Vatopedi

The Calm Haven of Vatopedi Bay

Vatopedi Bay, an inlet of the Aegean, spreads out like the blue calm of pure contemplation.

For the past week, free of all cares except those of travel and attending the long hours of prayer, following the rule of sleep and fixed regimen of the trapeza, moments of talking with other pilgrims and moments of solitude, and I have arrived at this calm bay.

The lack of the presence of any women, also, I must admit, had an effect. It is not that I think of women primarily as a distraction, or according to any pre-conception at all. And yet I am a man, and the psychic and biological dynamic exists, and I would be foolish not to admit it. But it is not simply that there are no women. There is also no talk of women, no crude insinuations such as one often finds in male companionship, and frankly, not a thought at all. Not a thought at all. It never occurred to me what this would be like.

And this is only one factor in a state of relative passionlessness such as I have only tasted during times in Great Lent. There was no anger, no anxiousness. Slowly, unexpectedly, almost without notice, I have entered this quiet where the main thrust of desire is in prayer. I find myself praying more for other people, and with eagerness. Even the moments talking with my fellow pilgrims have become more prayerful.

This is the place where contemplation can begin.

The sun goes down, on this northeastern shoreline, not into the sea, but into the rocky spine of the Athonite ridge. The horizon is still and immense. Soon, the sea and the infinite northern sky will melt together into nightfall – there, where Jason sailed northward in quest of the golden fleece. It was found in the spiritual riches with which Byzantium clothed the sacrifice of the lamb.

“So long as the mind holds sway and is active and influential, the will remains constrained and subject to human desire. The will always remains fastened to the mind. But, when the mind begins to calm down and give way, the will is thereupon released and heads straightforwardly to God.” (from Orthodox Prayer Life: The Interior Way, by Matthew the Poor, p.62.)

I speak of contemplation in its literal sense, of simply prayerful awareness from a place with a wide view, not in the more exalted spiritual sense of theoria, Divine Vision.

This Bay of Vatopedi, wide, blue and calm under a high summer sun, attracts not only the eye, but also, from the first immediate sight of it, the soul.

Gray stone houses, shingled with stone slabs, line the incurving shore between tall, shady chestnuts, olives, feathery pines, figs, graceful cypresses. An ancient yellow-stuccoed basilica, the cemetery chapel, stands quietly in the sunlight, and other lead-roofed domes mark small chapels. Stone walks, walls, and stairs wind through the narrow shade between the buildings. A walled pool under the western wall, like an ancient moat emerging from a stone arch under the entry stairs, stores overflow from the springs for watering the gardens. A culvert out of this, now in its dry season, runs in a channel past buildings that once housed water-wheel driven mills and down to the cove.

Eastward a road winds up the hill into olive groves that overlook the developing sea cliffs. At the crown of that hill sits the ruin of the former school. To the west, on the rising peninsula ridge that reaches oceanward enveloping the bay, are two churches, surrounded by vast gardens and beehives. Near one of these St. Gregory Palamas was for a time in seclusion in the vastness of theophanic prayer. Rocks cut into that shore, dropping their massive anchors farther out.

All this is outside the walls.

I sit on a balcony high on a wall which is itself a monument of Byzantine fortress architecture. What is within is astonishing.

There have been more than six hundred commemorated saints here. Everything has been built and used by them. The church itself is over a thousand years old. The “pious legend” that the original church was built by Emperor Constantine the Great in the fourth century has been given weight by the archeological discovery of a very old and quite huge church foundation beneath the present church. The oldest chapel within the walls was built by St. Sabba of Serbia and his father, St. Symeon the Myrrh-Gusher. Miracle-working icons are everywhere. Here is the skull of St. John Chrysostom, with the incorrupt ear into which the Apostle Paul whispered his interpretations of his epistles.

We were able to give confession here. Since I had been thinking about this ever since I arrived on Mt. Athos, my confession was swift and to the point. I was able to take communion in the chapel built by St. Sabbas…!

We were able to stay in Vatopedi for three days. It is here that we truly relaxed into the monastic rhythm, and here that we found a spiritual home. Fr. Nicholas made the kind of contact he had been seeking – this is certain to be a benefit to our parish life. Scott could not stop reflecting on the beautiful and powerful prayerfulness with which the monks chanted – it seems to have completely overwhelmed him.

Varopedi was renewed by one of the disciples of Elder Joseph the Hesychast, as were many of the monasteries on Mt. Athos. It was Joseph the younger who came here with his own disciples, including the present Abbot Ephrem. Fr. Theonis, the gate-keeper and office manager, who has been especially kind to Fr. Nicholas, was one of these who came here twenty-five years ago to re-establish the coenobitic rule. This means that there is a common life: no personal property, common worship services and meals, all work distributed and appointed under the guidance of the abbot. Meanwhile, it is primarily a training ground for the interior life. Only those most experienced in interior life are given a blessing to retire to a hermitage. The dangers are vividly illustrated by the life of St. Hilarion the Georgian (see The Orthodox Word), who encountered demons as tall as the mountain. This was one of the saints who lived in the cell now occupied by the elder we approached on the ridge above Dionysiou.

During the period of Turkish rule, which lasted half a millennium, the monasteries, plagued by taxes and pirate raids, suffered extremely. Some were destroyed; most entered a period of depopulation and decline. Monks were forced to abandon the order of the coenobitic rule and became idiorhythmic. That is, each monk followed his own rule and lived by his own means. Coenobitic rule has now been re-established in all the major monasteries, but only during the renewal of recent decades.

To see men that are this angelic in demeanor – to see what man is capable of becoming in the transformative loving hands of God – this alone is worth a pilgrimage. Actually, it is perhaps the whole point of it, in order to desire such transformation in one’s self.

To begin with, there was the monk whom Fr. Nicholas met at the administrative office at Karyes, the one who encouraged us to go to Vatopedi a day earlier than scheduled and who gave us the note that really got us past the gate. It turns out he was one of the original disciples of Elder Joseph the younger. When one first encounters these men, the passionlessness of their quiet gaze is difficult to read. The degree of their guarded interior concentration makes them appear almost angry; it is similar to the expression one sees in icons of hesychastic saints. But if one has the opportunity to speak with them more freely, it is as though they open their souls, and one begins to see in their interior vastness a glimpse of things that brings tears. The countenance is transformed into a smile of otherworldly sweetness.

Fr. Gregory, a young deacon, was such a one. I was brought into his office to view his plans, in the auto-cad computer program, for a power plant incorporating solar power. He went to Stanford and spoke warmly of Fr. Basil Rhodes in Palo Alto. This was one with a very angelic demeanor.

Also I was fortunate to encounter Fr. Gavriil, a Russian monk from Valaam. As the sun went down, he sat on the balcony with us and with Fr. Matthew, the American monk in Vatopedi who has been our principle guide here. Fr. Gavriil spoke of the youth of the present very large monastic renewal going on in Russia. He said that Russian monks often needed to come to Mt. Athos to find their way deeper into their calling. Fr. Matthew agreed that monasticism is a vocation with tremendous depth, that even on Mt. Athos there were brotherhoods that were relatively young; but there are also experienced elders. Fr. Gavriil mentioned the many very experienced elders in Simonapetra, about whom we have heard repeatedly in our journey. We never received permission to go there. But it was during this very sobering conversation that we gained a perspective on our own Orthodox life in America, which, though growing, is frankly infantile in its maturity. Simply put, the Christian life is an exceedingly deep well, and we have known only a few drops from it. We were here informed of our need to mature, under experienced guidance, in order to give Orthodoxy in America any real chance.

Here, I think, by the tremendous Grace of God, is where we encountered what it was we were searching for on the Holy Mountain.

We had encountered many perspectives. The elder from Grigoriou had been an example of maturity, patience and wisdom. Others, perhaps, were less so. We had encountered several monks – and pilgrims on Mt. Athos – with strong political opinions, both in sacred and secular matters. The strength of these opinions surprised me; perhaps it is part of the Greek character. Most seem relatively balanced, but one will certainly come across zealots, especially among the younger. Some of these made me uncomfortable in their condemnations of those who are not Orthodox enough, and, therefore in their implications, not really Orthodox at all. Fr. Nicholas reminded me that the Holy Mountain has always had a responsibility to maintain purity in the faith. Of course I accept this fact. May it be blessed. Nevertheless, one wonders about the maturity of some of these views when they are vented with a certain amount of heated intolerance and, especially, when they are thrust upon one in the form of unasked-for, and frankly unwanted, personal advice. It seems to me that the purity of the faith is something of a different quality than this.

In Vatopedi we encountered nothing of this sort. The general perspective seemed to be very mature, even while the monks who had been there since the beginning of the present renewal of coenobitic life admitted their own relative immaturity.

On Sunday, Fr. Matthew showed us the grounds outside the walls. Sunday evening, after Vespers and the meal, I slipped out of the gates to find a quiet place to pray. There in an English garden established by Prince Charles, outside a chapel he provided. This had been a smoke-house, which he had converted, by the labor of specialists in ancient building techniques, into a chapel for St. Evdokimos. This is a Vatopedi saint about whom nothing is known, except that his skeleton was discovered in the ossuary holding an icon and emitting a fragrance of myrrh. It is conjectured that he was a holy man who did not desire to be remembered, and so he crept off to hide among the bones of the deceased monks and die. The monks who found his skeleton, from who knows what century, named him “the one who lived well”, Evdokimos.

Here I sat on a bench looking out into the olive grove and prayed for what seemed more than an hour. Fr. Theonis had warned me when I went out that the gate would close early, but that it would open again after eight. When I returned to the gate, it had just closed. I really did not want to wait outside for another full hour.

So I started eyeing the scaffolding all around the east side of the walls.

By the time I climbed up to our fourth-floor balcony, Scott was sitting so quietly writing that I was afraid I would startle him. So I greeted him from underneath his elbows. It took him a few minutes to get any comprehension of what I could possibly be doing out there beyond the railing of the balcony.

I had climbed the walls of Vatopedi like one of the pirates, seeking to plunder its richness.
This journal reflects, perhaps, a glimpse of the value of my stolen treasures.

Christopher