Report to Grego (45 page)

He remained silent, apparently struggling to choose what to say and how to say it without wounding me. For he saw me squirming nervously on my stool.

“I want you to know,” he declared at last, “that of all the world's joys—and it has many, curse it!—youth is the one I revere the most. When I see a young person in danger I feel that God's vanguard, indeed the whole of life, is in danger also. I run to help, as far as I am able—to help keep youth from perishing, in other words from going astray, shedding its flowers, and growing old prematurely. This is the reason I called you to my cell tonight.”

I gave a start.

“What, am I in danger?” I asked, not knowing whether to become angry or break out laughing.

The old man moved his hand slowly back and forth to calm me.

“Be angry, laugh, get it out of your system—but listen carefully. I am talking to you out of bitter personal experience; it is your duty to listen. For seven days I have watched you circling God's flame like a nocturnal butterfly. I don't want to let you be consumed; no, not you, I repeat, but youth. I pity your cheeks which are still covered with fuzz, your lips which are still not surfeited with kisses or blasphemy, your guileless soul which darts forward to be consumed wherever it spies a glint of light. But I will not let you. You are at the edge of the abyss. I will not let you fall.”

“Whose abyss?”

“God's.”

The cell creaked as he pronounced that terrible word. Some invisible being had entered. Never had this word which I had uttered so often and so profanely, never had it provoked such fright in me. Alive once more inside me was the childhood terror I felt when I heard the word
Jehovah
issue as though from a dark clamorous cave, the same terror which the word massacre had aroused in me ever since my childhood.

I rose from the stool and huddled in a corner.

“Do not stop, Father,” I murmured. “I am listening.”

“Inside you there is a great devouring concern. I see it in your burning eyes, your incessantly fluttering eyebrows, your hands which grope in the air as though you were blind, or as though the air were a body and you were touching it. Take care. This anxiety can lead you either to madness or perfection.”

I felt his glance pass into me and churn up my entrails.

“What anxiety? I don't know what anxiety you mean, Father.”

“The anxiety about sainthood. Do not become frightened. You yourself are unaware of it because you are living it. Why do I tell you this? It is to enable you to realize what road you have taken, which direction you have chosen. To keep you from going astray. Though you have embarked on the most difficult of all ascents, you are in such a hurry to reach the top that you think you can accomplish this before you traverse the mountain's foot and sides, supposedly as if you were a winged eagle. But you are a man and don't forget it. A man—nothing more, nothing less. You have legs,
not wings. Yes, I know: man's supreme desire is for sanctity. Well and good, but first we must traverse all the lower desires, we must learn to despise the flesh, and also the thirst for power, gold, and rebellion. What I mean is, we should live our youth and all the manly passions to the hilt, should disembowel all these idols and discover that they are overstuffed with chaff and air, should empty and cleanse ourselves so that we will never be tempted to look back. Then, and only then, should we present ourselves before God. . . . This is how the true Striver acts.”

“I can never cease wrestling with God,” I replied. “I shall be wrestling with Him even at the very last moment when I present myself before Him. I believe this is my fate. Not to reach my destination—this I shall never do—but to wrestle.”

Coming close, he tapped me tenderly on the shoulder.

“Never cease wrestling with God. There is no better discipline. But do not assume that in order to wrestle with more confidence you must pluck out the dark roots inside you—the instincts. The sight of a woman frightens you to death. You say it is the Tempter—'Get thee behind me, Satan.' Yes, it is the Tempter, but if you wish to conquer temptation, there is only one way: embrace it, taste it, learn to despise it. Then it will not tempt you again. Otherwise, though you live a hundred years, if you have not enjoyed women, they will come whether you are sleeping or stirring and will soil your dreams and your soul. I have said it once and I say it again: whoever uproots his instincts uproots his strength—for with time, satiety, and discipline this dark matter may turn to spirit.”

He glanced around him and stepped up to the window, as though afraid that someone might be listening. Then, coming close to me, he whispered in a hushed voice, “I still have something else to tell you. We are alone; no one can hear us.”

“God can,” I said.

“I fear men, not God. He understands and forgives, they do not—and under no circumstances do I want to lose the tranquility I found here in the desert. . . . Listen, therefore, and bear firmly in mind what I am going to tell you. I am sure that it will help you.”

He stopped for a moment, half closed his eyes, and glanced at me through his eyelashes, as though weighing me.

“I wonder if you can stand it,” he murmured.

“I can, I can,” I answered with impatience. “Speak freely, Father.”

He lowered his voice still more.

“Angels are nothing more—do you hear!—nothing more than refined devils. The day will come—oh, if only I could live to see it!—when men will understand this, and then . . .”

He leaned over to my ear. For the first time, his voice was trembling.

“ . . . and then the religion of Christ will take another step forward on earth. It will embrace the whole man, all of him, not just half as it does now in embracing only the soul. Christ's mercy will broaden. It will embrace and sanctify the body as well as the soul; it will see—and preach—that they are not enemies, but fellow workers. Whereas now, what happens? If we sell ourselves to the devil, he urges us to deny the soul; if we sell ourselves to God, He urges us to deny the body. When will Christ's heart grow sufficiently broad to commiserate not only the soul but also the body, and to reconcile these two savage beasts?”

I was deeply moved.

“Thank you, Father, for the precious gift you have given me.”

“Until this moment I have sought a young man to whom I could entrust it before I died. Now, praise the Lord, you have come. Take it. It is the fruit of my entire apprenticeship to flesh and spirit.”

“You are rendering up the flame of your entire life. Will I be able to carry it still further and turn it into light?”

“You should not ask if you will succeed or not. That isn't what matters the most. The only thing that matters is your struggle to carry it further. God reckons that—the assault—to our account and nothing else. Whether we win or lose is His affair, not ours.”

Neither of us spoke for quite some time. The desert night with its innumerable disquieting voices passed outside the cell's tiny window. Jackals could be heard howling in the distance; they too were undergoing the pangs of love or hunger.

“It is the desert,” murmured the old man, making the sign of the cross, “the goatsuckers and jackals, and farther away, the lions. And inside the monastery, the monks sleeping and dreaming. And in the sky above us, the stars. And everywhere, God.”

He offered me his hand. “I have nothing else to tell you, my child.”

Walking with weightless steps, I returned to my cell, my mind clear, my heart beating calmly. Father Joachim's words were a glass of refreshing water, and I had been thirsty. The coolness branched to the very marrow of my backbone.

Gathering together my things, I tied them into a bundle and threw them over my back. I opened the door. Day must have commenced, because the sky had turned milky and the smallest of the stars had begun to fade. Down in the ravine a partridge started cackling.

Deeply inhaling the hallowed dawn, I crossed myself and murmured, “In God's name.”

I proceeded along the cloister walk once again. The light was still burning in the old man's cell. I knocked. I heard his bare feet sliding over the flagstones. He opened the door and looked at me. Seeing the bundle over my back, he smiled.

“I am leaving, Father,” I said, bending over to kiss his hand. “Give me your blessing.”

He placed his palm over my hair.

“Bless you, my son. Go, and the Lord be with you!”

I
HAD GROWN
weary. I was young, after all, and youth's insatiability is burdensome. It will not condescend to acknowledge man's limits; it seeks much but is capable of little. Having struggled to attain these limits and grown weary of the struggle, I returned to the land of my fathers. I wanted to confront our mountains, see our aged standard-bearers with their tilted fezzes and broad laughter, and hear once more of wars and liberty. I wanted to tread my native soil in order to gain strength.

“Where are you coming from?” my father asked me.

“From far, far away,” I replied, not breathing a word about my adventure of nearly taking vows at Sinai.

It was the second time an attempt of mine to attain sainthood had miscarried. The first time, you remember, was in my childhood when I went down to the harbor, ran to a captain who was preparing to weigh anchor, and begged him to take me to Mount Athos so that I could become a monk. The captain split his sides with laughter. “Home, home!” he shouted. Clapping his hands as though I were a pullet, he shooed me away. Now it had happened again. “Return to the world,” Father Joachim had cried. “In this day and age the world is the true monastery; that is where you will become a saint.”

It was to gather momentum that I returned to my native soil. Leaving Kastro, I walked out to the villages, where I ate and drank with shepherds and plowmen. I felt ashamed, seeing how the lazy, fraudulent life of the monastery was so strongly opposed by the whole land of Crete, this land which is incessantly battling, if not with floods and droughts, then with poverty, disease, or the Turk. And here I was trying to go against its will and betray it by becoming a monk! Father Joachim was right. The world is our monastery, the true monk he who lives with men and works with
God here, in contact with the soil. God does not sit on a throne above the clouds. He wrestles here on earth, along with us. Solitude is no longer the road for the man who strives, and true prayer, prayer which steers a course straight for the Lord's house and enters, is noble action. This, today, is how the true warrior prays.

A Cretan once said to me, “When you appear before the heavenly gates and they fail to open, do not take hold of the knocker to knock. Unhitch the musket from your shoulder and fire.”

“Do you actually believe God will be frightened into opening the gates?”

“No, lad, He won't be frightened. But He'll open them because He'll realize you are returning from battle.”

Never did I hear from an educated man words so profound as those I heard from peasants, especially from oldsters who had completed the struggle. Their passions had subsided within them; they stood now before death's threshold, tenderly casting a final, tranquil glance behind them.

One afternoon I encountered an old man on a mountain slope. He was wizened and gaunt, with snow-white hair, patched vrakes, and boots full of holes. As is the custom with Cretan shepherds, he held his staff extended across his shoulders. He kept climbing slowly, stone by stone, stopping every so often to gaze lingeringly at the surrounding mountains, the plain far below, and the band of sea visible in the distance between the walls of a ravine.

“Good afternoon, grandfather,” I called to him from a distance. “What are you doing here all by yourself?”

“Saying goodbye, son, saying goodbye . . .”

“In this forsaken place? I don't see a soul here. Who are you saying goodbye to?”

The old man tossed his head angrily. “What forsaken place? Don't you see the mountains and the sea? Why did God give us eyes? Don't you hear the birds above you? Why did God give us ears? You call this place forsaken? These are my friends. We talk to each other; I call them and they answer me. I'm a shepherd. I have ranged for two generations in their company. But now the time for parting has come. It's evening already.”

“But it's still early in the afternoon, grandfather,” I said, assuming his sight had been dimmed by age. “It's not evening yet.”

He shook his head. “I know what I'm talking about. It's evening, I tell you, evening. . . . Goodbye.”

“You'll lay even Charon by the heels, grandfather,” I said to encourage him.

He laughed. “I've already done so, confound it! Yes, don't you worry, I've already laid him by the heels, the old cheat. How? By not being afraid of him! . . . Goodbye. You lay him out too, my fine lad, and you'll have my blessing.”

I couldn't bear to let him go.

“Give me your name, grandfather. I don't want to forget you.”

“Well then, bend down and pick up a stone. Ask and it will tell you. It's old Manoúsos from Kavrohóri, that's what it will tell you. . . . All right, enough now! Pardon me. As you can see, I'm in a hurry. . . . Godspeed!”

So speaking, he resumed the ascent, stumbling because his sight was poor.

It is true that we cannot conquer death; we can, however, conquer our fear of death. This aged mountaineer was facing the end with serenity. The hills had enlarged and fortified his soul; he would not condescend to kneel before Charon. What he wanted from him was simply a few days' respite to give him time to take leave of his former companions—the fresh air, thyme, and stones.

But as I was walking one day near Phaistos, down below on the fertile plain of Messará, I saw another old man, a centenarian. He was sitting on the doorstep of his humble cottage, sunning himself. His eyes were like two red wounds; his nose was dripping, spittle was running from his mouth, and he smelled of tobacco and urine.