Short Trip to the Edge

by Scott Cairns

  Evidently, that one trip was all it took for Father Zosimás; he never returned to the States. We spoke late into the evening, and in his calm, quiet voice—telling me his story, showing genuine interest in mine—he helped me to recognize what stillness looked like from the outside. His conversation was woven with the writings of the fathers, whose words he had internalized, made his own.

  I was awake—and quite suddenly—well before the call of the tálanton. I went to the balcony of the guest house to begin my prayer. The air was still quite crisp, but the wind had let up overnight and the sky had cleared. Countless stars filled the sky, and their countless reflections streaked the sea, which continued to swell.

  In the midst of my prayer, I had a delicious sense—oddly concurrent—of both God’s enormity and His absolute nearness. I suppose I might have said that I stopped praying at that point; more truly, I think, I found myself more deeply in prayer, and speechless.

  I’m not sure how long this lasted, but I was drawn out of that moment by the familiar clatter of the tálanton. I made my way across the monastery grounds to the new katholikón.

  This odd sensation—was it a sinking beneath the language of prayer? a descent to the heart? a taste of stillness?—returned to me throughout the midnight service, orthros, and notably during the Great Entrance of the liturgy itself.

  When I received the Holy Mysteries, I came upon a new and powerful apprehension, as if at the tongue something in me were meeting with itself.

  Forgive the cliché, but I tasted, and I saw.

  I don’t suppose I can say this any more clearly, though I’m guessing that what I’m writing now is of scant help. This will have to do: there is a moment when petition is eclipsed by presence, and that is as close as I have come, so far, to the prayer I’ve been seeking.

  Right after the Divine Liturgy, I said my good-byes to Father Zosimás, thanking him for his hospitality; I skipped trápeza in order to catch the early boat back to Dáfni. I was able to score a coffee and a toast onboard, then sat on the open deck to enjoy the rocking cruise. The weather had settled a bit during the previous twenty-four hours, and I was grateful that I could spend my last nights on Athos celebrating the vigil and the Feast of Saint Nicholas at Grigoríou.

  Father Damianós greeted me with another pot of American-style coffee, eager to hear how my journey had gone. Robin Amis was also still there, and I was treated to a sneak peek at their nearly completed translation of Abbot George’s book on theosis.

  As I read, I kept thinking that my experience during communion at Xenophóntos had occasioned a new sense of much of what met me on the printed page, there in the archondaríki kitchen. For one thing, I had a renewed sense that the animating life within us, by appalling grace, is mystically congruent with the very Life we receive partaking of the cup.

  A great many scattered apprehensions and apparently serendipitous experiences seemed to be coming together now at the end of my second pilgrimage. I found myself taking care not to make too much of their convergence. On the one hand, I was pleased to think that God had actually led me there, that He was actively showing me something I needed to see. On the other hand, I was wary of the hubris of imagining such immediate direction.

  It would have been handy to have had, say, a spiritual father to help me sort it out.

  In any case, the monastery was bustling in preparation for the vigil and the feast. As I’ve mentioned, the general rule is that no one is turned away from a monastery’s festal celebrations, and the fathers were expecting somewhere in the neighborhood of four hundred pilgrims for the weekend.

  In the midst of these many preparations, the sky went black in midafternoon. The weather turned from rough to violent within the space of about fifteen minutes. From the northern headland, a small speedboat, the Sophia, came bounding over the waves to deliver a somewhat shaken bishop and his entourage from Thessaloníki; the bishop would be presiding over the vigil.

  His would be the last arrival, save for a handful of monks hiking in from Saint Paul’s and Dionysíou.

  The expected hundreds of pilgrims were probably languishing in Ouranoúpoli or already returning home, having been unable to board the Áxion Estín, which had suspended service.

  Once more, it occurred to me that I might have trouble getting home; still, I wasn’t overly concerned, given that I had two and a half days before my morning flight from Thessaloníki. Father Damianós adopted a nearly comic disposition toward the matter, reporting with a big smile that the boats had been suspended for two weeks about this time the previous year, and saying that if the boats never ran again I could become a monk. “I’m sure your wife will understand,” he said, grinning.

  In the meantime, the dearth of guests freed Father Damianós from a number of duties he otherwise would have had to attend to, and we took advantage of the time to talk; he also showed me around the monastery.

  The most memorable part of my tour was the cemetery and the cemetery chapel, just outside the southernmost gate and poised on a narrow terrace between the steep slope above the monastery and the sheer cliff (maybe a two-hundred-foot vertical drop) upon which the monastery is built. He showed me the chapel, pointing out some of the unusual frescoes of the narthex, the close quarters of the nave and altar space. This is the chapel where, I gathered, Father Damianós most often celebrates the liturgy with a handful of his brothers. When we’d ducked our heads to exit the tight doorway, we stood at the cliff edge for a good ten minutes, looking out at that amazing sea in silence. As I was turning to head back toward the katholikón and the refectory, Father Damianós asked if I’d yet seen the ossuary. I had not.

  Observed from the outside, the Orthodox manner with the dead—which is, as it happens, the early church’s manner—can seem a little strange. For starters, the dead are unlikely to be spoken of as dead. They are asleep. Since the Resurrection, Christian people do not die per se. They fall asleep. They are said to have fallen asleep in the Lord.

  Let that “in” trouble the air for a moment.

  On Mount Athos, when a monk falls asleep, he is buried—as most Orthodox are buried whenever the laws of the land allow it—unembalmed.

  One other curiosity to note: rigor mortis does not happen on Mount Athos. You may think I’m kidding. I’m not. You’re wondering why such a trivial matter is of consequence. I wonder the same thing. For whatever reason—and I can think of nary a one—when these monks fall asleep, their bodies remain from deathbed to wooden coffin to tiny cemetery plot, pliant and weighty—as if they were simply asleep. Father Damianós apprehends this phenomenon as a gift to the monks, a special gift from a loving God.

  But back to the general practice. The first Orthodox funeral I ever attended was at Holy Trinity Church in Santa Fe, New Mexico, just down the road from Saint John’s College, where I, off and on, take part in the Glen/Image Workshops that meet there every summer. I showed up at Holy Trinity for Sunday liturgy with my friend Warren Farha, an Antiochian Orthodox fella from Wichita and the proprietor of an incomparable bookstore, Eighth Day Books. We saw the coffin as soon as we stepped inside.

  Like a good many Orthodox churches, this church was without pews or chairs. In such cases, parishioners generally stand for the duration of the services, though chairs are available for the elderly, the infirm, and small children. When the homily rolls around, some folks take the opportunity to sit or hunker on the floor, especially if the pastor tends to wax (let’s say) toward the windy.

  On this morning, the parishioners stood around a wooden coffin resting on three sawhorses in the very center of the sanctuary. The coffin was open, and lying prominently among that community of the faithful was an elderly man—asleep.

  I was initially startled, then strangely moved.

  Whereas popular culture has, for the most part, removed death and dying far from view—nudging death itself to the very periphery of collective consciousness—here was a practice insisting that the phenomenon be given center stage. Throughout the liturgy
that followed, family and friends continued to worship by his side. Children and adults both turned to him throughout the service, as if to see if he was comfortable, attending to him as if he were still present.

  And, frankly, he was. During the communion hymn, one slight girl with straight dark hair reached up and laid her right hand upon his two hands, pale, cold, and crossed upon his chest. She held his hands like that until it was her turn to approach the cup.

  When my own father died, we missed out on most of this. Following a nearly forty-eight-hour vigil in his hospital room—during most of which he had struggled to breathe, nearly panting in his efforts—it was with some relief that we watched him take his last few breaths—made easier by morphine—and settle into…sleep. We wept, of course, but we had little in our experience to help us attend as fully to his body—attend to him—as we might have or as, perhaps, we should have. I’ve written about this experience before, in a poem called “Regarding the Body”:

  I too was a decade coming to terms

  with how abruptly my father had died.

  And still I’m lying about it. His death

  was surely as incremental, slow-paced

  as any, and certainly as any

  I had witnessed. Still, as we met around him

  that last morning—none of us unaware

  of what the morning would bring—I was struck

  by how quickly he left us. And the room

  emptied—comes to me now—far too quickly.

  If impiety toward the dead were still

  deemed sin, it was that morning our common

  trespass, to have imagined too readily

  his absence, to have all but denied him

  as he lay, simply, present before us.

  What comes to me now is that in our turning away so soon afterward, we missed something both precious and sustaining—something the folks at Holy Trinity in Santa Fe did not miss, and something that the monks of Mount Athos are also careful to retain.

  Father Damianós pulled a key from his pocket and led the way down three narrow steps to a door beneath ground level in the foundation of the cemetery chapel. He pushed that door open and invited me to enter. There was hardly room for the two of us, stooping beneath the low ceiling, for the space was all but taken up with bins of stacked bones and rows lined with skulls.

  Vertigo was immediate, and powerful. I had to place my hand on the ceiling to keep my bearings. I recognized the large bucket at my feet: it was the one that had held bones earlier in the year when I was returning to Grigoríou along the trail here. Those bones had been the remains of a monk who had fallen asleep some three years before, and whose bones had on that day been retrieved from the small cemetery plot. His grave, in the meantime, had been used to inter another father who had fallen asleep.

  Father Damianós waited with me without saying a word, letting the “memory of death” do its efficacious work.

  Back outside, we stood a while longer at the edge of the cliff; the sea had become wild.

  I would remain at Grigoríou for two nights. The first was taken up with the festal vigil. The second was something of a private vigil, as I barely slept, keeping my eyes on the sea, praying that it would settle enough to allow the boats to run. If I didn’t catch the boat in the morning—or, at the very least, catch the last boat of the afternoon—I would not make it to Thessaloníki in time for my flight. It was, moreover, the week before Christmas, and the odds that I’d get a seat on any subsequent flight were pretty slim.

  Father Damianós knocked on my door before the tálanton and told me he had heard that the Agía Ánna would certainly not be coming here that morning; there was a chance—if a slight one—that the Áxion Estín would make it as far as Dáfni. He suggested that I hike to Simonópetra, then walk the road to Dáfni. If I left by 7:00, he said, I might catch Father Iákovos between liturgy and trápeza, to learn if he had any ideas about getting me home. The tálanton sounded out, and Father Damianós left to prepare for the service. I finished packing and hurried to the katholikón.

  At the end of orthros, I venerated the icons one last time and slipped out before liturgy to begin my climb to Simonópetra. The rain was intermittent, but my clothes were soaked through and I was gasping for breath—my legs burning—when I hobbled into the courtyard forty-five minutes later. I believe I set a record for that stretch of trail.

  The fathers were still in services when I finally collapsed in the archondaríki, but one of the younger monks passing by recognized me and asked, “Isaák, where did you come from?”

  I told him about my situation, and he told me how doubtful it was that the boats would be running, even as far as Dáfni. I suggested that maybe I’d try walking to Ouranoúpoli, which he first took to be a joke, then—I gathered from his suddenly puzzled scowl—took to be a sign of my foolishness. “No, not possible,” he said. “I’ll get Father Iákovos.”

  I was not the only one potentially stranded for the moment, though I might have been the only one who would be missing a plane as a result. When Father Iákovos arrived in the archondaríki, he was accompanied by two men from Thessaloníki, longtime friends of the monastery, Stelios Zarganes and Argyris Doumas. They too needed to get home, if possible, that day. For one thing, Argyris—whose nuclear medicine clinic is the busiest in the city—had many patients to see.

  Long story made short: Father Iákovos and Father Metrophánes made many phone calls in an attempt to find us a way to Ouranoúpoli, but even the chartered taxi-boats weren’t running. The fathers, however, did arrange to have us driven to Dáfni in the monastery’s Land Rover.

  As I prepared to go, Father Iákovos returned from his cell with a final gift: a large icon of Saint Isaac of Syria, my name saint. “Do you think you have room in your pack for this?” he asked.

  We embraced, and he whispered, “I’ll be praying. Don’t be anxious. See what comes.”

  When we arrived in Dáfni, I was astonished to see the crowd of men—well over five hundred of them—languishing at the pier. Most seemed fairly content with the situation, but a few were already showing some of the anxiety I was feeling, rushing about, raising their voices in anger, insulting some of the dockworkers as if it were their fault that the boats weren’t running.

  I have to admit that, for the preceding twelve hours, I had managed to let that very anxiety erode most of the stillness I had cultivated during these two weeks on the Holy Mountain. It was as if a switch had been thrown in the back of my brain, effectively delivering me right back into the world of the minute hand; it had been, for a good twelve hours, as if I hadn’t learned a thing.

  I suddenly remembered—and wrote in my journal that very minute—something W. H. Auden had observed: The opposite of faith is not doubt, but anxiety. I did my best to flip the switch back. As the hours dragged on, I found my way back to being—as Sohsen might have said—here, now, waiting to see what would come.

  A good bit did come, but nary a boat. I met several folks there at the pier, shared food and wine with a group of young men who’d set up camp in the café patio, was blessed by an elder who happened by. I managed to find a cozy corner of the patio that was out of the wind, and settled in to read. I pulled Yéronda Aimilianós’s book from my pack and leaned into it.

  The next fourteen hours passed in an intensely introspective cycle. I would read for a while, get up to stretch my legs, browse through the few shops there at the landing, stand at the edge of the concrete pier, pray the prayer, return to my corner and to my book. I seemed to be in silent conversation the entire time; even when I was in actual conversation with another pilgrim or a monk, I was conscious that God was very near, listening. I worked very hard to listen back.

  At one point, I was able to reach my wife, Marcia, by card telephone to tell her that I would certainly be missing my plane. I asked her to talk to our travel agent, the excellent Barbara Davis, to see if she could get me on a subsequent flight. I wouldn’t know until the next afternoon if she’d been
able to do so.

  As afternoon dimmed and darkened to evening, most of the crowd dispersed by bus, microbus, and Land Rover to monasteries and sketes where they had found—or hoped to find—shelter. I was loathe to flip that particular switch, engaging the anxious-mode once again. I took a deep breath, looked around, and decided that the patio was as good a place as any to spend the night. By 9:00 p.m. I had—I thought—settled in for a night of reading and praying. At about 10:00 p.m. the power generator was shut off, and the patio went black; I dug into my pack for the bundle of beeswax tapers I’d packed for home. With an empty beer bottle as my candle stand, I kept reading.

  There were still a hundred or so men hunkered down in pockets around the landing. Conversation and occasional singing could be heard from all corners of the darkened port. Off and on, what I took to be a punch line would be nearly shouted and followed by hoots of laughter.

  About midnight, I was surprised to hear a voice call out from the darkness, “Isaák? Íse edó?”—Isaac? You’re here? It was Argyris. He and Stelios had found beds in the guest house that Simonópetra keeps at Dáfni. Their friend, the port supervisor, Father Metrophánes, had been able to find places for them.

  Argyris was chagrined that I hadn’t gone up to one of the monasteries and insisted that I not stay where I was. “You’ll freeze,” he said. He had been taking a walk with Florín, one of the many Romanian laborers working for Simonópetra at Dáfni; and now I could hear him in conversation with Florín. I gathered that they were talking about me.

  Florin was nodding as Argyris turned back to me and announced, “Florín has a place for you.”

  The place Florín had was his own. I followed my two rescuers across the darkened port to a ramshackle two-story building at the back of the complex. We climbed to the second floor to the small room Florín shared with another Romanian worker. I could see that he was pulling his things off the larger bed and putting them on a bare mattress on the upper level of a bunk bed across the room. Clearly, he was giving me his own bed.