Pilgrimage to Mount Athos
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Human beings are all just about the same. It seems to be characteristic of human beings that the more we have, the more we want. The more we care about the things we have – the more things we want. The more we have, the more we think about ourselves, the less we think about other people. This is just how it progresses in human history. Human beings are not different ever, anywhere. We are all just about the same. Somehow, we cannot manage to learn. We have more and more things, and when we have more and more things, we are preoccupied with all those things, and we forget about everyone else. That is precisely the case with the rich man that the Lord is speaking about today in the Gospel. This rich man has so many ripe crops, and he says : “‘What shall I do, since I have no room to store my crops?’” Instead of doing something more selfless, all he did was build bigger and bigger storage, and prepared to enjoy himself. He was turned in on himself, and he did not think about sharing all that wealth. Therefore, the Lord says : “‘Fool! This night your soul will be required of you; then whose will be those things you have provided?’” That was it.
We have to be very careful ourselves about how we are living our lives. The way of our Lord is never characteristically tight-fistedness and holding on to everything. His way is always the way of open-handedness and sharing. Saint John Chrysostom speaks over and over again about the need to care about the poor and the needs of other people. The Gospel reminds us over and over again that the way of the followers of Jesus Christ, the way of love, is to care about what happens to all the people around us, and to care about creation as well. What happens to creation around us ? In living out the love of Jesus Christ, we have a responsibility towards people, animals, trees, water, everything around us.
The way of Gandhi was to make as small a negative impact as possible on the environment around us. In that way, he was right. For Christians, our responsibility, being where we are in our environment (and that includes people, animals, water, everything), is to be co-creating with God, to be life-giving with God in this environment, working, living in the love of Jesus Christ. To do this we have to be, as our Saviour said, rich towards God. If the Lord is blessing us with many things, then it is important for us to give thanks to Him for His gifts (and not to think that we have done everything ourselves), and to share what He gives us with people around us. The more we are ready to share what He has given us, the more He gives us to share. The more we hold on tightly to what we have, the less we have. If we hold on tightly to what we have, then this is because we think it is ours : “I got it myself, and no-one is going to take it from me”. When we hold on so tightly to things, we kill everything.
From my childhood (and from seeing other children, too) I remember children who pick dandelions or other sorts of little flowers for their Mummy. They bring them home to their Mummy, and they are holding onto those flowers very tightly so as not to lose them. By the time those flowers get to their Mummy, they are all strangled. It is an offering of love from the child, and the Mummy is going to accept the strangled offering with love anyway. We are like that with our holding onto things. We do not approach the Lord like the child towards his mother with the strangled dandelions, but we are often holding on tightly to whatever we have, not even thinking about offering to anyone else. This is just plain death. It is important for us today to remember that the way of Christ is always about openness. It is remembering the Lord. It is giving. Giving.
Now a few words about the past week which I spent in Greece. I had the blessing, finally, for the first time, to be able to go with a group of people to Mount Athos. The Lord truly gives us object lesson after object lesson. We thought that we had planned according to the rules (indeed, there are many rules about how to get to Mount Athos). Even if we did plan and try to do everything correctly, everything always changed. When we finally came to be prepared to go to spend our three days (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday) on Mount Athos, we thought that things would just happen as normal. However, on Monday, when we had arrived in Ouranopolis and were getting ready to go to Mount Athos, we did not go to Mount Athos because it was windy and there were no boats. We finally made it very early Tuesday morning. We thought we would find a monk-taxi for rent, but instead we found a little mini-bus driven by a monk from Karakallou. As a result, we saw half a dozen monasteries, including Vatopedi (which is where Father Pierre’s home monastery is), and finally we arrived at Iveron late in the afternoon. By then, we were running short of time, and we thought that we might get to Panteleimon. The winds were just favourable enough ; the boat came, and we managed to get to Panteleimon. We were only allowed to stay on the Holy Mountain for three nights and four days. We were simply going to be obedient to that (and anyway there was no time for any other possibility). We said, therefore, that we would have to resign ourselves to one night at Panteleimon.
However, we had two nights at Panteleimon because the winds did not let us leave. By then, we had begun to think that this would be all, and we would go back to Thessalonika, and maybe go to a church shop or two and then come home. However, we stopped at two monasteries on the way to Thessalonika. Then we stopped at four churches in Thessalonika and finally got back to the hotel. The hotel people, obviously used to such things, were not like most North American hotel people. We had missed a day in our hotel arrangements, and they said : “Ah so, you finally made it back !” They were quite peaceful about it.
What happened was that we proposed a way to approach the Holy Mountain and to make this pilgrimage, and we thought this was the possible and right way to go about it. However, the Lord said to us, as it were : “No. This is not good enough. You are going to do this, and you are going to see much more. You think you will get this much blessing, but I have more blessings to give you, and I am going to show you”. We venerated so many more saints than we had ever imagined. When anyone goes to the Holy Mountain, it cannot be as a tourist merely looking at these ancient buildings (although, of course, we do see ancient buildings). By the way, for women (who are not permitted to set foot on the Holy Mountain), it is actually possible for them to take a boat (as long as the winds are favourable – in summertime it is a much more predictable thing), and go all the way around the Holy Mountain. The boat comes quite close to the monasteries, and the monks bring the relics out for the passengers to venerate. They pray with the women who thus have an encounter with the Holy Mountain. Therefore, it is possible for them to come close to the Holy Mountain. There are women’s monasteries nearby the Holy Mountain also, that are dependent on the men’s monasteries. However, the point still is : we are not simply wandering around and looking as gawkers do. It is the personal encounter with the saint whose relics are there that matters ; it is the personal encounter with the monks who are living there and praying daily that matters. They are not merely playing around in their prayers.
All the monasteries have about the same daily starting time. Either they start at 1 a.m. Greek time, or they start at 2 a.m. Greek time. Why do I say “Greek time” ? The Holy Mountain is on a different clock. They are on the biblical clock which used to be the clock of the old Roman Empire. The day starts at sunset. The first hour of the night is the first hour after sunset. The clock is all different, and, in fact, it put us another seven hours ahead. We were living on the Holy Mountain fourteen hours different from time here – not just seven hours. It is like being in China, I suppose, according to the clock. The daily liturgical cycle begins at 1 a.m. in Panteleimon, and they finish at about 5 or 6 a.m. If there is a great feast then they finish at around 8 or 9 in the morning. Then they start again at 2 in the afternoon with Vespers, after which is a Molieben (or a Paraklesis) to the Mother of God (which is not particularly short). Then they have supper, and after supper they go back to church for Small Compline in which there is an Akathist to the Mother of God because the Mother of God is Abbess of the whole Holy Mountain.
The monks always say : “No women can come here nowadays”, but a woman is the Abbess of the whole place. The Mother of God is the living Abbess of the whole Holy Mountain, and the Mother of God actually does regulate what is going on – we experienced it. The daily life she does regulate. Compline, which one would expect to last for 25 minutes, lasts for more than an hour. On an average, ordinary day, they are praying for six to eight hours, because that is the work of monks – to praise God. That is their first work. After that they do manual labour for four hours. Their days are not very short, and they are not at all empty.
When we are standing there in the churches, in these services, we are facing the Lord, and we are facing one another. More than one of the pilgrims said that he had come to understand himself and his relationship with the Lord much more clearly just by standing in the services (not necessarily understanding all the Greek or all the Slavonic). Nevertheless, he was there ; he knew the order of the services. In the presence of the Lord, in the presence of all those people who truly are praying, there is a great deal of focus, and all that focus brings Grace, blessing and healing to the heart.
That is the purpose of a pilgrimage. It is remembering that we are in the hands of the Lord, and that the Lord is directing our lives, to whom be glory : Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.