travel to Grigoríou one more time, as I’d promised Father Damianós, to celebrate the vigil and the Feast of Saint Nicholas.

  Then a strange thing happened. As the boat churned through huge swells and squalls, I started thinking about food. Ten days of living like a monk poses a number of challenges for the dilettante pilgrim, not the least of which is hunger, genuine hunger of the sort that makes your knees tremble as you walk, your head throb as you pray. We’re given plenty to eat, really, but it’s all so doggone healthy: no meat at all, only a little fish, and, on a good many days, not even any oil or cheese. On top of that, I had been doing quite a bit of hiking on this trip—more, even, than I had in the summertime—and I’d slept no more than five hours a night, often less. I was thinking, Enough is enough. Weariness of body and weariness of soul, at that moment, conspired to keep me on the boat; I was already thinking of the lamb chops and tzatziki waiting for me in Ouranoúpoli.

  And then an even stranger thing happened. I suddenly felt ashamed for putting such things ahead of a continuing need (and, it fairly seemed, an increasing need) for prayer. As soon as I realized what was really luring me away, I put it aside, and, when soon thereafter the boat pulled away from Xenophóntos, I was already halfway to the monastery gate. Maybe I wasn’t so good at wrestling with God, but the struggle with myself was a breeze—the guy’s a wimp.

  Xenophóntos is stunningly beautiful, and apparently thriving. The monastery’s restoration seems all but complete, although new construction is underway for, significantly, a new wing of monastic cells. The original katholikón—near the guest house, the trápeza, and adjacent chapels dedicated to Saint Demétrios and Saint Lazarus, respectively—dates from the eleventh century and continues to be used; a newer, exc
eedingly spacious katholikón (the largest among the ruling monasteries, and second in size only to the enormous katholikón at Saint Andrew’s Skete) has been erected in the center of the compound, near the bell tower. Its marble iconostasis and inlaid marble floor are the most beautiful I have seen. The guest house (reminiscent of the one at Vatopédi) appears very like a well-designed pension; and I was astonished to learn that the monastery is equipped to offer hospitality to as many as two thousand visitors at a time. My room on the second floor overlooked the arsanás, where the sea seemed to have calmed a bit. Waves continued to splash over the concrete pier, but less violently.

  After I’d settled in, I asked the guest master about Father Zosimás. He led me to the ground floor of the bell tower, where we found the young monk busy at his task of preparing wooden boards for the iconographers at work in the tower above. He welcomed me with a warm embrace and the offer of hot tea; I accepted both.

  During our visit, he led me up the bell tower to see the state-of-the-art iconography studios above. A good many monasteries and sketes support their existence with the production of icons, and, admittedly, any icon manifests beauty, offers a sense of the intersection of visible and invisible presence. Even so, the level of accomplishment—the craft and artistry displayed in the icons at Xenophóntos—spoke to yet another level of discipline and devotion. From the preparation of the carefully selected wooden boards on the ground floor to the final buffing of the golden inlay on the fourth floor—and clearly at every laborious step along the way—the loving attention paid to each image-in-the-making was unmistakably superior. These were among the most beautiful and most powerfully affecting icons I have ever seen.

  Not surprisingly, following our visit, vespers was sweet as ever, resounding with particular brightness in the marbled vault of the new katholikón. After trápeza, Father Zosimás walked me to the guest house for conversation and coffee. He had first come to Athos as a seminary student whose professors had encouraged him to make a pilgrimage to Mount Athos before the duties of parish and family life would make such a journey more difficult to arrange, less likely to happen.