Foolishness to the Greeks

James Hall is a likeable guy. He has the gift of teaching, and one can quickly understand why the Teaching Company recruited him after retirement for a course on Philosophy of Religion. Now the rest of us can experience, as we already have with Ehrman, what undergraduates have as they get civilized by their confessionally agnostic college professors. Like metal detectors at an airport, surely such courses are necessary lest a Christian's overly serious beliefs infect the American body politic with the unfounded, dangerous and possibly genocide-inspiring conviction that what they believe is actually true.

Make no mistake, I enjoyed this course. It's hard to think of a more effective way to have buttressed my wonder and appreciation of the Trinity, which because it's not logical, Hall can't accept; and for exactly the same reason, I can. Hall has an unpretentious style which makes for good listening, but one only wishes his style would extend to his rather condescending conclusions. (Something avoided by Phillip Cary's similar course.) For though Hall critiques the slash and burn method of teaching philosophy religion which aims to destroy faith, what he does is, one might argue, even worse - lull the listener's convictions to sleep with an "agnostic Episcopalian" lullaby. The course ends (after compulsory intonations against the usual scapegoat of the religious right), with the following illustration: Even though there may be no Santa Claus, it's still good to hang up your stocking and get that happy Christmas feeling. Hall's point (I think) is to keep going through the moral and liturgical motions, while surrendering hope for grasping whether or not any of this God-talk has a referent. I suppose that is intended as a concession to those of us who really believe stuff.

There's lots of good in the course before the arrival at this dead (and dull) end. I'm with the good professor in his insistence that the ontological, cosmological and teleological arguments, though interesting, do not provide iron-clad certainty for God's existence (hence faith). I'm also with Hall in his insistence that the dysteleological argument, i.e. the problem of evil, does not deliver a certain verdict against God. But when covering the matter of transcendence, Hall simply loses his nerve. He cannot accept the possibility of transcendence without surrendering any and all relevance to the here and now. By so doing Hall denies any possibility for revelation, and therefore any possibility for belief in the Christian God to be properly entertained in his course.

To illustrate, he recounts a debate with a Calvin College philosopher where Hall cried foul because the speaker said, (rightly I should add), that the laws of logic don't always apply to the divine. This is just too much for Hall. He says that if moves like that are allowed then any and all conclusions are possible. Hall's example of such an unworkable paradox is the claim that God is transcendent, wholly other, while yet answering prayer and working in a believer's life. Halls logic:

"Unless something can be both transcendent and immanent, then if X transcends Y, X and Y must be totally irrelevant to each other."

What about the Trinity? Did it not strike a professional philosopher of religion that the dominant concept of God in the largest religion in the world (one that Hall claims to be a part of) directly addresses this dilemma by claiming both God's transcendence (Father) and immanence (Son and Holy Spirit)? But I guess that's too much for Hall.

While unwilling to venture beyond the safe, warm womb of logic, Hall nevertheless charts a path through postmodern terrain. In a well narrated turn, Hall explains how Thomas Kuhn pulled the rug out from under the logical positivists by showing how the standards of the discipline by which they were judging religion - science - was itself subject to severe fluctuation. So inspired, Hall moves (with help from Rudolf Bultmann, and of course John Hick) to the value and power of story - and only story. But even here Hall's love of logic betrays him. He compares Jesus' parable of the fig tree to the boy who cried wolf. Hall doesn't get the first story, but does get the second one. Only the second one, he concludes, can be significant, and the former, we presume, must be full of wind and piss.

Though ending with the concept of "fabulation" while insisting he's not talking about mere fables, Hall still refers to interpretation of stories that retain an actual referent (in what was perhaps a slip) as "silly" and "vacuous." Instead, he extracts the moral principles from select Bible verses in a Jeffersonian hack job, confidently declaring, "That's what really matters." He then commends the prophetic (versus the priestly) strand of religion as holding true promise, giving us as it does liberal "progress" within our given paradigms. But fairminded as Hall is, next comes a ringing defense for those who actually believe this stuff, because though their beliefs can lead to intolerance and genocide, at least they at times are led by their mistaken certainty to unwittingly assist those who know better in the worthwhile goal of progress. Again, I suppose that is meant as a concession.

Professor Hall is a committed adherent of his agnostic Episcopalianism, and quite an evangelist for it as well. The last lecture comes off almost as an altar call. I got the sense I was supposed to come forward and confess that I'm really not so sure about faith as I thought I was, and so perhaps preventing the next genocide. He advised me to pursue the Christian agnosticism of Leslie Weatherhead, who not actually believing all that stuff, still went ahead and did good things. (Incidentally, I have my own brand of this, which sounds like it would displease both Hall and Weatherhead). I couldn't help but think however that though there certainly may be a few agnostics who end up doing good things, one suspects there are a good bit more believers who have done extraordinary things, and refrained from bad ones, because they actually believe that there is a God who so commands.

Strangely, perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 20th century and one of the heroes of Hall's course, might have been one of them. Wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein:

"What inclines even me to believe in Christ's resurrection? If he did not rise from the dead, then he decomposed in the grave like any other man. He is dead and decomposed. In that case he is a teacher like any other and can no longer help and once again we are orphaned and alone. So we have to content ourselves with wisdom and speculation. We are in a sort of hell where we can do nothing but dream, roofed in, as it were, and cut off from heaven. But if I am to be REALLY saved, what I need is certainty - not wisdom, dreams or speculation - and this certainty is faith. And faith is faith in what is needed by my heart, my soul, not my speculative intelligence, for it is my soul with its passions, as it were with its flesh and blood, that has to be saved, not my abstract mind" (Culture and Value).

Still, I suspect that's too much for Hall.

Did I mention he's a likeable guy?

Staying Put

It is strange that among the cries of the theologically orthodox for "staying put" in the fragmenting Presbyterian Church that more aren't making use of the theologian who has (for some time) been that position's most articulate and thoughtful voice from within Anglicanism, Ephraim Radner. Here are some of his more haunting quotes, made all the more intersting when knowing that Radner is unimpeachably orthodox himself:

"To forgo choice is something that takes place wherever we are, and it submits us to the forms of such a discovered place. If we are shopping, it will mean stopping even at one spot and staying the movement on; if we are struggling against the place of our childhood, it will mean ceasing to struggle there; if we are warring or wilting in the denomination of our discontent, it will mean allowing what chafes to be cherished" (51).

"The providential value of suffering division as a means of repentance is, in fact, the only theological model of ecclesial division that the Bible offers us. I refer explicitly to the history of divided Israel, a reality that is both the consequence of sin and the means of that sin's experiential redemption. No Jew, within scriptural testimony, is ever asked by God to choose between Israel and Judah, despite the fluctuating fortunes of their respective faithfulness. Rather, God asks each Israelite to suffer these fluctuations themselves in faith and to allow that faithful patience to be molded into the shape of repentant people by God's own acts upon them" (207).

"It is not so much ironic as it is theologically inevitable that one of the central issues currently in dispute within our denominations - the character of marriage - provides also the very shape by which faithful Christians are called to enter into this dispute: the cruciform union of love that suffers its rejection indissolubly. What is ironic is that some of those who would protect the human embnodiment of marriage within the church should be tempted to contradict its ecclesial expression. We must not give in to this temptation" (209).

"We cannot hear God's prodding and correction unless we are physically bound to those who would speak hard things to us" (214).

"Pierre Nicole, one of the great Jansenist apologists for Catholicism, is notorious for his argument against the Calvinists: despite the evils of the institutional church, Nicole insisteded, you should have gone without pastors altogether, rather than alleviate your suffering through subverting the unity of the church by ordaining your own" (193).

"In the Christian Church, followers like Catherine of Siena live and speak to our own age most pointedly. (I suppose she would say that our vocation is to die for the liberal heretic in our midst! There is a thought worth sinking our theological teeth into!)" (203).

Faith n' Physics

Due to the overheated rhetoric of the science/religion dialogue (from both the God and no-God corner), when engaging this matter I have a new rule: Only listen to knights of the British Empire. This leaves Elton John, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger and John Polkinghorne (et. al.). Among these, only the latter has (to my knowledge) spoken on the matter, and I continue to like what he says, which is well laid out in this program (for free!).

Consider that a consequence of 20th century physics, the "loosening up" of matter, opens genuine insights into the effectiveness of prayer (i.e. a Universe of perpetual variables can be influenced). Or that the the particle/wave dual-nature of light has a corollary in the divine/human dual-nature of Christ as expressed by the Council of Chalcedon. These inights would sound sophomoric coming from me, but somehow fly when coming from a respected Cambridge physicist who (surely you know) is also a priest.

Paul Davies was not bad either in the Einstein's God program, making the evident and important point that Augustine's thoughts on time (Confessions XI) are in beautiful harmony with Einstein's. But still, rules are rules, and Davies is no knight.

Cultural Christianity

Three weeks in Greece has caused me to reconsider the benefit of cultural, material Christianity. Protestantism, specifically the Calvinist form, is based largely on its despisal. Thinking Luther had not gone far enough in freeing the ship of faith from centuries of accumulated cultural barnacles, second generation Reformers (whose leading light was Calvin) sought to finish the job, scrubbing the hull almost right through the wood.

Do you find yourself, like so many young Protestants, on the Canterbury Trail? Despite the gridlocked disputation and theological apoplexy and of the Episcopal Church, are you growing in appreciation of its time-tested liturgy? Calvin, in a section entitled "Their Mysteries are Mockeries," offers these not exactly measured reflections on the love of ceremony:

So today not only the untutored crowd but any man who is greatly puffed up with worldly wisdom is marvelously captivated by ceremonial pomp. Indeed, hypocrites and lightheaded women think that nothing more beautiful or better can be imagined. But those who more deeply investigate and, according to the rule of piety, more truly weigh the value of so many and such ceremonies, understand first that they are trifles because they have no usefulness; secondly, that the are tricks because they delude the eyes of the spectators with empty pomp (Bk. IV chp. X pt. 12, p. 1190).

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Do you find yourself, like so many young Protestants, considering with fondness the physicality of the Church, appreciating art and architecture that is not generically modern but historically and specifically Christian? Said Calvin,

we need not see the church with the eyes or touch it with the hands. Rather it belongs to the realm of faith"(Bk. IV chp. I pt. 3 p. 1014).

Do you find yourself becoming increasingly sacramental in your sensibilities, not to replace a living faith but to enhance it? Once again, here's Calvin, this time regarding the "false sacrament" of confirmation:

We see the oil - the gross and greasy liquid - nothing else... Those who call oil 'the oil of salvation' forswear the salvation which is in Christ; they deny Christ, and they have no part in God's Kingdom... For all these weak elements which decay with use have nothing to do with God's Kingdom, which is spiritual and will never decay (Bk. IV chp. XIX pt. 5 and 7, p. 1453-55).

For contrast, compare the sentiment of Eastern Christianity. "I do not worship matter," says John of Damascus in a quote I never tire of citing,

I worship the God of matter, who became matter for my sake, and deigned to inhabit matter, who worked out my salvation through matter. I will not cease from honoring that matter which works my salvation. I venerate it, though not as God (Apologia pt. 1).

Whereas the latter John's ideas nurtured centuries of churches, frescoes, mosaics and icons, the former John's stripping of cultural Christianity has proven capable of turning churches into strip clubs. As I pointed out last year (surely you recall), the textbook case of Calvin's iconoclasm, the Oudekerk of Amsterdam, is now in the heart of the red light district.

Fast forward from the 16th to the 21st centuries, where the heirs of Calvin have had the chance to accumulate more than a few cultural barnacles of their own. But the Calvinist instinct endures. The rite of passage of a young Protestant (at least where I went to school) is the despising of whatever cultural Protestantism we were infected with as impressionable teenagers. The evangelical intelligentsia, or what I might playfully call "Books & Culture-culture," is fueled to a significant extent by highbrow rejection of Protestant cultural Christianity. Despise it (without losing faith completely), and you're in. Neuhaus expressed the phenomenon anecdotally:

An agnostic friend who taught at an Ivy League university for years underwent a born-again experience under Baptist auspices. For his sabbatical year, he decided to accept an invitation to teach at an evangelical college. He discovered, he tells me, that the most self-consciously sophisticated of this evangelical colleagues were the most boringly parochial. They were touchingly eager to convince him and others that they were in conversation with what my friend viewed, and knew all too well, as the stiflingly parochial and achingly correct discourse of the Ivy League. They displayed, he said, a practiced aloofness, bordering on disdain, for the Baptist faith and life that was, for my friend, the bracing alternative to 'the larger culture.' One person's stifling ghetto is another's bracing alternative (p. 12).

Of course there is much in Protestant cultural Christianity that is theologically sketchy, and there are lots of excellent articles in Books & Culture that you won't ever find in Christianity Today. And no it's not a bad thing to leave Left Behind's eschatology behind... but nor is it bad that lots of people are reading about the fact that Jesus is coming again and seeking to be spiritually prepared. We should take a cue from Paul and forgo despising, because the thing about unsophisticated, nuanceless, overbearing, kitschy cultural Christianity is that it's not going to go away. And that's a good thing.

There are many examples I could give of this kind of cultural Christianity in Greece, a country whose Christians have been subject to more than their share of oppression, and who consequently have learned some hard lessons of endurance. Consider the perpetual crossing and kissing, crossing and kissing, that happens as each soul thinks with their respective bodies as they enter the sacred space of the Orthodox church; or the many mountainside chapels and murals, where my instinctual Protestant distaste was overcome in realizing that whether or not such devotional channels avoid my theological scruples, given the choice between these expressions and Ottoman conquest, I'd prefer the first. Perhaps the strongest example was in Phillipi, one of the most well preserved of all ancient Biblical sites. Try to find the city as it stood when Paul preached there, and you won't. You'll find a place that claims to be the famous prison, but it's unlikely that it actually is. What you will find however are churches - massive, two-story, giant basilicas. In fact, three of them. What you will find is cultural, material Christianity by the ton. It is as impossible to find the pure essence of New Testament Christianity as it is impossible to find the ground that Paul walked on - what we have instead are basilicas. You could dig past them, but even then what would you find? Pagan temples that preceded the Christian ones, which are (at least to me), hardly preferable.

Explains Robert Louis Wilken in a very helpful article on the matter at hand,

Nothing is more needful today than the survival of Christian culture, because in recent generations this culture has become dangerously thin. At this moment in the Church's history in this country (and in the West more generally) it is less urgent to convince the alternative culture in which we live of the truth of Christ than it is for the Church to tell itself its own story and to nurture its own life, the culture of the city of God, the Christian republic. This is not going to happen without a rebirth of moral and spiritual discipline and a resolute effort on the part of Christians to comprehend and to defend the remnants of Christian culture.

Cultural Christianity is of course not enough. It is a supplement to genuine, vibrant, orthodox Christian faith. But for those not quite prepared for the latter, a Christianity of culture is a helpful waiting room until the moment of interior conversion arrives. Furthermore, cultural Christianity is necessary insulation against the cold blasts of secularism, and so is stripped away to our peril. A healthy degree of body fat may not look sexy, but it is healthy, and if you're caught in a blizzard, it could save your life. Likewise a deposit of cultural Christianity may not impress your hipster friends, but it could be the very things that helps Christianity survive whatever challenge to it may be waiting around the bend.

Certainly all Christians, as they are able, should develop their eyes and ears beyond Warner Sallman and CCM. But many have not, and among them, most will not they have time, money or opportunity to refine their sensibilities until the new heavens and new earth (where I expect they'll have to). For those of us a bit more elevated, good for us. But sophistication need not be accompanied by snobbery, and it best not. For it's not a far step away from despising cultural Christianity to despising Christianity to, dare I say? Dare I will... despising Christ.

Trippy

How does a lab make headlines? By having religiously inclined subjects pop shrooms while lying in a comfy bed listening to classical music, and then advising them to get spiritual. Results were (not surprisingly) positive, but remarks one candid chemist who worked on the experiments, "If you take psilocybin and go watch 'Friday the 13th,' I can guarantee you won't have a mystical experience."

And speaking of Friday, keep in mind this is nothing new, but recalls the 1962 Good Friday Experiment. Why on earth researchers chose the darkest day of the church year to send Seminarians on a psycheledic romp is beyond me. Then again, it was the 60's. Folks weren't exactly lucid.

In the meantime serious laypeople, and most especially monks and nuns, have been, and will continue to be, meeting God the hard way - through disciplined spirituality that translates into concrete action. It's a thought that leads me to wonder how many Habitat for Humanity chapters were initiated by highpriest of acid Timothy Leary?

Just when I was thinking it's good to finally be back in the UuuSssAaaaa, the above was passed on by a friend who has succeeded in returning this blog from Orientale Lumen back to Occidente Tenebris.

Athos Journal Part II

A journey to Athos deserve the sort of considered and meditative reflections that two brief blog posts are unable provide. For more lingering descriptions may I therefore refer you to journalist Christopher Merrill's Things of the Hidden God, which provide well informed and beautifully penned personal reflections on his recent pilgrimage. In the meantime, here's a quick jaunt through the rest of mine.

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Day 3 - Karyes: I awoke to a beautiful sunrise (the first I'd seen as the other monasteries I'd been at face West). Not exactly unhappy to leave the less hospitable place, I took a bus to the central "town" of Kyries, shopped around and observed the art of the Protaton, including the Axion Esti icon decorated with the watches of anonymous but grateful men. I then hiked up to the Skete of St. Andrew, a massive Russian monument hurriedly erected in the nineteenth century and just as quickly abandoned thanks to the Russian Revolution - but is now experiencing a revival. Because the place needs serious restoration, I thought perhaps an item or two purchased in the gift shop would help in the effort. After picking out a well-sized icon of St. Christopher and a print, I handed the monk at the register a 20 euro bill, only to have him shoo it away and (despite my persistent refusals) make me take the things I'd chosen while refusing, with a smile, to let me pay.

Day 3.5 - Iveron: I then took a bus to the #3 monastery in Athos' hierarchy. I should have walked, but paid for it the next morning by a return hike on the same unispiring route uphill. After checking into a private room at Iveron's massive guesthouse, I proceeded downstairs where the Australian monk Father Jeremiah both offered me lunch and took me up on my offer to converse (to my enormous relief) in English. Here finally was a chance for some theological discussion, so out came my objections to Orthodoxy, and back came winsome replies, understated but satisfying, from under the cover of a coy smile and unruly beard. Some monks on Athos were rude, he explained, simply because monks are people too. It is an obvious but often forgotten point. While mysticism is a branch of Catholic theology (and, I should add, a Protestant twig) all of Orthodox theology according to Father Jeremiah is mystical, refusing any and all concession to human logic. It's a debatable point, but I can at least see it. My most serious objection to Orthodoxy is what seems to me its decidedly ethnic composition. Father Jeremiah's reply to this was particularly astute: Athough nationalism is regrettable, the only truly "Orthodox" are not Greeks, Russians or Serbs, but those who are divinized, i.e. the Saints.

I suspect in fact that some of the monks at Iveron may be well along with their respective divinizations. After liturgy they informally processed around the courtyard in joyful conversation, embracing all newcoming guests with the same enchanting hospitality as they did me. The splendor of the liturgy effortlessly translated itself into the gentle kindness of everday interaction.

At night I found myself in the bookstore with two more English speaking monks, one who must have been about thirty, the second about seventy. They had a rapport like college roommates, and were eager to inivite anyone into their circle of comradery that was willing to join, even if it meant the exhausting task of keeping up conversations in English and Greek at the same time. After pouring us all a (single) shot of vodka, they laughed and joked with the other customers until well past closing time. The elder monk saw my interest in icons, and literally forced me, again despite repeated objections, to plunder the print section of the gift shop without paying, taking a copy of every icon print they had, which were quite a few. I felt at this point it was my duty to not go into any more gift shops lest I be considered to be taking advantage of a situation.

Though the extraordinary grace of Iveron hadn't convinced me to become Orthodox, for the first time I felt the tug that leads so many to so decide. Still, because as one British writer dryly put it, "Athos has never been at the forefront of ecumenical dialougue," I am to the Athonites formally a heretic (albeit a very kindly hosted one). If Western Christianity has anything going for it, at least neither Protestants nor Catholics return that particular favor, as there will always more more to learn from the East than there ever will be to criticize. As explained one western Christian in an extraordinary document,

"The men and women of the East are a symbol of the Lord who comes again. We cannot forget them, not only because we love them as brothers and sisters redeemed by the same Lord, but also because a holy nostalgia for the centuries lived in the full communion of faith and charity urges us and reproaches us for our sins and our mutual misunderstandings: we have deprived the world of a joint witness that could, perhaps, have avoided so many tragedies and even changed the course of history."

Day 4 - Xenophontos: The joy in Iveron was contagious, and I left in the morning for Kyries not exactly happy to leave. Though I had planned to depart that day, unanimous advice of the monks was that staying one or two days past your permit was acceptable. Because the purpose of my visit was art historical research, I was told that the capitol of icon painting on Athos was Xenophontos monastery. After a quick stop at Panteleimon (the Russian monastery which saw 600 of its monks forcably deported by warship to Siberia in 1913), I spent the better portion of a long hike trying to secure a Xenophonatos reservation beforehand. But phones it seems aren't picked up on Sunday. No matter however, because after arriving (and waiting 4 hourse!) it turned out a reservation was unnecessary. The food of rice and clams was delicious, and the elaborately painted refectory overlooked the sparkling sea. That night a few of us made a rewarding short hike to Docheiariou, from where the above picture was taken.

Day 5 - Departure: In the morning after liturgy and breakfast I was given the chance to interview (with rare permission for pictures!) Father Lukas, one of the head iconographers on Athos. Thanks to my having recruited a translator the night before, our conversation about icons could venture well beyond "This is pretty," and "I like this one" (too far beyond which this pilgrim's Greek has yet to go).

On the boat back I met up with Hussein, a Muslim student studying in Thessalonki who I had met at one of the less hospitable foundations. I learned that after being politely asked to leave another monastery, he tried his luck, without having called ahead, at the famous (and consequently overbooked) Simonopetra, where he was treated to the same kind of extraordinary graciousness I had experienced at Iveron. One monk, on learning that he was a Muslim, kindly gave him a prayer bracelet and instructed him to say "Allah, Allah" during the service. It struck me as a gesture that would make many Orthodox deeply uncomfortable, as I should admit it makes me. But what was the effect of this instruction? Said Hussein, "I was so struck by their kindness that I am considering changing my religion."

There's a little bit in it story to offend everyone. Perhaps that's why I like it.

From two weeks at a convent and one on Athos, I've learned above all that monks and nuns are often much, much shrewder than one might orignially suppose. And though the "Orthdoxy or Death" flag flies still over Esphigemenou because the current Patriarch of Constantinople dared merely speak with the Pope, still I'll bet their are a good many Athonite monks who secretly joined the last one in praying,

"May God shorten the time and distance. May Christ, the Orientale Lumen, soon, very soon, grant us to discover that in fact, despite so many centuries of distance, we were very close, because together - perhaps without knowing it - we were walking towards the one Lord, and thus towards one another" (5/2/95).

They're way too holy to not have.

Athos Journal Part I

Perhaps recording my Athos itinerary might be of help to any men (or daring Yentls) who'd like to go, and prefer to learn from someone else's mistakes rather than their own. While taking issue with the word "ferocious," I can generally concur with one guidebook that put the matter this way:

"It is possible to be treated to ferocious bigotry and disarming gentility at the same place within the space of ten minutes, making it tricky to draw conclusions about Athos in general and given monasteries in particular" (527).

Were I Greek, Orthodox, or both I am certain things would have gone much more smoothly - but being neither made the extraordinary hospitality I (sometimes) did receive all the more disarming.

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Preparation: As with much else in modern life, hippies spoiled the fun for the rest of us. Flowerchildren flocked to Athos in the 60's on hearing everything there was free and overstayed their welcome, thus requiring Greece to now insure the process is complicated enough to discourage the idle traveler. It's a pain, but doable, and up until the visit to the port city of Ouranopoli can all be done by phone/fax. Two months in advance however proved not to be enough to get the day of my choice, so plan way ahead. After securing a permit, one needs call individual monasteries for reservations, and 6am (1pm Greek time) proved not to be early enough, but 5am usually worked. Be prepared to speak Greek on the phone, and to call repeatedly. There is of course spiritual preparation as well, which I could have used a bit more of.

Day 1- Departure and Dionysiou: In Ouranopoli (literally "Heaventown") the Pilgrim's Office opened at 7:30am and they even let me keep my bags there for a couple of days. With permit (diamoneterion) in hand I bought a ferry ticket, and by 10am was cruising up the easternmost peninsula of the Chalidici. I took the boat to Daphne (the main port), from where I took another smaller boat past the visual feast of the famous "cliffhanger" monasteries. I got off at St. Paul Monastery, and backtracked in a beautiful but punishing one hour hike to my first reservation, Dionysiou. Upon arriving I was treated to the traditional libations, a shot of tsipouro (a nice liqueur) and louokoumi (Turkish delight).

Immediately I found myself engrossed in conversation with a Catholic German who shared with me his dismay at having to eat entirely alone at the monastery he had just come from, apart from both the monks and other Orthodox pilgrims. He said he understood not being able to receive the eucharist, and he would not have minded being able eating apart if there were one or two others with him - but he was literally in the corner at his own table, alone, while all the Orthodox ate together. It was an ominous conversation to begin the trip with, especially considering for some reason the Pilgrim's Office named me a Catholic (even though I said Protestant).

At 5pm vespers began, and at 6 pilgrims and monks processed into the refectory for a fasting season supper as we listened to texts read aloud in Greek (no one here had to eat alone). Though I grew to really enjoy refectory meals, to be honest my first impression of the corporate-passive eating style was, "This must be what prison is like." However, with few exceptions the food is (to my taste at least) phenomenal: Organic vegetarianism before it was cool. Afterwords we were processed back into the church for relic venearation, Orthodox and non-Orthodox alike being allowed to go all the way into the main katholikon. Had my Greek (or Russian) skills been sharper it would have been easier finding evening conversation after dinner. But silence can be good for the soul.

Day 2 - Skete of St. Anne and a Less Hospitable Place: I was off early the next morning to make it to the Skete (i.e. less than a full monastery) of St. Anne, where I had a tip about a friendly, English-speaking, icon-painting monk named Father Theoliptos, who turned out to be all three. The hike was again on the brutal side (I'm not exactly in shape), but included an impromptu donkey ride from a passing caravan, and was rewarded by great hospitality at the guest house of St. Anne's. Arriving pilgrims were shown the relics of ee giagia tou Jesou (Jesus' grandmother), and one priest noticing my interest gave me an icon. After monastic lunch and a long conversation, Father Theoliptos recommended a speed boat to loop around the tip of Athos on my way to where I had a reservation for the night. These waters are treacherous enough to have led Xerxes to build a canal, but the ride seemed pretty smooth to me, and seeing the terrain I would have been covering relieved me of any sense of guilt that I hadn't walked.

At this monastery I unfortunately felt like I was in the way. Though the guestmaster invited non-Orthodox pilgrims into the main church for relic veneration after dinner, this proved to be too much for one priest who promptly ordered us out. Things proceeded apace, and at one point while I was observing a mural, one monk said to me snippily, "Can you understand what you're reading?" Hoping this might be the beginning of a conversation, I explained to him that (in this case at least) I did, but he just kept walking. Though I've tried to give this incident a charitable interpretation, I feel that to do so might be misconstruing this particular monk's intentions. The stay was disheartening enough that I even considered leaving before my permit ended.

But the next day, thanks to a few amazing monks the trip took a serious turn for the best, so much that I stayed past it. Part II is in the works.

Greece Update

Just when I thought I was getting well travelled, along comes another Matt to put me in my place. Impressive. Makes me look like Immanuel Kant.

As for this Matt, after a two week seminar at an extraordinary convent recently revived by the famous Father Eprhaim, I enjoyed a brief stay at the Imaret under academic auspices, a quick stop at Phillipi, and just returned from five days on Mt. Athos. Regarding the latter, here are some things I hadn't expected:

1. Seeing a pilgrim buy a case of beer in the provisions shop as soon as I stepped off the boat.
2. Helipads (note the plural).
3. Downright rudeness from some monasteries.
4. From others, simply the most gracious hospitality conceivable. Almost to the point of some kind of holy absurdity.
5. Squid for breakfast.
6. Weekday services that can extend from 3am - 8:30am (I preferred vespers).

I'm still in beautiful Thessaloniki gnawing on frappee straws between churches and museums. Back soon.