by Scott Cairns
We turned in soon thereafter. Ben and I said our prayers, did our prostrations, and hopped into our beds. The tálanton rang out, it seemed, in no time at all.
Once again, Ben seemed already adapted to the odd hours; he was alert and active throughout the long services, even poking me in the ribs whenever he thought I was singing too loudly.
We partook of the Holy Mysteries and then broke our fast with the fathers at trápeza. In the courtyard afterward, all the monks who had befriended us gathered around to say their good-byes—Father Iákovos, Father Makários, Father Athanásios, Father Galaktíon, as well as Fathers Ioásaf, Porfýrios, and others who had made my earlier visits to Simonópetra so rich and welcoming. Dr. Nick was there too, wishing us a good journey, and also helping translate the farewells between us and the fathers.
My previous partings from this place had been softened by the knowledge that I’d be back soon. This time, the ache of parting was a bit more acute, as I wasn’t sure exactly when I’d be able to return.
Fathers Galaktíon and Athanásios—father and son—stood before Ben and me, pointing to themselves and to us, asking, according to Dr. Nick, “Do you see the resemblance?”
In turn, each monk kissed us good-bye, embraced us with great warmth. Ben was beaming, but speechless; I could see how moved he was, and that further thickened the lump in my throat.
Father Athanásios stood before me a final time, taking my hand and saying we would meet again. Through Dr. Nick, I said to him, “You must bring Simonópetra to America. Please.”
He laughed and said, “Just find us the right rock.”
15
What I say to you, I say to all—Watch!
Ben was quiet for most of the hour it took us to hike down the slope to Grigoríou. At the top of the headland, however, he turned to me and asked, “Can we come back here sometime?”
“Probably not on this trip,” I answered.
“Oh, I know. I didn’t mean this trip; I just want to know that we get to come back sometime. I love it here.”
“That’s not just the rakí talking, is it?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Yep. I love it too. Let’s be sure to come back.”
At the bottom of the slope, the trail passed along a pebbled beach. We dropped our packs on the rocks and took a rest there, wading in the warm water, inhaling the salt air, and skipping rocks. Ben reached into his pack and pulled out a full box of loukoúmi.
“Where’d you get that?” I asked him.
“Father Athanásios,” he said, popping a square into his mouth. His smiling lips were covered in powdered sugar, so was his chin. “It’s the good kind, green, lots of nuts.”
We arrived at the arsanás of Grigoríou just ahead of the Agía Ánna, which was, by the look of it, loaded with pilgrims. Ben and I picked up our pace so we could arrive at the upper archondaríki in time to say hello to Father Damianós before the crowd arrived.
We found him in the archondaríki kitchen, boiling coffee for the coming onslaught. When he saw us, he put it aside, howling, “Isaac! It’s about time you showed up!” He pointed to Ben, “Who’s this? Your father?”
Father Damianós hurried us into seats at the table in the kitchen, telling us to make ourselves at home while he got the coffee served to the others.
During our two days at Grigoríou, we spent a good bit of time at that kitchen table, visiting with Father Damianós and with our second roommate—also named Nick—who was making his annual visit to Mount Athos to see his spiritual father, a yéronda he shared with Father Damianós. The two of them were, therefore, as they put it, brothers.
Along the way, Ben was able to visit the cemetery chapel and the very full ossuary. Later, he said to me, “That was really something, the bones of all those monks.”
“Did you think it was strange?” I asked him.
“Sure. It is strange. But not in a bad way.”
Ben also liked that “they recycle the graves,” removing the bones from the ground and “making room for the next guy.”
My time with Father Damianós was, all told, too brief; but he did take the chance to ask me how my journey to prayer was faring. I told him that it was still a matter of ups and downs. The ups were, perhaps, increasing in duration, but the downs remained a constant threat.
“They will always be a constant threat,” he said. “Stillness is a worthy aim, and watchfulness is its strongest protection. You must guard your heart against a lot, of course, but mostly against the illusion that you can ever let down your guard, even for a minute.
“The enemy’s greatest threat is letting us think he is no longer a threat.”
What he said pretty much reminded me of me. Most times—make that every time—I’ve gone through what I would call a detour from prayer and a subsequent eruption of anger and/or pride, that descent was preceded by my thinking I might just skip a prayer or two, take a little break, given how well things were going.
Even a little break, it seems, can leave you broken—and wondering how you got that way.
My own greatest sin—I was thinking just then—pretty much boils down to pride, and to the countless attendant sins that pride makes possible.
“Watchfulness,” Father Damianós was saying, “also involves seeing your sin and your own sinfulness. If you see your own sin, you will be spared the most insidious sin, the greatest sin, which is pride.”
Ouch.
Yep, I told him, that pretty much hits me where I live.
“Me too,” he said. “How do you think I learned any of this?”
Our next stop was Saint Andrew’s Skete near Karyés. We would need to renew our diamonitíria before heading on to Vatopédi and so planned to stay one night at the skete. My last time here—during the Feast of Saint Andrew—the place had been packed with hundreds of guests. This time, Ben and I were two among only thirty or so.
Once we’d been led to our quarters, a very cozy room with two beds and—in welcome contrast to the room I’d had the winter before—with glass in the window, Ben and I hiked into Karyés, thinking we might get our permits extended and have done with it. The Pilgrims’ Bureau offices were closed, though, so we’d have to make another try in the morning. Meantime, we had a chance to walk around the village, poking through the icon shops and picking up a pile of prayer ropes and other gifts to take home with us.
Back at the skete, we took what we thought would be a shortcut to the archondaríki. It turned out to be not so short, but it did offer a glimpse of how extensive the ruins of the skete were. I had already guessed that only a very small percentage of the skete had been restored, but we spent most of an hour wandering through a maze of burnt-out buildings, some of which were filled with trees and grasses, and a good many of which were all but erased from view by the crumbling destruction of their walls amid the flourishing overgrowth.
Back at the main courtyard, we passed a youngish, roundish monk with his foot propped up on the wall he sat upon. “Evlogíte,” I said.
“O Kýrios,” he responded. Then he said in English, “Where are you from?”
This turned out to be Father Ephrém, an English monk Father Damianós had suggested we try to meet. Limping slightly—he’d broken his ankle earlier in the year—he led us into the enormous katholikón, and to the chapel area to the left of the central nave where vespers were about to begin.
The chanting was erratic, and not entirely pleasing. I had a very strong sense that the monks doing the chanting were doing so under duress. In fact, when Father Ephrém was directed, at one unconsidered point, to intone a short sequence of hymns, the pain on his face made it clear that he knew he could not carry a note. He was not the only one.
When it was over, I was exhausted. Ben had pretty much kept his own counsel, but as Father Ephrém led us to trápeza, Ben said to him, “That was nice.”
“You shouldn’t lie, Benjamin,” was Father Ephrém’s smiling response.
We made plans to meet with Fathe
r Ephrém after trápeza in the morning. He had offered to give us an insider’s tour of the katholikón. Then Ben and I turned in for the night; the sparse food, the long hours, and the relatively little sleep we’d had—four days running—were beginning to take their toll, especially on Ben, who hadn’t run this particular gauntlet before, or anything vaguely approaching it. We lay down on our beds and, within seconds, I asked Ben if he wanted some water. He didn’t answer; he was already asleep.
The tálanton just barely managed to rouse me, and looking across the room I saw that Ben hadn’t heard it at all. I mulled over the right thing to do and decided I would let him sleep through the midnight service but wake him in time for orthros. I turned on my flashlight to read, opening to Yéronda Aimilianós’s “Catechism on Prayer.”
I remember some of what I read, but what I remember far more vividly is waking up again with a start, my flashlight in hand, my head jerking up from where it had fallen into the open book.
Looking at my watch, I realized that we were probably missing orthros.
Ben woke up pretty quickly at that point, and I was suddenly alert, as well. We dressed in a rush and more or less jogged across the courtyard to the katholikón, venerated the icons in the narthex, then entered the nave in time to hear the priest intone, “Evlogiméni i Vasileía tou Patrós kai tou Yioú kai tou Agíou Pnévmatos”—the opening words of the Divine Liturgy.
Ben and I made our way down the hundred or so yards of echoing nave to two empty stalls near the front. As the litany continued, we went forward to venerate the icons. A few other men joined us, and I was a little relieved that we were not the only latecomers.
After liturgy, we received antídoron, then venerated the icons on our way out. By the time we’d gotten outside, there wasn’t another soul around. We walked to the side of the building only to find the entry to the trápeza chained shut. We supposed that the skete might observe a rest time between liturgy and trápeza, as often happens, say, at Simonópetra and Grigoríou, so we thought we should take the chance to rest. The microbus to Vatopédi wouldn’t be leaving until after 2:00 p.m.
After half an hour or so, I left Ben napping in the room and hiked into Karyés to get our diamonitíria extended. The official did so with no problem, pleasantly even, and I hurried back to the skete. In the courtyard, there was still no sign of life around the chained trápeza door, so I joined Ben in the room and lay down for further rest, thinking the bell for breakfast would rouse us eventually.
I was awakened at noon by a knocking at the door; it was the guest master asking if we wanted to stay another night. No, I told him, we thought we’d head into town after trápeza to catch the bus to Vatopédi.
“Trápeza?” he said. “Trápeza is finished hours ago.”
Evidently, while Ben and I were venerating icons after liturgy, the community had made its way to yet another dining area, a smaller trápeza that I didn’t know anything about. The guest master was chagrined, and insisted that we let him make us a tray in the archondaríki. He loaded us up with apples, biscotti, and loukoúmi; he made coffee, and he insisted we finish up with big sticky squares of baklavá. We cooperated as well as we could, then thanked him and donned our packs for the hike into town.
My experiences throughout the Holy Mountain have been, almost completely, wonderful; even when I wasn’t especially pleased with, say, a particular monastery’s attitude toward—or treatment of—pilgrims, I realized that they had their reasons. That said, there are two places on the peninsula where I more or less came to expect to lose a bit of spiritual ground: Dáfni, the port of entry, and Karyés, the center of government. These happen to be the only places where pilgrims tend to outnumber—and by a significant margin—the monks. These are also the only places where large groups of nonmonastic Athonites pretty much call the shots, especially in terms of transportation.
To be fair, these men may also have good reason for the general callousness they display.
Pilgrims can be painfully misinformed; they can be oblivious to local conventions and even the most elementary religious practices.
Pilgrims can manifest a profound and aggravating sense of entitlement.
Pilgrims, in short, can be jerks.
The odds are pretty good that the men who drive the buses, day in and day out, have good cause to manifest—as many do—a disposition of not giving a damn, if only as a form of self-preservation. Beyond that, the weekends of major feasts—Pentecost, for example—load the logistical infrastructure to its breaking point.
Whatever. In any case, the only times I’ve nearly blown my stack on Mount Athos had to do with trying to get from one place to another using the transportation these guys are allegedly there to supply. When I was traveling alone—that is, when it was only a matter of my getting where I needed to go—the frustrations were somehow more tolerable, even comically entertaining; when, however, these men extended their crap to my son, and when, for example, one of them roughly pushed Ben out of the way to hop into his microbus, I thought for a minute that I might reach up through his window, grab him by the throat, and drag him out for a lesson in manners.
Whatever stillness, calm, and prayerful humility I had discovered at the monasteries were pretty much squandered here in Karyés.
I’m not entirely alone in this. Ben and I met a wonderful pilgrim from the States, a publisher named Art Dimopoulos who, we learned, regularly spends time at Koutloumousíou. When we’d all finally made it onto a bus out of Karyés, he said to me: “It never fails. You can spend three days in the monastery, discover a very deep sense of peace, and it’s all gone in fifteen minutes trying to get on the bus.”
I don’t know. Take it as a warning. Well warned is well armed. Maybe.
At any rate, although Ben and I may have been the first ones to arrive for the microbus to Vatopédi, we didn’t manage actually to get on it. We suffered a series of misdirections that led to large crowds of men pushing and shoving from one bus to the next, angrily demanding to know which bus was going where, and led to our being given bad information again and again. Ben and I decided, finally, to sit it out and take what would come. We watched as the pilgrim mob turned pretty ugly, then scrapped and screamed to get their desired seats.
When the dust had cleared, Ben and I were all but alone, sitting on the curb, asking passersby if they knew a way to Vatopédi. Two men from Moscow joined us and let us know that they were going in that direction too, not all the way to Vatopédi but to a skete along the way. We four sat, then, waiting for something good to happen.
Then it did.
A monk stopped by to tell us he had found us a ride. The ride he’d found was a Datsun pickup truck driven by a weathered old guy named Ioánnis.
Ioánnis—I was soon to learn—made his living by charging exorbitant fees for rides late in the day; he more or less counted on folks like us to be desperate enough to pay. Initially, he agreed to a cool seventy euros to haul all four of us down the road; by the time it was over, he’d gotten seventy euros from Ben and me and seventy more from the two Russians. The drive took about forty minutes.
When we got to the first checkpoint—the first gate protecting Vatopédi from unexpected guests—the officer checked to see if our names were on the list to be let through. When we said we were Isaac and Benjamin, he lit up, saying, “Ne, ne, Páter Mattéou! Páter Mattéou!” Evidently, Father Matthew, who’d gotten us on the list, was a favorite with this gatekeeper. This particular officer, who must also have had something of a history with our driver, put his finger about an inch from Ioánnis’s nose and, I’m pretty sure, asked him how far he was taking us. From what I gathered, Ioánnis had planned on leaving us with the Russians at their destination, dropping us about two miles short of Vatopédi.
At that point, it sounded—in very fast and very loud Greek of an undeniably urban sort—as if the gatekeeper were tearing Ioánnis a new one, and thereby got the suddenly accommodating driver to promise to take us to the Vatopédi gate. He made Io�
�nnis say as much. He made him say it three times.
Along the way, we dropped the Russians at their destination, Skíti Bogoróditsa—the Skete of the Dormition of the Theotókos—one of the very earliest Bulgarian sketes on the Holy Mountain and one that looks, from the outside, a little like a walled-up junkyard in the middle of a thick chestnut forest. Once the monks unbar the huge, if rickety, wooden gate from the inside, however, a well-maintained, close-quartered garden of paradise is revealed within. We stopped long enough to venerate the very old icons inside the katholikón, which is dedicated to the Assumption of the Theotókos; we also received the blessing of the Bulgarian priest-monk who’d let us in. All in all, it was a quite beautiful surprise.
As Ben and I squeezed back inside the Datsun truck, even Ioánnis seemed more likeable. He drove us the rest of the way to Vatopédi, even deigning to converse a bit in English, which, it turned out, he could do fairly well. His good-bye was a final dose of “I like Americans. I no like America.”
We arrived at the gate about 4:30, well after the other visitors; vespers had already begun, but we were welcomed readily by the gatekeeper and directed to the archondaríki. Again, as we were being checked in, the guest master took care to make our reservations for the bus two days hence and, while he was at it, asked if we would like to go to confession while we were here.
My new rule: whenever anyone asks if I want to go to confession, I will say yes.
I said yes. And surprisingly—to me, at least—so did Ben. We would be called out from the all-night vigil to see Father Palamás, the priest with whom I had made my confession during the winter.