I sit now on the balcony of my hotel room, "with a mountain view," near the Thessaloniki airport. Here's my view:
See the mountain? Neither do I, but I enjoy the room, the balcony, the chirping birds, and the gentle breeze, nonetheless.
It is 29 days since I have been home, and, if God wills, a little more than a day before I am again home. As far as my current intentions go, this will be my last post about this trip. Whether or not I continue to post on this blog regarding other matters, I currently have no opinion. I do hope, however unrealistic the plan is, to review the posts I have made, correcting many errors and filling out stories that were only briefly expressed. This would be a way for me to let the taste of the Holy Mountain linger a little over the coming weeks. There are many 'posts' I started that were never published, but I am not so unrealistic so as to think that I'll take the time to finish those.
I have been reflecting on how best to capture the trip, but as is so often the case words seem inadequate. I'm sure the single most penetrating experience for me was the memorial for Fr. Roman at Prodromou, which I wrote briefly about earlier. That was nothing short of miraculous, a tangible experience of the way the world truly is and not how it merely appears to be. But it would be deeply misleading to suggest that this was typical of my experience of the people and places of Mount Athos.
There is, though, one event that does poignantly express my nearly continuous experience while on Mount Athos. Near the end of my first week at Lakkou, while I was at work fulfilling my obedience (laminating icon cards), Frate Ioan (Brother John) came and sat down a short distance from me. My work space was in a frequently traveled hallway to the Abbot's room so I had reoccurring, though brief, interactions with monastics as they would go and come from speaking with Fr. Stefan. It was less common, however, that people had the time to stop and sit for a conversation; they had, after all, their own work to do.
From early on, Frate Ioan and I had a most precious of relationship. He knows as much English as I know Romanian, a negligible amount, but paradoxically the inability to speak with one another not only failed to hinder our communication but seemed to enhanced it. The language of the kingdom, the holy fathers' say, is silence--be still, and know that I am God--and Frate Ioan was almost continuously showing me how much could be communicated with so few words, and most often with simple gestures and facial expressions.
So it was that I was a little surprised when he sat down to converse, or rather, try to converse, with me. Over the course of the next fifteen or twenty minutes, he was able to find out many 'facts' about my life: married, age, children, siblings, jobs, Dormition Monastery, and the like. It was, for reasons I still don't comprehend, exceedingly difficult for him to grasp that I don't have any job in addition to serving at the Dormition of the Mother of God Monastery. He did, however, in time come to believe me.
It was touching to experience his interest in my life, and those whom I love, even if the content of our communication was piecemeal and mundane. The communication was a stuggle, albeit an enjoyable one. Gradually I noticed that with the successful reception of each piecemeal, mundane fact, his face grew a little brighter. And so it went until someone from down the steps called his name and he had to go. He arose from his bench and walked toward me, the opposite direction of the steps. He reached out his arms to embrace me, buried his tear-streamed face in my neck, and exclaimed "Bucura!" (Rejoice!)
He experienced in the piecemeal and mundane facts of my life a joy inexpressible. And this, I believe, sums up my experience on the Holy Mountain: the simplest and most mundane activities of our daily life are in Christ made to be the tear-steaming fountain of joy.
Bucura!
