Quiet hearts
Contemplative life at Greek Orthodox monastery
by Paul Smart
Woodstock Times - Features 6/8/2006
According to Heiro Deacon Savas, this past Monday was the first quiet day he and his fellow monks of the Monastery of the Holy Ascension on Cold Brook Road had seen in over a week. June 1, he said in his quietly intense manner, the sky brightening with late afternoon sun behind him, had been the feast of Christ's Ascension, the biggest day in the Greek Orthodox Church.
On Holy Thursday, Father Savas was saying, busloads of the devout had come up from New York City, where the Holy Metropolis of the Genuine Greek Orthodox Church of America is based on a side street in Astoria, Queens. The monks on Cold Brook Road, who range in number between five and seven, depending on their church's needs elsewhere, had tended gardens, set up flags and prepared feasts for their visitors.
Savas, who first came to Woodstock soon after the monastery's founding seven years ago, said that the monks of Holy Ascenion have been needed quite a bit of late. The head of their church in North America, His Eminence Metropolitan Pavlos, had suffered a stroke on the last day of February and just been moved from intensive care at Mt. Sinai to a rehabilitation center on Long Island. The monks of the church's "monastery and spiritual center," founded by the Metropolitan soon after his becoming bishop in 1998, had been going back and forth to be with Pavlos as he slowly regained some of his powers. And, Father Savas added, they'd been doing what they could "to keep things under control."
In late March, it turns out, Father Savas had sent out a press release to this newspaper and other publications throughout the region, heartbreaking in its simple sense of careful language.
"The attending physicians have not seen the progress and improvement that they had hoped to see by this time," he had written. "His eminence remains at a level of consciousness wherein he is not responsive to verbal or visual stimuli."
Seated on the former farm of a little-known but well-recompensed daytime soaps actor, birches bending in a breeze before a shimmering view of the deepening Catskills, Savas told of how Pavlos had founded this monastery in honor of his predecessor, Metropolitan Geronda PETROS, who had spent years of his life as a monk on Mount Athos, the legendary (and hard to reach) Greek peninsula of cliff-hanging monasteries dating back to the 4th Century. Furthermore, he spoke of how much it had meant to him and his fellow monks to have the Archbishop Chrysostomos II of Athens send his prayers and best wishes, as well as his emissary Chrysostomos of Attica, to celebrate the Ascension in the Catskills.
And yet oddly, given his grief for a friend and mentor in illness, Father Savas does not seem sad, or even distracted. We talk about the Metropolitan's being paralyzed on one side but also about all the gifts of food that parishioners had brought up from the city. The monks' shopping trips to Boiceville Market and Home Depot as well as their talks about how the English language tends to pack its punches at the end of sentences, making it hard for someone with a stroke to really say much other than "yes" or "no" with any grammatical grace.
Frogs are sounding as birds flit about, a lame cat limps by, and the monastery's two Akitas bark in anticipation of being petted.
"Monasticism is the foundation of Orthodox Christianity and it is the purest form of life the Church offers. The Monastery of the Holy Ascension will be a place where laymen of our Metropolis can give up their worldly lives and embrace the 'Angelic Life,'" reads a notice written when the Metropolitan now in-rehabilitation first announced his plan to search out a suitable place for such a retreat within driving distance of New York.
Father Savas explains that he achieved his goals via Internet Real Estate ads and a broker. Now, a second monastery is being set up farther north on the border between Albany and Greene Counties outside the rural community of Preston Hollow.
He gets up, the hour drawing close to his order's second daily three-hour liturgical reading and chanting, and moves us as quickly as is polite towards a barn where the monks make candles for orthodox churches around the continent. We pass a vegetable garden growing lush with all the rain of recent weeks.
Savas has a pronounced limp but moves fast. His ways are gentle but firm. His humor is keen but his very being is sweet and direct, caring and cool. He's young, as all the four monks we meet are, aged somewhere between his early 20s and mid-30s.
Sheep move together on the distant hill around three bare crosses. Do the monks milk them, shear them each spring?
Father Savas laughs. They have tried, he says, but were told the sheep they bought, while scenic, are basically meat sheep. So they've ended up being more for the old country charm they lend parishioners coming up from Queens, or their Orthodox Church's other centers in Clearwater/Tarpon Springs, Florida, Michigan, Montreal and the Chicago area.
"We're still a bunch of city slickers when you get down to it," Savas says, asking that we duck our heads as we enter the barn. "But we've gotten along with our neighbors. The older ones, two of whom are in their nineties now, have told us many stories about this property. They are glad we've brought it back. It had been empty for a few years before we came..."
Bare bulbs illuminate an old milking room stacked with ancient-looking bricks of beeswax. There's a stainless steel cauldron and more stacks of molds... intricate systems of strung wicks that get dipped into the wax, much of it recycled from candle tail ends, for candles of different sizes.
A line of yard-high pieces of PVC pipe with more strings dangling out their tops, the monk says, are actually altar candles. They're made of paraffin, he says, so they won't break as easily.
"When an orthodox goes into church, the first thing he or she does is light a candle," Father Savas says. "I guess you could call candles our stock in trade."
From outside comes a loud yet oddly melodic clacking sound... a monk in black robes, like our host, is giving the call for vespers, compline - the night prayers - and the evening lauds on what looks like a Byzantine washboard. Savas begs leave. Services start at 7 p.m. Then again at 5 a.m. They're bunched here, as on Mount Athos, he has said, to better allow for the work schedule monasteries require.
"By a quirk of history the government of Greece, in 1924, outlawed the 2,000-year old traditional Orthodox church in favor of a modernized Greek Orthodox State Church. Anyone opposing the beliefs of the State Church was branded as 'uncanonical,' and 'schismatic' and - as the persecution reached a pitched fervor in the 1950s - the traditionalists were condemned in the secular Greek press as 'enemies of the Greek people. . . those who seek to shatter our ethnic unity,'" I read in literature picked off the Web as I make my way to Holy Ascension's chapel, a small room off its kitchen. "Under the leadership of monks from Mount Athos the traditionalists, or 'Old Calendarists' as they were labeled by the modernists, went underground in Greece until a recent revision of the law allowed them to publicly exercise their religious preference."
Saint Markella's, the church out of which this monastery was eventually born, had its roots in the orthodox Diaspora of the 1950s. Its growth has been via similar rurally-born immigrant populations in unassimilated Greek communities.
"Logic dictates that if the liberation of the Church is the only way to preserve and rejuvenate her and if we cannot possibly achieve this in one step, then let us start by promoting our spiritual independence through the liberation of the local churches from the bondage of their captors one by one," I continue reading amidst a dense treatise on the many splits Christianity has taken over 2,000 years.
And a few paragraphs later, in a 2005 edict: "In view of the misinformation being disseminated by those who do not have the best interests of the Holy Orthodox Church at heart - disobedient clergy, scandal-mongers, adherents of Para synagogues, and others of like mind - His Beatitude, Archbishop Chrysostomos and the Sacred Synod of our Church have instructed us to issue this formal clarification, that the minds and hearts of the reason-endowed sheep of Christ may not be troubled by the lies of the unscrupulous. It is alleged by these unprincipled calumniators that we recently performed the Orthodox marriage rite over an Orthodox woman and a heterodox man. This is a blatant misrepresentation of the facts."
The sound of chanting comes from the closed storm door separating the chapel from outside. We enter.
It seems that Pavlos, now ill and being cared for by these monks, helped set up his own, purified church over time.
Father Savas has told me that the role of the monastic is to be in retreat. To be pure, in other words, and lead by example. To pray.
The chapel is adorned with icons of Christ at various stages of his life, the Holy Mother, various saints. There is an ornately-carved throne-like chair sitting empty against one wall. To its side stands Savas and three others, reading from the Bible in accented English. Across from them is a massive wooden box-like edifice, columned with heavy drapes. Occasionally, the sound of chanting and Bible readings in what must be Greek emanates.
The monks are robed. All are bearded. Father Savas and the man who emerges from the curtained box wear hood-like headgear... classically Orthodox.
Savas had told me earlier how his mother had been a Cypriot orthodox. He had had to search out the church after growing up on its fringes in the City. Other monks had been raised similarly, or, in the case of one, in the Russian Orthodox Church.
The man who has emerged carries a smoking censor that rings percussively with the sound of brass bells. The monks at the lectern, Savas included, start chant singing in Greek. The melodies are ancient, Eastern, and with the haphazard rhythms of the censor being carried around the room, then through the kitchen beyond, about as mystical and otherworldly as anything I've heard in years.
I feel like bursting into tears for some reason. I think about the ineffable beauty of all that is unknown.
The harmonies of male voices, half in high tenors, with drones below, is mesmerizing. It could go on forever, the sound of hope and yearning and all that is good and wanting to be better in men and women. And it likely will continue, I realize, for several hours yet as the outside light first strengthens then slips into the dark.
"Christos Anesti! May the joy of the Risen Lord fill your hearts," reads a mid-May Encyclical from Chrysostomos of Athens and All Greece. "Until His Eminence has completely recovered I ask that you not only please continue in your supplicatory prayers towards the Lord, the All Holy Virgin, and all the Saints, but that you all should also with increased zeal ask of the Lord for the quick recovery and return of His Eminence to his duties as shepherd of his flock. Our Church, and the Greek Diaspora, is attacked by many enemies and is in serious need of his Eminence's leadership."
But the Archbishop also asked that people give the Metropiltan quiet. Do not visit, it said. That is the monk's job. Visit them.
Which may, Savas had said earlier, be why this year's Feast of the Ascension had been so busy.
"I understand how much you all want to be near him during his trying time, and how much you all want his blessings. This tires him, stresses him, and delays his recovery," the Encyclical continued. "Have some patience, and have the hope that very quickly you will have the opportunity to joyfully see him conduct Divine Liturgy at the Cathedral of St. Markella and with his thunderous sermons be victorious over the enemies of Orthodoxy and Hellenism."
I step back out from the small chapel as the west fills with rich colors. It's not easy to pull away from such music, such devotion.
"Our society needs many alternative ways of life. The pursuit of wealth, social status and earthly pleasures which are the current social values, need to be counter balanced," reads the official Website for Mount Athos, orthodoxy's original monasteries, now run as their own state. "Monasticism is an established alternative society. Monks live a particular way of life which aims at the soul's salvation and the salvation of humanity at large."
There's no time for proper goodbyes with Father Savas. But I know he can't look up from his vocation. I'll be back.
"Please keep praying for him," were his last words before moving on to his own prayers. "I'm thankful that you came."