Holy Monastery of Grigoriou

On the boat again to the little port of Daphne, where we met the pilgrim Stratos. He was extremely excited about meeting Orthodox Christians from “the great prostitute of the apocalypse”: America. I admit being a little shocked that someone I had never met should say this to me. Athonite monks who came from Western cultures roll their eyes at this assessment of American culture, considering how secularized even Greece is becoming. But Stratos was generally excitable in all his descriptions. He told of the Holy Fire of Jerusalem in the tomb of the Savior at Pascha, and how it is flown by airplane to Greece then met by vans to be distributed to every village in the country. He spoke of the many holy elders in the monastery of Simonapetra.

We passed under the high walls of that fabled monastery, perched on its precipice on a steep incline far above the shore. I prayed as we drifted past it, begging for a few drops of the blossoms of its lofty blessings to fall on me.

The sun was high, near noon. I made another attempt to study the Mediterranean color of the waves. Deep blue ran along the crests, with luminous greens in the wave-runs. Other hues, many, ran across the undisturbed surface. But what poetry could really describe these colors? Do they come from the sky, or some mineral pigment brushed in from the island shores? I understand why one has to see the color of this sea for himself.

We docked at Grigoriou and were given a room right over the boat dock. The guest master was a quiet monk with extremely quiet, almost expressionless eyes under thick black bushy brows. How could one known that he was a priest, or that this was Nikos Vlachos’ spiritual father, Fr. Christophoros?

Our room for two nights faces the steep rocky cliffs at one angle, a corner of the towered monastery at another, and the sea wide between. A forest descends the slopes, with magnificent rocks and old ruins. I sat on the dock and tried to enter prayer. My three-hundred-knot prayer rope which I had purchased at the great basilica church of St. Demitrios in Thessalonica I said to the Theotokos, asking Her help again, as I did when I first attempted the practice of this prayer – more than ten years ago.

It occurred to me that I have not pursued prayer as single-mindedly as one must at least try to do since I moved away from my own spiritual father in the Bay Area. Actually, I was overwhelmed with this realization. It was a gift. Later that afternoon, when I talked with my parish priest and fellow pilgrim Fr. Nicholas about this, I knew that I had come to the Holy Mountain for this reason.

The Catholicon (Church) of St. Nicholas at Grigoriou was beautiful and inspiring, and I felt at home here. The antiphonal singing of the Vespers stichera was ornamented, according to the practice of the Holy Mountain, with interjected refrains, on an ison note, of short supplications by the canonarch, who walked back and forth from choir to choir on either side of the iconostas. Heart and mind soared in prayer. There is an immense throned Christ frescoed in front of the inner narthex, to whom I addressed my prayer. Then I moved into the nave at the Lord I Have Cried psalms to hear the splendor of Byzantine chant. There is also a beautiful icon of St. Gregory of Sinai, the monastery’s founder.

After the meal, we returned to the church for the Akathist hymn. Though I could not understand the Greek, I knew the hymn well enough to know what was being chanted – perhaps the most beautiful and inspired poetics ever written. The service began with the veneration of the relics of St. Gregory Palamas, St. John the Theologian, and others.

It was a beautiful and lofty experience of prayer. I stood in front of the narthex fresco of the Mother of God, companion icon of the throned Christ. I was aware of the tremendous power of Her presence, and I wept silently. This is where the heart finds its home, where the human creature tastes the sense of its purpose, while hardly even knowing it!

Afterward, we talked with young Miloch the Serbian, named for the hero of the medieval Battle of Kosovo. He is a theology student and son of a priest. There were also two young Romanian schoolteachers, very pleasant, extremely interested in Orthodox America, in Fr. Seraphim Rose, and in our own stories. Everywhere we went, the name of Seraphim Rose came up! We saw the book on his life in Greek. A monk from London, Fr. Damian, was also extremely attentive to us.

Fr. Nicholas went to speak with the abbot about the question of spiritual fatherhood in America. The abbot agreed with him, he told me, that the situation was particularly difficult in America, and he sympathized with that search and gave Fr. Nicholas a prayer rope. He was not, however, in good health, and the conversation went not much farther than that.

I was so inspired by the Vespers that I determined to rise early and be at the beginning of Matins next morning at 4 AM. I did not entirely succeed. By the time I got there at the end of the Six Psalms, the service had already been going on for three-quarters of an hour. I prayed eagerly through the early morning darkness, when the candles are extinguished for the Six Psalms and the kathisma. As it began to grow light, I paid the price for my zealousness, fighting sleep through the remaining hours of the long morning service. I was in the church for four hours. No complaints – I knew that is what they do, and I looked forward to it – but one keeps nodding off until the floor begins to move…


Christopher