Short Trip to the Edge

by Scott Cairns

  I saw that the only thing I could do was to accept the kindness. He offered me food and coffee. When we had eaten, he pulled a two-liter bottle of ouzo from the cupboard.

  And thus we spent an interesting night, swapping pictures of our families, sharing a good portion of that bottle, and trading words in Greek, Romanian, and English. We laughed a lot, though I wasn’t always sure exactly why.

  About 2:00 a.m. Florin left for a while, coming back to issue what I took, initially, to be a surprising invitation to get out of his apartment. “Tomorrow boat come. Tomorrow boat no come. You go!”

  “Ne,” I said. “Ávrio, I go.”

  “Ávrio,” he said, “boat come, no come, you go. Speedboat.”

  “Okay,” I said, starting to get it, “what speedboat?”

  “Sophia, you go Sophia.”

  Over the course of the next hour, amid several more rounds of ouzo, the plan began to take dim shape in my mind. Father Metrophánes had made certain that Stelios, Argyris, and I would have seats on the Sophia, the only boat guaranteed to be running in the morning. All I had to do was be sure to show up at the pier by 8:00 a.m.

  I was relieved that I’d be getting to Ouranoúpoli in the morning, but even more relieved to realize that Florín hadn’t been telling me I wasn’t welcome. We pretty much polished off the ouzo, and called it a night.

  When I woke up, I was alone in the apartment. A mug of lukewarm coffee sat next to me on the bedside table. I drank it down, and hurried to the pier dragging my pack. The crowd was back to its full complement, probably five hundred men, all of whom appeared to be in a bad mood, anxious to learn about the boats.

  Argyris and Stelios found me immediately. “We were looking for you, Isaák!”

  They had already bought my ticket and refused to let me pay them back. Quite surprisingly, Stelios expressed “embarrassment” that they hadn’t been able to take better care of me the day before. This baffled me for a while, but as I got to know him better, I realized that, for Stelios, hospitality is quite a serious matter, both a duty and a joy.

  When the Sophia arrived at the dock, the crowd appeared very like a mob, with a good third of the five hundred men pressing to buy their way aboard. The uniformed customs agents were able to escort the forty men with tickets—our trio included—to the boat without incident.

  Once we were underway, Stelios came to where I was sitting and asked how I was getting to Thessaloníki. I told him I would take the bus. “No, you won’t,” he said.

  The trip that would have taken us two hours on the Áxion Estín was accomplished in about forty minutes. We disembarked at the pier, and my new friends showed me the way to Stelios’s car. We drove the “quick way” back (taking a little less than two hours) and drove Argyris directly to the clinic where his patients awaited their cancer treatments.

  On the way to my hotel, Stelios asked if I wouldn’t rather come stay with him and his family. Had I not been as filthy as I was—two weeks without hot water, and two days without so much as a cold Athonite shower—I would have accepted; as it was, I told Stelios that I’d need a good hot bath before anyone should let me anywhere near his house or his family. He laughed, but insisted that he pick me up later for dinner.

  So that was how—once I had to let go of my own, failed plans—the Body of Christ took up the slack. In the evening, Stelios fetched me at the curb and took me to his home, where I met his wife—Sophia, as it happens—and their son, Tryfonas. They fed me, gave me to drink, shared their stories with me, attended with great interest to my own meandering story, and sent me home loaded with gifts for my family and our young parish back home.

  My new rule: whenever things go wrong, wait and see what better thing is coming.

  Meanwhile, the excellent Barbara Davis had gotten me a seat on the morning flight, as well as timely connections all the way to St. Louis. I was home about twenty-four hours later.

  13

  …not without honor, save in his own country.

  I had pretty much decided as early as September that, sooner rather than later, I’d be making a trip to Saint Anthony’s Monastery in Arizona. The oddness of my first day on Mount Athos—exacerbated by a complex mix of tragedy and elation—had been punctuated late in the evening by two casual questions from Father Iosíf. He’d asked if I had been to Saint Anthony’s, and he’d asked if I had sought out Elder Ephrém, the man who had been Philothéou’s abbot for many years before leaving the Holy Mountain to establish monasteries in America.

  No and no had been my answers.

  An exceedingly puzzled look had been his response.

  His perplexity, as I have come to understand it, had to do with his wondering why I would travel more than five thousand miles in search of a guide into the prayer of the heart when one of the most revered elders of Mount Athos lived (with several other adepts) less than a thousand miles from my home in Missouri.

  To which I would have to say, I’m not exactly sure.

  Beyond that, over the intervening months, the memory of Father Iosíf’s puzzlement has led me to another perplexity: why had my hunger for the fullness of the faith and my desire for genuine prayer taken me so far from the church I had loved as a child, so far from the community that had sparked my desire for God in the first place?

  I’m still mulling that one over, too.

  In any event, I felt then that I should set out to see what I might see—to learn what I might taste and see—in a monastic community closer to home. On the Thursday of Bright Week (the week following Holy Pascha—Easter, to most folks), I landed in Phoenix late in the evening, picked up my rental car, and headed southeast to Florence. Father Markéllos, the guest master and apparent bookstore manager, had instructed me through a phone call to Seraphima that if I didn’t get to the monastery by 8:00 p.m. I should wait until 12:30 a.m. to enter. The monks would be unavailable in the meantime, and my arrival within that space of time would mean that someone would have to depart from his routine—perhaps even his prayer—to tend to me.

  That would be a bad thing.

  So, as I surely would not be able to arrive before 8:00 p.m., I planned to arrive sometime around 10:00 and to sit reading in the car until 12:30 a.m. As it happened, I didn’t have to wait that long at all, not in the monastery parking lot anyway. On my way to Saint Anthony’s, I happened upon a burning bush.

  Well, several of them.

  A whole desert of burning bushes.

  A wildfire had broken out the day before, and I ended up doing most of my waiting behind a roadblock about six miles shy of the monastery. By the time the Forest Service called an “all clear,” it was nearly midnight, and I rolled into the gravel parking lot about fifteen minutes later.

  Along the way, I had driven a mile or so between burning grasses, mesquite, and saguaro cacti. In particular, one huge mesquite bush about fifteen feet high—less than five feet off the road—was fully engulfed in flame as I drove past it. It was my own burning bush in the desert. I didn’t hear any voices, but I may have been getting something of a message, even so.

  Minutes later, I sat in my parked car admiring the brilliant night sky bursting with stars, and gazing to the north where the horizon glowed red from the wildfire. At the far end of the expansive gravel lot, three Forest Service fire trucks and their attendant crews were holding the line against any flare-ups that might send the fire in our direction. I could see their silhouettes—the trucks, as well as the men themselves—vividly magnified before a backdrop of red glow. As I watched the surreal scene, I tried to focus on why I had come.

  To say the least, my search for a spiritual father had not gone exactly as planned. Early in my year of pilgrimage, I had supposed that I would find a likely elder on my first visit to the Holy Mountain—maybe even early in that visit—and that I would be able to make two subsequent trips to seek his continuing guidance regarding prayer. As it turned out, two journeys to Mount Athos had already come and gone, and I had yet to find that father.

 
; That particular disappointment had led to my supposing that what I’d been seeking in Greece may have been waiting all along, much closer to home. I would be at Saint Anthony’s for an entire week, and I hoped to meet both Yéronda Ephrém, the elder, and Yéronda Paísios, the abbot. Both men hear confessions at the monastery, and each serves as spiritual father to the community of monks and to the many pilgrims who arrive there every day.

  I hunkered in the car and said the prayer. I recalled a particular saying of the monks, made in response to any request of their elders, as well as to any overt expression of their own hearts: “May it be blessed.”

  That’s what I said as I stepped out of the car and onto the gravel lot; that’s what I kept repeating as my crunching steps took me to the gate.

  As soon as I’d passed through, I was in the waiting area—a terra-cotta sandstone patio with a large and elegant gazebo structure—immediately to the left of the entryway. Just beyond the gazebo stood the bookstore building where I’d been told to meet Father Markéllos. Even in the moonlight, I could see that the monastery was like a lush oasis, with garden after garden stretching far into the night. At that moment, a light went on inside the cell beside the bookstore, and I saw that my host was on his way to meet me. A small monk opened the door and stepped out. He saw me standing there in the dark and asked if I was Isaac.

  This was not, I learned, Father Markéllos, but rather the surprisingly young—in his early twenties, maybe—Father Nikódimos, who welcomed me with almost painful shyness and asked me to follow him to the guest house. He led me without another word; rather, he led me saying what I took to be the Jesus Prayer—albeit in Greek—under his breath, punctuated like a cadence beginning with an audible KÝrie. The sandstone path wound through an expanse of palm trees, flowering trees, and cacti to the men’s guest house.

  Inside, Father Nikódimos showed me to my room and told me that the midnight service would begin at 3:30. Then he made a beeline for the door, still whispering the prayer.

  I would spend a full week at Saint Anthony’s, worshiping for the most part in the central katholikón (dedicated to Saints Anthony and Nectários), but also in Saint George’s Church and Saint Nicholas’s Church, and praying alone in Saint Demétrios’s Chapel. I was also able to venerate relics in a small chapel dedicated to Saint Panteleímon the Healer. Other chapels on the grounds are dedicated to Saint Seraphim of Sarov and to Saint John the Baptist. The place is immense, and apparently growing, with every detail of construction undertaken with uppermost care.

  The monastery was established in 1995 when Yéronda Ephrém, the abbot of Philothéou on the Holy Mountain, sent six Athonite monks to land they had acquired in the Sonoran desert of Arizona. Before this, Yéronda Ephrém had led in the repopulation and restoration of no fewer than four monasteries on the Holy Mountain, as well as several women’s monasteries in mainland Greece. He had visited Canada and the United States in 1979, and was moved to action by a perceived lack of monastic support for the Orthodox Christians of North America.

  The six monks set immediately to work, drilling a well, building the first katholikón, the living space for the monks, the trápeza, and guest houses for men and women. With water from a very deep and munificent well, they began irrigating their little corner of the desert, developing a veritable oasis with extensive vegetable gardens, a vineyard, citrus orchards, and an olive grove. Today, the many churches and chapels, the array of wooden and stone structures are all connected by an elaborate system of gardens, pathways, and pergolas with Spanish fountains. I would walk the entirety of the grounds during my week there, never quite managing to get my mind around the reach of the monastery’s lush expanse. It was evident, even so, that further construction is underway; the trápeza was being added to, nearly doubling its size; newer fountains and chapels on the periphery and new sandstone and slate paths signaled that the vision continues, extends.

  The brotherhood at Saint Anthony’s now exceeds forty monks. There is also a community of nuns living nearby, under the protection of the monastery and served by its priests and elders. During the week I was there—a relatively slow week by local standards—there were easily fifty pilgrims on any given day, as well. The monks range in age from their late teens to, I’d guess, men in their sixties. Elder Ephrém himself is now nearly eighty, but the majority of the fathers seem to be relatively young men, with a surprising number in their twenties. This strikes me, alternately, as a remarkable tribute and a remarkable weirdness. That a good dozen men in their late teens and early twenties have already and so definitively turned away from their culture’s commonplace self-indulgence in favor of áscesis is stunning, however you slice it. Some critics—including the parents of some of these men—feel it to be an excess, a perversion; others recognize it as a laudable decision to pursue theosis, regardless of how such a choice may appear to those on the outside.

  During my week there, I was able to work side by side with several of these young monks—three in particular—and I was struck by how happy, how full of joy they were. I washed and dried dishes with Father Ioánnis, I set and cleared the tables in trápeza with Father Efthémios, and I dug irrigation ditches with Father Nectários. These young men all seemed genuinely to savor their lives of obedience and prayer. I was especially moved by the sweet contentment and powerful sense of calm presence manifested by Father Nectários—a thin, wiry young man who, I’m pretty sure, couldn’t have been more than twenty-two, and who couldn’t have seemed more at home with his vocation.

  We spent three hot afternoons digging ditches and replacing irrigation junctions; he was unfailingly thoughtful, articulate, and cheerful. Off and on, through the grove of lemon trees, I’d hear him chuckling to himself as he dug, and I’d often hear through the leaves a quiet “Dóxa to Theó”—glory be to God.

  On the other hand, my week at Saint Anthony’s was recurrently troubled by another, unfortunately familiar phenomenon that stood in stark contrast to the spirit manifested by the monks themselves. Since its founding, the monastery has attracted a surrounding community of what I would call dour Orthodox families, many of them converts to Orthodoxy. For several miles along the main road leading to Saint Anthony’s, something of a building boom is evident. There are perhaps forty new houses built on or near monastery land.

  The part that troubles me is very hard to talk about, and perhaps it is impossible to talk about without falling into sin myself. I suppose, therefore, that I may as well sin boldly, if only in hopes of clarifying what I now believe to be a somewhat debilitating disposition, and one that might distract others from the essential joy that lies at the heart of the faith.

  Sometimes I think there are two Orthodoxies (as, perhaps, there are two Christianities)—the mystical faith of those who glimpse how little we know (and are drawn and driven by love), and the cranky faith of those who know everything already (and wish the rest of us would either catch up or disappear).

  To be sure, there is no shortage of proposition offered by the Orthodox Church, in particular those propositions pronounced in the Nicene Creed and in the conciliar canons of the church. That said, within the church (and now I mean throughout both Orthodoxy and non-Orthodox Christendom), one is likely to come across two vividly distinct understandings of those propositions; the two understandings are so different that one might wonder if the diverse members actually are of one body, or if these differences reveal separate religions practiced by people sitting or standing side by side in worship.

  How one understands these propositions (as well as how one understands the status of the scripture from which most proposition and practice spring) pretty much sorts out the faithful into their respective camps. Some receive these propositions and paraphrases as dynamic, inexhaustible, provisional glimpses along an endless path, and others retain them as static, comprehensive, and conclusive. Some would hold that these propositions enable the beginning of our journey to meaning, while others see them as fixed certainties marking the journey’s end. />
  The generous (and, I think, the correct) view is not confined to Orthodoxy. Martin Luther wrote of scripture that in it “God stammers with us as a nursemaid with a child.” Karl Barth insisted that we understand scripture as “the witness to the Revelation,” and that we realize that Christ Himself—in all His infinite and indefinable glory—is the Revelation.

  Saint Isaac of Syria says it like this: “Holy Scripture says many things through allegory and often employs figurative language…. Do not approach the words of the mysteries contained in the divine Scriptures without prayer, beseeching God for help; rather, say: Lord, grant me to perceive the power in them!”

  In each of these, one apprehends the writer’s sense of the Enormity beyond the proposition, his sense of a Truth that cannot be circumscribed, much less merely scribed, or—as it often seems to me—reduced to paraphrase.

  There appear to be, as well, two distinct expressions of piety, and both are abundantly available throughout Christendom; Orthodoxy is not spared the dichotomy. One flavor of piety is manifested by monks like Fathers Nectários, Damianós, and Iákovos, men who undergo even the most strenuous áscesis smiling. The other flavor is manifested by the pilgrim at Great Lavra I called the sheriff, the man who shushed us and rapped the knuckles of my friend who’d reached across the table for an olive. The first sort privileges, I’d say, the resurrection; the second sort privileges the crucifixion. The first manifests gladness in all things; the second affects a severe and suffering visage. The first seems to be running to something; the second seems, primarily, to be running from something.