by Scott Cairns
We had just enough time to drop our bags in the room and throw water on our faces before heading to trápeza, where we came in at the end of an amazing crowd of pilgrims. Pentecost had filled the guest rooms to capacity and very nearly filled the enormous trápeza, as well. I realized afresh how generous Father Matthew had been to arrange two nights for us at such a busy time.
Speaking of Father Matthew, he found us in the courtyard after trápeza and, after warmly embracing us both, led us into the katholikón to venerate the relics, where he once more supplied an English translation of the priest’s words. Here again, just as during my winter visit, I was especially and oddly moved by the belt of the Theotókos. An inexplicable sweetness and powerful sense of presence accompanied my kissing this strip of ancient fabric that had, as I imagined it, wound around the very womb that one time proved to be, as we like to say, “more spacious than the heavens”—containing, as it did, the uncontainable God.
Afterward, Father Matthew led us to venerate the several miracle-working icons throughout the katholikón and in the adjoining chapels, giving Ben the full stories of each, including Our Lady Paramythía, an icon that had spoken aloud to warn the gatekeepers about pirates lurking outside; Our Lady Esphagméni, an icon that had been attacked by a prideful monk; and Our Lady Pantánassa, an icon that continues to this day to bring healing to thousands with cancer, especially many hundreds of children afflicted in the Ukraine following the disaster at Chernobyl.
As Father Matthew excused himself to prepare for the vigil, he suggested we might want to rest a bit before coming back. We probably should have taken his advice; as it was, Ben and I strolled around the grounds, getting a better sense of the significant spread of the monastery—a mix of ancient dwellings and new construction, a broad collection of cottage industry and agriculture, and all of it apparently thriving.
The familiar tálanton called us back inside.
Once again, we were able to find chairs in the katholikón’s central nave just as the vigil began, but Ben soon suggested we snag a couple of stalls that had opened up behind us. Both of us had come to appreciate the way the old-style stalls could facilitate sitting, standing, and leaning, allowing us to remain in place for hours without, say, having our butts fall asleep.
A couple of hours into the vigil, the guest master drew us out to wait in stalls outside the chapel of Saint Demétrios to the left of the narthex. We waited there for a good while, listening to the vesper hymns, staring into the icon of the Theotókos, Our Lady Esphagméni—Our Lady Slain—which commanded the dark wall before us. Long ago, a monk in a fit of pride and rage had driven a knife into the cheek of this icon. It had bled. That same monk spent the rest of his life in anguished repentance, sitting precisely where we were sitting now. The overall situation was, I’d say, a good inducement to our preparing for confession.
As Ben was called in, I prayed that he might be both strong and brave enough to speak without fear. I finished by praying the same for myself.
When my turn came, I found Father Palamás in the same spot where I’d met him six months earlier. I’m sure he didn’t remember me, but I reminded him that he had helped me once before. Then I confessed my usual—fairly habitual—sins of pride and an appalling lack of love for people in general. Father Palamás suggested I regularly include the prayer of Saint Ephrém in my rule, and I told him that I already did.
He looked at me a minute, then said, “You have to mean it.”
Allrighteethen.
I moved on to what was most on my mind. “Father,” I said, “I have been saying the Jesus Prayer for close to ten years without finding my way to a life of prayer. I have been deliberately searching for a spiritual father for most of a year. I don’t know how to proceed.”
“You are proceeding,” he said.
“No, I mean I don’t know where to find a spiritual guide, a father who will teach me, help me avoid pride and impatience and harsh thoughts.”
“What do you do when you suffer pride, or impatience, or harsh thoughts toward other people?” he asked.
“Well, mostly I pray.”
“Tell me how you pray.”
“I say the Jesus Prayer.”
“Do you say it slowly?” he asked.
“Well, I don’t hurry.”
“Do you listen to the words?”
“Yes.”
“And to the stillness between the words?”
Hmm, I thought, then asked, “The stillness between the words?”
“When you pray the prayer, say it once, and then wait, listening. Then say it again. Then wait, listening.”
“Yes, Father. I’ll do that.” This reminded me of a central passage I’d read in Yéronda Aimilianós’s book.
He stood up, saying, “I know you will.”
As I knelt, he placed his stole over my head; then he took it away, and said, “Don’t worry about the number of repetitions; just notice the words and the stillness.”
“Yes, Father,” I said, bowing my head, waiting for the prayers of absolution.
He stepped back. “You know,” he said, “it is not you who prays.”
“It’s not,” I repeated.
“No,” he said. “This is why you must listen. You must learn that it is God who prays. When you descend into your heart, it is God you find, already praying in you.”
Finally, he replaced the stole over my head, spoke the prayers of absolution, and blessed me, in the name “tou Patrós, kai tou Yioú, kai tou Agíou Pnévmatos.”
I stood, kissed his hand, and said, “Thank you, Father. I think this will help. I’m eager to see if it does.”
He blessed me again, and said, “Maybe you will come back and tell me how you are finding your way.
“A guide is good,” he said, “but remember the scriptures: ‘When the Spirit of Truth comes, He will show you all things.’ Don’t wait for a guide. Pray.”
Ben was waiting in a stall before Our Lady Esphagméni. He had his prayer rope in his hand, and he looked up as I opened the door to leave the chapel.
“You took a while,” he said. “Guess you had a lot to confess, huh?”
“Guess so. I had to confess my plans to beat my wise-guy son.”
“Oooo,” he said, “didn’t the father tell you that might be unforgivable?”
We returned to the vigil to find every candle of every candelabra lit and all the huge fixtures circling in broad arcs, filling the nave with glittering golden light reflecting off a million golden surfaces. It was a feast of sparkling light, accompanied by celebratory festal chanting from two full choirs. To repeat the emissaries of old, “We didn’t know if we were in heaven or on earth.”
We stayed in that middle ground until a bit after 2:00 a.m., when I happened to look over at Ben and saw that he was fighting to keep his eyes open. I nudged him, nodded toward the door, and led him out into the courtyard. We walked, blinking, into a glorious star-filled night. The air was cool and made me suddenly more fully awake.
“I’m feeling pretty wide awake now,” I said. “Should we go back in?”
“Sure,” Ben said, his eyes almost crossing as he spoke.
“Never mind,” I said and threw my arm around him to walk with him back to our room.
Ben slept for about three hours; I napped off and on, but was going over the words of Father Palamás, trying hard to remember all he’d said and to write it down as accurately as I could. His words resonated with me, and I knew that I had come across similar observations before. I’d read similar admonitions just days earlier in The Authentic Seal; still, they hadn’t struck me then as they struck me now—as possible. More than that, they seemed, even, very likely. I was ready to pray slowly, and ready to attend to the stillness between prayers. I wanted to catch wind of the Holy Spirit praying in me.
That night, though, I didn’t get very far. I woke with a start, prayer rope in hand, and looked at my watch; it was about 5:30 a.m. The morning’s Divine Liturgy would be a festal liturgy, and I d
idn’t want Ben to miss the party. I grabbed his big toe and jiggled it to wake him. Good sport that he is, he jumped up and pulled on his clothes without a word of complaint. We scrambled over the stone courtyard, alongside the trápeza, and arrived just as orthros was ending. We found stalls as the chanters intoned the doxology.
The icons—as well as the monks and pilgrims—were censed by a duo of deacons, moving from place to place in tandem and bearing on their shoulders golden replicas of the katholikón. Ten priests—Father Palamás among them, I think—joined the presiding bishop of the feast for the processions and the readings, filling the air with celebratory, nearly raucous, full-throated chanting and filling the nave with their red and white vestments; again the candelabrum were, as the liturgy proceeded, completely lit, filling the nave with wavering golden light. The iconostasis seemed to move with light. The nave and every narthex were lined with pilgrims and monks, celebrating the feast in prayer, witnessing anew the birth of the church.
After nearly three hours of vertiginous beauty, we partook of the Holy Mysteries and of the festal bread soaked in honeyed wine. Following the final prayers, the bishop blessed us, giving us another square of antídoron as he did so, and the church streamed into the bright morning to begin another year as the visible Body of Christ.
After a feast of roasted fish and potatoes, feta, olives, oranges, baklavá, and a deep red wine, Ben and I collapsed in our room, where we napped for a few hours before meeting Father Matthew for our tour.
We had strolled the grounds on our own the day before, but Father Matthew augmented the walk with an array of stories. We toured the wine cellar, the rakí distillery, the several groves and gardens; he pointed out the various tilled fields, the workshops, the mill. At the end of our walk, he brought us to the cemetery chapel.
We venerated the icons inside, then he led us around and below to the ossuary. It was empty.
“We decided it was time to clean it out and restack the bones of our brothers,” he said. “It’s something we try to do every hundred years or so.” He was smiling.
He pointed to an opening in the floor. “This time, we found another entire layer of bones in underground vaults. None of the living monks knew about them.”
Ben and I just looked and listened.
“When the monks came down to organize the vaults in 1842, they found Saint Evdókimos.”
“Saint Evdókimos?” I asked.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, laminated icon of the saint. He gave it to Ben. “The monks found the remains—the relics—of a monk seated far back behind the other bones. He was holding an icon of the Theotókos.”
Father Matthew paused to let the story sink in.
“We don’t know his real name. All we know is that when his time came, he told no one, but made his way down here, cradling the icon, sat down in the very back, and fell asleep.
“When they found him, his bones were the color of golden beeswax, and the vault was filled with the fragrance of myrrh.
“We remember him now as Saint Evdókimos.”
“Where are all the bones now?” I asked. “Where else can you keep a thousand years’ worth of bones?”
He turned to the left and pointed, “Right there.”
We had walked past a covered shed on our way in, but I was so intent on the chapel in front of me that I hadn’t noticed what lay under the shed, protected from the elements by only a roof and a tarp. “Come,” he said, “meet my future roommates.”
Father Matthew led us along a narrow plank between heaps of human bones. Along the right side of the plank, three other rows of planks reached a good thirty feet; along each of these, the skulls of more than a thousand monks had been carefully placed side by side. Some were gray, some white, some were very nearly black; a great many were the color of beeswax candles.
I felt a little dizzy.
Ben seemed fine, if fascinated, saying, “Whoa.”
Father Matthew said, “Sort of makes a point, eh? All that we accomplish comes down pretty much to this.”
The walk back to our room was fairly subdued. We left Father Matthew to prepare for vespers, and Ben and I went to rest up a bit before the tálanton called us back to church.
To understand the unique character of the vespers service of Pentecost Sunday—the Kneeling Vespers—it helps to have a sense of Pascha, our Easter. Following about fifty days of pre-Lenten and Lenten fasting, and more than a month of fairly demanding prayer services, Great Lent culminates in Holy Week, when the services become all the more demanding but begin, incrementally, to replace the “bright sadness” of Lent and the Crucifixion with the giddy celebration of the Resurrection, observed in the midnight service of Holy Saturday through the wee hours of Sunday morning. It’s such a big deal for us—partaking in this movement from death to life—that we forgo kneeling altogether for the next fifty days.
The vespers service of the Feast of Pentecost, then, is the service that reintroduces the practice of kneeling to the church.
At Vatopédi, Ben and I had the added pleasure of kneeling with several hundred pilgrims and nearly a hundred monastic celebrants of a hierarchical vespers. We returned to the practice of kneeling, then, in good company, and tasted again, if only slightly, the spirit of bright sadness of those who continue in the journey.
After trápeza, we relaxed by the monastery gate, where Ben spent the evening crumbling bits of bread for the huge carp in the reservoir there. I’d known he’d been sneaking bread from the trápeza but didn’t know until now that he was copping it for the carp. When he’d gone through his stash, we headed back to the room to turn in early.
I let Ben sleep through much of the midnight service, then grabbed his big toe in time for orthros. He’d been a very good sport, but I could see that he was exhausted; most nights, he’d fallen asleep as soon as he lay down.
We lit our candles in the exo-narthex and venerated the icons on our way into the katholikón. We found places in the front row of chairs the monks had set up for pilgrims and enjoyed what would be our last Divine Liturgy, our final communion, on the Holy Mountain.
We had hoped to spend one more night on Mount Athos; in particular, I’d hoped to introduce Ben to Father Zosimás at Xenophóntos. As it was, the Feast of Pentecost had brought hundreds of men to the Holy Mountain, and we weren’t able to get tickets for the Áxion Estín—though, with about two hundred men clamoring for the last twenty tickets, we did get to enjoy a farewell shoving match.
The Áxion Estín would have made a regular stop at Xenophóntos, near the midpoint of its final run to Ouranoúpoli. We were able only to gain passage on the Agía Ánna, which would, on its final northern run, make a beeline from Dáfni to Ouranoúpoli without any stops along the way.
So we were a little disappointed, but as we looked ahead to two-plus hours with the crowd at Dáfni, we realized that if we boarded the Agía Ánna early—if we hopped aboard now, as the boat prepared to pull out for its final southward run before heading north—we could finish our pilgrimage with what was essentially a boat tour taking us the entire length of the Holy Mountain.
When Ben and I had boarded the boat, we discovered that our friend Art Dimopoulos had come up with the same idea; we found him on the upper deck visiting with friends from Koutloumousíou. After having forsaken stillness and calm in the turmoil of Karyés and Dáfni, we recovered a good bit of it as we cruised along the Athonite coast. At the far end, rounding the cliffs of Katounákia and turning back at Nimfé (the very tip of the peninsula), we raised our eyes to the cliffs where scattered, isolated dwellings were perched high in chinks in the rock face. Here, the most strenuous ascetics had fashioned—out of the most exposed granite faces of the Holy Mountain—their solitary cave dwellings, enclosed by stone facades. We’d been staring up at them for a while when Art said, “I think I found that peace I lost in Karyés. If I lose it again, I’ll just remember this place, this picture.”
Our final run north from the very “dese
rt” of the Holy Mountain to Ouranoúpoli provided the visual aid for a final review of what had turned out to be a fruitful journey, even if it hadn’t always—hadn’t really ever—gone as expected. We passed beneath Saint Anne’s Skete, where Fathers Cheruvím and Theóphilos labored among their brothers; we rounded the next headland and passed along the slopes of New Skete, where the tomb of Elder Joseph the Hésychast sweetened a citrus grove; we passed Saint Paul’s Monastery, where Yórgos, Stamátis, and their crew of accountants had welcomed me as one of their own, and we passed the sheer face of Dionysíou, from which those same accountants had shouted their farewell across the narrow valley; we passed the radiant enclave of Grigoríou, where Father Damianós brightened the archondaríki with a ready smile and willing heart; and then we passed beneath the miraculous Simonópetra, where Ben and I had, I’d say, found our Athonite family and our Athonite home. At Dáfni the boat took on its final passengers and we made for the mainland, passing before the enormity of Saint Panteleímon’s Monastery, the generous Xenophóntos where Father Zosimás, drawn as a young seminarian to a life of prayer, continued that journey. Our route took us past Dochiaríou—the first of the monasteries I’d seen, nine months earlier—and along the rugged and sparsely inhabited coast, where scattered hermitages and ancient ruins completed my passage just as it had begun.
16
Watch, therefore, and pray…
The journey to prayer, so far as I can tell, comes to no conclusive end. Like theosis itself, the pilgrim proceeds from glimpse to glimpse, or, as Saint Gregory of Nyssa speaks of it, from glory to glory. With the help of many along the way this past year, I feel as if, finally, I might have made a beginning.
Father Damianós offered me his friendship, his willing counsel, and shared with me his own, ongoing struggle. He also gave me—simply by his willingness to hang out and talk, his willingness to laugh at me and at himself—a sustaining sense of joy. Even now, when I think of him, I see him smiling broadly, clapping his hands together, laughing, “Doxa to Theou!”