Report to Grego (43 page)

Jesse, troubled, came up to him.

“There is still David, my youngest” he said. “He is tending the sheep.”

“Have him called!”

“Eliab,” said the father, “go and call your brother.”

Eliab knit his brows, and the frightened father addressed his second son: “Abinadab, go and call your brother.”

But this one refused also. They all refused.

Samuel rose from the threshold. “Open the gate. I'll go myself.”

“Shall I describe his appearance so you can recognize him?” asked the old man.

“No. I recognized him sooner than his father or his mother!”

Stumbling over the stones, he began with curses to climb
the hillside, shouting, “I don't want to, I don't want to,” as he proceeded.

The moment he perceived a youth standing among his sheep, a youth with flame-red hair which shone like the rising sun, he halted. His heart bellowed like a calf.

“Come here to me, David,” he called commandingly.

“You come to me!” answered David. “I don't leave my sheep.”

“It's him, it's him!” roared Samuel as he went forward, full of indignation.

Going close to him, he clasped his shoulder, dug his fingers into his back, examined his shanks, returned to the head.

The boy jerked his head away angrily. “Who are you? What do you mean by examining me?”

“I am Samuel, the Lord's servant. He tells me to go and I go; He tells me to cry out and I cry out. I am His foot, His mouth. His hand, His shadow upon the soil. . . . Bend down!”

Finding the top of the boy's head, he poured out the holy oil.

“I hate you, I do not want you; I love another. But the wind of the Lord passes above me, and look, against my will I lift my hand and pour the prophetic oil upon your scalp.

“David is anointed King of Israel! David is anointed King of Israel! David is anointed King of Israel!”

He hurled the sacred flask against the stones, shattering it

“You have shattered my heart in the same way, Lord. I no longer want to live!”

Seven crows sped out of the heavenly depths, hovered in a circle close above him, and waited. Unwinding his green turban, the prophet spread it out on the ground as a shroud. The crows came closer, encouraged. The prophet covered his face with his patchwork tatters and did not move again.

•  •  •

W
ith this vision of the man who vainly tries to oppose God, sleep carried me off, and I surrendered myself without resistance
to the invisible hands. Thus the night, which I had so feared, passed happily and without dreams.

I descended to the courtyard at daybreak, fully rested. The monks, flitting by like wraiths in the half-light, disappeared one by one into the chapel. I went in with them to hear matins, huddling in one of the stalls. Two cressets were burning in front of the iconostasis—there was no other light—but I managed to make out Christ's austere figure in the dimness, and next to Him the tender, afflicted face of the Blessed Virgin. The air was redolent with wax and sweet-incense. Paschal laurels were still scattered over the paving stones.

What happiness is here, I thought to myself, what isolation! How distant is the reeling, bellowing world! Why flee from beneath this wing of Christ—to go where? Why drown in minor concerns and minor joys? The oyster is here, the oyster with the Great Pearl. I shall master my body, master my soul, prune away all the minor branches that drain off the strength of the crown; I shall remain nothing but crown, and shall rise. Before me I have a great Striver. I shall follow Him. He is climbing a terrible ascent; I shall climb it with Him.

I kept gazing at Christ's virile, ascetic figure in the gentle glow of the cressets. Perceiving the slender hands which maintained a firm grip on the world and kept it from falling into chaos, I knew that here on earth, for the full span of our lives, Christ was not the harbor where one casts anchor, but the harbor from which one departs, gains the offing, encounters a wild, tempestuous sea, and then struggles for a lifetime to anchor in God. Christ is not the end, He is the beginning. He is not the “Welcome!” He is the “Bon voyage!” He does not sit back restfully in soft clouds, but is battered by the waves just as we are, His eyes fixed aloft on the North Star, His hands firmly on the helm. That was why I liked Him; that was why I would follow Him.

What attracted me and gave me courage above everything else was how—with what striving and derring-do, what frantic hope—the person who found himself in Christ set out to reach God and merge with Him, so that the two might become indissolubly one. There is no other way to reach God but this. Following Christ's bloody tracks, we must fight to transubstantiate the man inside us into spirit, so that we may merge with God.

This dual nature of Christ had always been a deep, inscrutable mystery to me, and especially the yearning, so human, so superhuman, of Christ the man to attain to God, or, more exactly, to return to God and become identical with Him. This nostalgia, at once so mystical and so real, had opened large wounds in me and also abundant wellsprings.

From my youth onward, my principal anguish, and the wellspring of all my joys and sorrows, had been this: the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh.

Within me were the dark immemorial forces of the Evil One, human and prehuman; within me too were the luminous forces, human and prehuman, of God—and my soul was the arena where these two armies clashed and met.

The anguish was intense. I loved my body and did not want it to perish; I loved my soul and did not want it to decay. I fought to reconcile these two antagonistic, world-creating forces, to make them realize that they are not enemies but, rather, fellow workers, so that they might rejoice in their harmony—and so that I might rejoice with them.

Every man is half God, half man; he is both spirit and flesh. That is why the mystery of Christ is not simply a mystery for a particular creed; it is universal. The struggle between God and man breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliation. Most often this struggle is unconscious and short-lived. A weak soul does not have the endurance to resist the flesh for very long. It grows heavy, becomes flesh itself, and the contest ends. But among responsible men, men who keep their eyes riveted day and night upon the Supreme Duty, the conflict between flesh and spirit breaks out mercilessly and may last until death.

The stronger the soul and the flesh, the more fruitful the struggle and the richer the final harmony. God does not love weak souls and flabby flesh. The spirit desires to wrestle with flesh which is strong and full of resistance. It is a carnivorous bird which is incessantly hungry; it eats flesh and, by assimilating it, makes it disappear.

Struggle between the flesh and the spirit, rebellion and resistance, reconciliation and submission, and finally—the supreme purpose of the struggle—union with God: this was the ascent taken by Christ, the ascent which He invites us to take as well, following in His bloody tracks.

This is the Supreme Duty of the man who struggles—to set out for this lofty peak which Christ, the first-born son of salvation, attained. How can we begin?

If we are to be able to follow Him, we must have a profound knowledge of His conflict, we must relive His anguish: His victory over the blossoming snares of the earth, His sacrifice of the great and small joys of men, and His ascent from sacrifice to sacrifice, exploit to exploit, to martyrdom's summit, the Cross.

I had never followed Christ's bloody journey to Golgotha with such intensity, never relived His Life and Passion with so much understanding and love as during my days and nights in Jerusalem, Galilee, and by the Dead Sea. Never with so much sweetness, so much pain, had I felt the blood of Christ falling drop by drop into my heart.

For in order to mount to the Cross, the summit of sacrifice, and to God, the summit of immateriality, Christ passed through all the stages which the man who struggles passes through. All—and that is why His suffering is so familiar to us; that is why we pity Him, and why His final victory seems to us so much our own future victory. That part of Christ's nature which was profoundly human helps us to understand Him and love Him and to pursue His Passion as though it were our own. If He had not within Him this warm human element, He would never be able to touch our hearts with such assurance and tenderness; He would not be able to become a model for our lives. We struggle, we see Him struggle also, and we find strength. We see that we are not all alone in the world; He is fighting at our side.

Christ's every moment is a conflict and a victory. He conquered the invincible enchantment of simple human pleasures; He conquered every temptation, continually transubstantiated flesh into spirit, and ascended. Every obstacle in His journey became an occasion for further triumph, and then a landmark of that triumph. We have a model in front of us now, a model who opens the way for us and gives us strength.

Blowing through heaven and earth, and in our hearts and the heart of every living thing, is a gigantic breath—a great Cry—which we call God. Plant life wished to continue its motionless sleep next to stagnant waters, but the Cry leaped up within it and violently shook its roots: “Away, let go of the earth, walk!” Had the tree been able to think and judge, it would have cried, “I don't
want to. What are you urging me to do! You are demanding the impossible!” But the Cry, without pity, kept shaking its roots and shouting, “Away, let go of the earth, walk!”

It shouted in this way for thousands of eons; and lo! as a result of desire and struggle, life escaped the motionless tree and was liberated.

Animals appeared—worms—making themselves at home in water and mud. “We're just fine here,” they said. “We have peace and security; we're not budging!”

But the terrible Cry hammered itself pitilessly into their loins. “Leave the mud, stand up, give birth to your betters!”

“We don't want to! We can't!”

“You can't, but I can. Stand up!”

And lo! after thousands of eons, man emerged, trembling on his still unsolid legs.

The human being is a centaur; his equine hoofs are planted in the ground, but his body from breast to head is worked on and tormented by the merciless Cry. He has been fighting, again for thousands of eons, to draw himself, like a sword, out of his animalistic scabbard. He is also fighting—this is his new struggle—to draw himself out of his human scabbard. Man calls in despair, “Where can I go? I have reached the pinnacle, beyond is the abyss.” And the Cry answers, “I am beyond. Stand up!” All things are centaurs. If this were not the case, the world would rot into inertness and sterility.

As I walked hour after hour in the desert surrounding the monastery, God gradually began to liberate Himself from priests. Thenceforth, the Lord for me was this Cry.

With the passage of the days in this godly isolation, my heart grew calm. It seemed to fill with answers. I did not ask questions any more; I was certain. Everything—where we come from, where we are going, what our purpose is on earth—struck me as extremely sure and simple in this God-trodden isolation. Little by little my blood took on the godly rhythm. Matins, Divine Liturgy, vespers, psalmodies, the sun rising in the morning and setting in the evening, the constellations suspended like chandeliers each night over the monastery: all came and went, came and went in obedience to eternal laws, and drew the blood of man into the same placid rhythm. I saw the world as a tree, a gigantic poplar,
and myself as a green leaf clinging to a branch with my slender stalk. When God's wind blew, I hopped and danced, together with the entire tree.

I kept speaking to my soul, asking it with anguish, Do you believe? Are you able to give of your entire being? Are you ready?

What I wanted was to comply with an austere rhythm, to enlist in an army which had set out to gain the supreme hope, to board in my turn the Christian Argo with its abstemious, destitute, virginal heroes—and we would heave out the red sail, and the mystic vine of the Eucharist would sprout from the mainmast, and we would-cruise as pirates in order to snatch the golden fleece of immortality from God's shoulders! What I wanted was to triumph, in my turn, over triviality, pleasure, and death.

I roamed the desert for hours each day, aware that a hidden decision was slowing maturing inside me, a decision which still did not dare reveal itself by name. In the evenings when I returned, I found the monks outside their cells. The day's swelter had subsided, and they were inhaling the coolness of the approaching night.

Solitude is fatal to any soul which fails to burn with a great passion. If, in his solitude, a monk does not love God to the point of frenzy, he is doomed. The minds of several of the monks had tottered. These brothers had nothing to think about, nothing to desire. Half closing their eyes, they sat down in a row in the courtyard and waited for the hour when they would enter the chapel, the refectory, their cells—that was all. Their memories had grown murky, their teeth had fallen out, their loins ached. They were not men, but neither were they animals. Nor were they angels yet. They were neither male nor female, neither alive nor dead. In a stupor, their arms folded, they waited for death, just as bare stalks await the spring.

One of them kept recalling his wife, and spat incessantly. Another had a notebook and a little package of crayons beneath his shirt; every so often he brought them out and proceeded to draw the identical picture—Christ with breasts, nursing His Mother. A third, upon awakening each morning, went down to the courtyard to wash in the fountain, maniacally excoriating himself in order to remove the filth from the dreams he had during the night. And seated always in the same place in the yard, a closed book on his
knees, was the strange monk who had come into the abbot's quarters with the guestmaster on the first day. He never spoke to anyone, and whenever he entered the yard, he lifted his eyes and observed me, his lips smiling sometimes with kindness—so it seemed to me—sometimes with mockery. On several occasions when I passed in front of him, he started to rise and was about to speak to me; but he always sat down again, the smile vanishing from his lips.