by Scott Cairns
Following trápeza, we venerated the relics in the katholikón, and, in particular, Ben was able to feel for himself the warmth of Saint Mary Magdalene’s hand on his lips. “Hey,” he said, “you weren’t kidding.”
Father Theológos—the priest charged with the care of the relics—blessed our prayer ropes with the relics, and we headed out to meet Father Iákovos and Dr. Nick in the archondaríki, where Nick was “on duty.” After another round of loukoúmi and coffee, Ben and I strolled down the slope with Father Iákovos to his dental office, where he brewed his customary pot of mountain tea. We sat on the balcony outside—at the very brink of the rock face—savoring the cool evening, the hot tea, the astonishing view of the sea. A good number of bats added an impressive air show in the expanse before us.
We talked of many things, but mostly about cultivating a life of prayer. Father Iákovos shared some insights he’d gained from his Yéronda Aimilianós; in particular, he said to Ben, “Just as our lungs breathe air, so our souls breathe prayer. Our souls cannot develop, cannot survive without prayer.”
I was content to sit quietly, attending to Ben’s instruction from Father Iákovos, breathing the prayer in silence.
Late in the evening, Father Iákovos asked Ben what he planned to be when he grew up. Ben’s answer surprised even me. “I was thinking I might want to become a priest.”
I hadn’t heard about any such thinking.
Father Iákovos asked, “What about being a monk?”
Now, Ben is probably as good-hearted, as sensitive to other people’s feelings as any kid you’re likely to meet, so I know it was hard for him to say what he said next. “I would be a monk…except that I want to have a wife and kids. I like my family; I want to have one just like it.”
“Ah,” said Father Iákovos, “those are good plans. You probably shouldn’t be a monk then.” He was smiling broadly as he refilled our cups.
As Ben and I walked back up the cobbles to the guest house, he stopped midway in the path, turned to look out at the amazing night sky over the sea, breathed a big sigh, and said, with a skateboarder’s inflection, “Whoa, this is sweet!”
If I had been concerned that Ben would be slow to rise for the midnight services, that concern vanished when he was the one who woke me at 3:00 a.m., five minutes before the tálanton sounded. You have to know a bit about our “normal” lives to appreciate this phenomenon. Like most fourteen-year-olds, Ben pretty much has to be dragged out of bed most mornings. On weekends he can easily sleep until noon or later, regardless of when he went to bed.
He was dressed and ready before I was, and we climbed up the causeway to the katholikón well before any other pilgrims, and ahead of many monks.
I had been anxious, as well, that Ben wouldn’t be able to stay alert, or even awake, through the nearly four hours of worship—but I shouldn’t have worried. His eyes were bright with interest from the first prayers to the last.
In the midst of orthros, Father Makários, the priest who was serving at the altar during our stay, stepped over to us and asked if he could borrow Ben for a moment. They disappeared for about ten minutes, returning just before Father Makários needed to return to the altar.
“What up?” I whispered to Ben.
“He showed me where I’ll be working after breakfast.” Ben was clearly pleased to be included in the work at hand. “I get to help bake the bread.”
After we’d received communion—Ben just ahead of me in line—I could hardly see my way back to my stall, having been completely undone by the sight of Ben’s receiving the Holy Mysteries on the Holy Mountain.
It is a wonderful thing to pursue the prayer of the heart, a wonderful thing to proceed along the way of a pilgrim. It is far better to proceed along that way with another.
This understanding would continue to enrich this third pilgrimage with a more poignant sense of joy, but at this moment—standing in the stall beside my son as the liturgy concluded in
“We have seen the Light, the True Light, and have received the Heavenly Spirit…”—I was convinced once and for all that the heart of the matter was our finding our way together.
As I must have suggested by now, over the years since I left home for college, salvation itself has come to mean something larger to me, fuller, more substantial, and more immediate than, say, the commonplace version of a personal, late-hour reprieve from execution, or my dodging a stint in Gehenna. For the Orthodox, salvation, or “being saved,” indicates a process rather than a moment. It is a process of being redeemed from separation from God, both now and later. It has very little to do with the popular notion of “going to heaven.” The Orthodox have insisted, from their earliest canons on the matter, that salvation belongs to all humankind, not just to members of the Orthodox Church. Of course, they also insist that the most trustworthy road to participation in the saving life of God is revealed in the traditional teaching of that church.
For me, in any case, salvation has come to mean deliverance, and now, from the death-in-life routine for which we often settle—the somnambulate life for which I have often settled. Somehow related to this is another, developing sense that while salvation happens to persons, it is not a simply personal manner.
I like very much the response that a wonderful priest gave to a man who asked him recently if Jesus Christ was his personal savior: “Nope,” he said, “I like to share him.”
Thanks to that priest and the tradition he manifests, I have a developing sense that salvation must have to do with all of us, collectively, and that it must have to do with all else, as well—all of creation, in fact.
It turns out that I am not alone in thinking this.
My reading in the fathers and the mothers of the church—as well as my late return to what I would call midrashic Bible-reading—has me thinking that all creation is implicated in this phenomenon we call salvation, redemption, reconciliation. Like the late theologian John Romanídes, I’ve come to suspect that our saving relationship with God is “as the Body of Christ,” not a discrete, individualized, private relationship but a membership in a Body that is at once both alive and life-giving.
I have a number of beloved friends, men and women whom, if you were to meet them, you would recognize immediately as genuinely spiritual people, but some of whom have yet to find a body to which to belong. They are, as I say, beautiful, kind, deeply spiritual believers of one stripe or another; they also share, paradoxically, a compelling hunger for community, which they intentionally pursue in a number of worthwhile activities—community choirs, potluck dinners, block parties, arts conferences. They also, it so happens, share an abiding sense of alienation from the Body of Christ, as that Body is expressed in the media and in their local churches. Each has also, I daresay, survived a number of clumsy, insensitive, and, frankly, idiotic ordeals in one or more of those communities.
Be that as it may, I think that—somehow or other and regardless—they must find a way home, a way to reconnect their faith to their communities and their communities to their faith, a way to reconnect, as it were, the spirit to the body. I’ve been relatively late in coming to this myself, but I see now how we are called to work this business out together, and I see that faith is not something that can be both solitary and healthy. The health and fruitfulness of the severed limb depends—utterly—upon its being grafted onto the living tree.
This is what I suspect Dietrich Bonhoeffer is reintroducing to his community when he observes in Life Together (a book in which he wrestles to reclaim some of the treasure jettisoned by the Reformation, most specifically the sacrament of confession) that “the Christ in one’s own heart is weaker than the Christ in the heart of one’s brother.” He insists that the presence of the brother or, rather, the presence of Christ as borne by that brother shores up one’s own faith. This is, in part, also why among the ruling monasteries of Mount Athos the aberrant idiorrythmic rule has been set aside in favor of the more deeply traditional coenobític rule.
Dwelling somewhe
re at the heart of this business lies the Orthodox understanding of the human person, an understanding that commences with the conviction that we—every one of us, of whatever religion or nonreligion—are made in the image of God, that we continue to bear His image. As the Orthodox like to say, we are written as the icon of God. What may come as news to some, even so, is that the one God is said to exist in three Persons engaged in a single perichóresis, a single circling dance, and that our trope of Trinity, then, is one way of figuring God Himself as an essentially relational being.
The Image-bearing human person—it follows—is also, necessarily, a relational being, so much so that for the Orthodox an individual is not the same thing as a person; genuine personhood stipulates the communion of one with another.
Simply put, an isolated individual does not a person make.
Similarly, I have a developing sense that salvation is not to be understood merely as a future condition, but as a moment-by-moment, present mode of being; I have begun to think that this is what Jesus was teaching when he said, “The kingdom of God is within you”(Lk. 17:21, KJV). I also think this is what he may have been getting at when he announced, “But I tell you of a truth, there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the kingdom of God” (9:27, KJV). This is yet another passage we chose not to scrutinize at the Baptist church of my youth, probably because, in what I would call our narrowly apocalyptic sense of the kingdom of God, we wondered if Jesus had misspoken. Jesus, as it turns out, did not misspeak; there were without question, among his exponentially expanding band of followers, “some standing…who would not taste death” before they had witnessed the kingdom, tasted its power, savored its abundant life.
According to the fathers, this is a kingdom, a power, and a life that is no less apprehensible now.
Abba Benjamin of Scetis, one of the more obscure and most ascetic of the desert fathers, is said to have left his spiritual children—as he lay dying—with the following paraphrase of Saint Paul’s message to the Thessalonians: “If you observe the following, you can be saved, ‘Be joyful at all times, pray without ceasing, and give thanks for all things.’” Here again, I catch a glimpse of one who is speaking from within the kingdom already. The one who apprehends the reality of God’s unfailing presence, the one who sustains ongoing conversation with that Holy Presence, is able to apprehend all things and all experiences—the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly—as purposeful. That blessed one is able, even through his or her tears, to taste and to see that the Lord is good.
And so I want very much, in other words, to be saved from what passes for myself. This is because what passes for myself does not, always, feel quite like the self framed in the image of God, and united thus with those around me, and, allegedly, growing with them into His likeness.
I’d like to replace this perennially hamstrung, broken self with the more promising image. I’d like to undergo some lasting re-pair of heart and mind, body and soul. And I see that it’s not something one does alone.
Following Ben’s shift in the bakery—he was in charge of loading the loaves into the stone oven and pulling them out with the paddle—we met in the archondaríki, where, much to my surprise, Ben lifted a shot of rakí from the tray and downed it. His eyes watered a bit, but he said, “Mmmm, that’s good.” He followed it with a cup of Greek coffee. “That’s good too,” he said. “All good.”
We then hiked a bit along the ridge behind the monastery and visited the cave of Saint Simon—where the founder of the monastery had lived before the miraculous visions that led to his establishing the brotherhood there. We also descended into the heart of the monastery itself, taking a series of stairways to the library, where the bare granite of “Simon’s rock” serves as a wall in a good many of the interior rooms.
Father Makários and Dr. Nick were busy with their translation work, but Father Makários took a break to give us a personal tour of the many ancient texts the library holds—manuscripts of patristic writers, hand copies of the Greek philosophers, the earliest printed editions of The Philokalía, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, works of Evágrios, Saint Gregory Palamás, and many other treasures.
In the evening, following trápeza, we met again with Father Iákovos. This time we were joined by several other pilgrims, including our roommate, yet another Nick, this one from Chicago, a friendly, pious man whose wife was the niece of the beloved Yéronda Aimilianós.
We sat together on a low stone wall outside the monastery gate, at the opening to the causeway that leads to the katholikón. Father Iákovos shared with us the story of his becoming a monk, how his decision had, at first, broken his father’s heart. “He told me that I had taken ten years off his life.”
When his father came to visit him at Simonópetra, he was so moved by the beauty of the Holy Mountain, the magnificence of the monastery, the love expressed by all the fathers—most especially that of Yéronda Aimilianós—that he saw what it was that had drawn his son there. He said to Father Iákovos, “I told you once that you’d taken ten years off my life. Well, you’ve given them back—ten years and more!”
Father Iákovos continued about the monk’s relationship with his parents. “It’s natural for a parent not to want this, his child, to go off to a monastery, no? When someone becomes a monk, he dies to the world! His eyes are on God alone. The monk is alive in the world, but he is dead to the world.”
He sat for a moment, looking up at the ridge above Simonópetra. We could still make out the location of Simon’s cave above us. “What parent,” he asked, “would be happy at the death of a child? This is why they weep when we come here. Still,” he brightened, “as I told my mother once, ‘Every tear you shed for the loss of your son will become a diamond in your crown.’”
Ben and I looked at each other, saying nothing.
“While I was still a novice,” Father Iákovos smiled, “Yéronda Aimilianós called me to his office. I walked in, received his blessing, and sat down. As I sat, I sighed. I didn’t mean to! It just came out on its own. He heard that sigh and immediately said, ‘Come on. Let it out. What’s troubling you?’”
Father Iákovos was very quiet for a moment, and I supposed that he was feeling the emotions of that conversation again. “I looked at him and asked, ‘Will my parents ever be at peace with my being here? Will they ever know how happy I am?’
“The Yéronda leaned forward to meet my eyes directly, and he said, ‘If you’re genuinely happy, full of joy, they will know it. The man of prayer,’ he said, ‘is very like a woman who is pregnant; as she feeds herself, she also nourishes her child. The one who prays is attached, by a spiritual cord, to everyone he ever came in contact with. As he feeds himself spiritually, he also nourishes everyone through his prayers. This is why the monk repeats, over and over again, the Jesus Prayer—he knows that as he prays for himself, he prays for everyone else. His prayer is universal.’”
Father Iákovos was beaming now. “That was all I needed to hear.”
This was also when I learned that Father Iákovos was not yet a priest, because he then told us that in just a few weeks, on July 13th—less than a month after our visit—he would be ordained into the holy priesthood, and his father would be arriving for the event.
I, however, realized that time was running out for us; Ben and I would be leaving after trápeza in the morning. So I jumped in with some thoughts that had been gnawing at me. I told Father Iákovos that I had gone to Saint Anthony’s Monastery in Arizona hoping to find, as he had suggested, a father closer to home.
And I admitted how conflicted I’d felt during my visit there, that I’d been drawn to the joy manifested by the monk but somewhat repelled by the severity, the apparent joylessness of many who worshiped there, using the monastery’s katholikón as their parish church.
I was conscious of not wanting to speak too candidly, too critically, in front of Ben about how some expressions of Orthodoxy in general, and of monasticism in particular, struck me as more like
ly than others; still, if I was mistaken, I wanted very much to be corrected.
I trusted Father Iákovos to correct me if he saw fit. He sat back and listened silently. Then he expressed concern about a monastery church becoming a parish for people who might live nearby, but he also spoke about the great blessing it is for those same people to have a monastery close to home. “It is a phenomenon occurring throughout history,” he said. “People have always run to the desert to see an ascetic or visit a monastery. And they often build dwellings around the cave of an ascetic! Just as the hymn announces—‘the desert has blossomed as a lily, O Lord!’”
He agreed with me, even so, that there was, and still is, a range of diverse expressions of monastic life. My own thoughts were that some appeared a good deal more compelling than others.
“My sense is,” I told him, “that even on Mount Athos there appears to be something of a spectrum. On one end of that spectrum, you find Simonópetra and, perhaps, Vatopédi—open, embracing, full of joy; on the other end, you find, say, Philothéou or Great Lavra—careful, suspicious-seeming, severe.”
Father Iákovos was firmly unwilling to characterize the other monasteries, but said, “All the monasteries on the Holy Mountain make up the garden of the Panagía. As in any garden, there are many different flowers. Each has its own beauty, its own character, its own scent.”
He laughed. “I love the sweetness of the rose. You may love the pungent scent of the gardenia. Everyone can find a monastery that speaks to his own soul on the Holy Mountain.”
The rub, as I saw it, was that of that wide spectrum, that surprising variety of expressions of genuine religious life, America had so far received just one end.
I didn’t say much more about it, but already my imagination was spinning out a very attractive, if exceedingly speculative future: What if Father Iákovos himself were to be sent back to America to help found a monastery, a monastery in the spirit of Simonópetra—open, embracing, and full of joy? What if he could, then, become my spiritual father? And Benjamin’s? And father to my wife, Marcia, and our daughter, Elizabeth!