Evidently every year for the past few years, the liklihood that there would be a Pilgrimage to the Middle East from Boston seemed small given the continuing upheaval, the veritable civil war, disturbing the peace in that region. But until now the Pilgrimage has confirmed its reservations year after year in spite of all the bleak and disturbing news, and flown into Tel Aviv for a highly-concentrated 10-day tour of the sites where our salvation was wrought in the midst of the earth.

This year we are 36, including some teen-agers travelling with their parents or guardians, some quite elderly women, and many in-between. Some, of whom I am one, arrive already with sore throats and cold symptoms. Fortunately, an unusually compassionate and communicative medical doctor (V. Mihailoff) is with us with the kind of bedside manner that prevents any of us slipping off into despair over the barb in our throats that makes every swallow painful. We also have an eye surgeon with us - our Deacon, Father Chris Patitsas.

Only a few of the moments along the path trodden by this year's Pilgrimage can be recalled here in this essay. The highlights, almost overwhelming in significant presence, are of course in Jerusalem itself, within the walls set up by the western Crusaders and, more particularly, the Muslims who drove them out of the Middle East. The Holy Sepulchre and Golgotha rest beneath a veneer of modern marble slabs and an overlay of 19th century, mostly-Russian, ikons, themselves overlaid with the elaborated silver and gilt metal covers reflecting the ecclesiastical taste of that era, the whole fronted by a wall of oil lamps suspended on chains. At the sites, one reaches into recesses, down through the veneers, significantly enough, to touch the actual rock that was the surface of the events we celebrate every year in Holy Week and at Pascha. Over the time of almost daily visits to the principle shrines, the names of the men and women who stood just where we are standing reel through the mind like the long lists of credits at the end of films, there are so many, they are so close to us who from childhood have been told the Bible stories that constituted the core of what had been the Christian West.

Archimandrite Panteleimon, leading yet another crowd of pilgrims through the labyrinth of the Old City, and through the Holy Land and Sinai, came here in 1957, 22 years old, dazed with reverence for the place which still reverberates with the awesome mystery of the Church of the Old Testament and of the New, and lived for a time within the precincts of the Holy Sepulchre in a tiny wooden cell built out from the stone walls of the present Crusader-built church, high up, reached by a ladder. He knows all the older people who are still resident here, and all the little alleys and winding staircases that course through the vast constructions like veins.

Everywhere we walk, someone carries a little censer with the familiar incense fragrances made in Boston, and gifts of incense and coloured glass oil lamps are given to all the shrines we visit. There is an outpouring of alms for the poor of Jerusalem - and at all the holy places throughout Israel and on Sinai - that is especially awaited by Palestinians in these long oppressive years during which, as always, it is the poor who pay the heaviest prices for the violence over which they have no contral at all, and by Bedouins in Egypt. Tourism and pilgrimage are at their lowest ebb in memory and everywhere we go we are told we are the first to enter the shop since the last pilgrimage a year ago.

We visit Khozeva, an ancient monastery deep in a ravine ("wadi") well-documented in Derwas Chitty's wonderful history of the first centuries of the monastic adventure, "The Desert a City", written almost half a century ago, still in print (St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, NY) and still by far and away the best account in any languge of the early history of Christian monasticism. When Father Chitty visited Khozeva in 1925 he remarked its poverty and particularly remembered two monks, whose personal and spiritual inadequacies served him as a kind of existential question mark over the whole enterprise of monasticism as such. Khozeva had been burned in 1917 by retreating Turkish troops, defeated by their Arab co-religionists in episodes familiar to us from the celebrity of Lawrence of Arabia, and the monastery, remote and difficult of access as it was and is, still showed signs of the Turkish destruction when Chitty visited it as a young archaeologist in 1925 . Today it is in far better material and spiritual circumstances. It is a small community (one of its members is Japanese, whose courteous hospitality was wonderful) but overall it is a young and fervent brotherhood. I have no idea if the chanting today includes the "interminable, tinny, nasal, gabbled Kyrie eleisons" that Father Chitty found so irritating in 1925, but the kindness and warmth of the small community could not itself have constituted a more harmonious prayer.

We venerated hundreds of relics from the more thorough destruction of this (and many other) monastic settlements in the 7th century by Chosroes II of Persia. When the famous Qumran "Dead Sea" scrolls were found in 1947 inside a cave, western academics of all kinds descended on these valleys and deep ravines, ransacking the caves and simply throwing the human bones (devoutly interred in them when the monks returned to survey the carnage and destruction of the Persians in the 7th century) out into the ravines. The famous modern Elder, Saint John the Romanian of Khozeva, beholding yet another depradation wrought against the monastic community, prayed that God would intervene and, suddenly, a large section of a ravine collapsed and fell down, covering the naked bones carelessly tossed out like so much garbage. St. John the Romanian's body is incorrupt and reverently venerated inside a glass casket at Khozeva. In addition to a life of remarkable ascetic struggle, he left a body of wise sayings and the example of steadfast fidelity to the Church's historic calendar and faith.

We visited Bethany School, a most beautiful complex of buildings put up by the Russians in the 19th century. During the First War the Turks used the buildings to stable their horses and mules and a great deal of wanton damage was done by the retreating, demoralized Turkish military. Metropolitan Anastassi, the second Primate of the Russian Church Abroad, had lived in Jerusalem in the 1930's, and he it is who began the work of repair, reconstruction and renewal. The site's importance lies in a large rock, on which sat our Saviour awaiting Martha and Mary to escort Him to Lazaros' tomb. One venerates this rock in the forecourt of the School, remembering what words were spoken here. The administrators of the school, Mothers Martha (a Russian-Australian) and Agapia (a Greek-American) offered coffee, banana cake, a tour of the neighbourhood and the most insightful and carefully-balanced assessment of the ongoing crisis brought about by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict heard on the pilgrimage. We also saw the wonderful work being done at the school which educates some 300 girls, some of them Moslems.

A highlight of the trip was a tour through Galilee, positively green from the Jordan river and a beautiful contrast from the rocky desert landscape predominating elsewhere. We are in Cana, Nain, we are on Tabor, and we are on a long boat ride on the Sea of Tiberias/Galilee ending up in Capernaum on a wonderfully mild day, in a modern boat modelled on one dug out of the lake bottom some years ago by archaeologists and dated to the time of the Saviour. We then are back on our Arab bus, driving through Gadara (of Gadarenian Daemoniacs fame) and pass by cliffs where, one day, a herd of Hellenistic pigs tumbled off into the water. And we end the day changing into chitonas, and going down into Jordan River, chanting the troparia of Theophany. On the way back to Jerusalem, in addition to troparia, a few African-American spirituals themed to Jordan are also sung. Quite amazing.

One morning we are up at 3 am and onto our bus, stepping off later that morning at Mount Sinai, spending the night, and (almost everyone) up again at 3 am to climb Mount Sinai and see the sun rise. But of the 3 of us from St. Gregory of Sinai two of us are having about our worst days coping with sore throats (in the midst of it, Father Anthony alights on the right phrase for our collective suffering - "barbed throat", which says it all) and general malaise and we decide to forego that climb in favour of a far easier walk out into the desert to the cave of St. John Klimakos, the author of the "Ladder of Divine Ascent". A Bedouin teen ager is hired as guide and off we go, just under an hour of mild climbing and descending out through the stark beauty of great granitic cliffs, changing colour as the sun rises (we leave at 5:30 am) and we spend over an hour in and around St. John's cave, mostly in a silence meant to honour one who gives so much to our lives.

A nun from France lives in a modern, tiny complex of Chapel cum living quarters at the base of the cave, where one begins the climb up and into it. She is highly-educated, in her late 60's, and tells us that St. John spent only one year as abbot of Sinai. Put off by the demands on his time and attention there, he returned as soon as he could to solitude and spent overall 40 years in this very cave. It was here that he wrote the "Ladder of Divine Ascent".

We read the "Ladder" every year during the 40-day Fast for Pascha, communally, in our chapel. All of us are also reading the "Ladder" throughout the year in our cells, and if any single book other than the Bible informs our particular community off in a remote forest here in northern California, the "Ladder" is that book. We three pilgrims return to St. Katherine's Monastery certain that other than Jerusalem's major shrines, this is the highlight of our pilgrimage - that we came here to see this, to stand in these places, to pray here.

The long time spent in silence at this place gives us the chance to look out at the stark rocks soaring high up into the sky, not very much changed since the time that St. John gave a lifetime to this place. Here he worked out what is, for all the change in vocabulary (especially in the last century thanks to the popularizing of a kind of psychology), the most amazing study of the human condition - we often call it the "Grey's anatomy of the human soul".

No matter how many times we read this book, it is always pouring new things into us, and demanding new things of us. One understands how it came to be the companion of the salvation of so many Christians since it was first written. It was the second most-popular book in Christendom (based on the number of extant manuscripts) until early modern times; it was the first book to be printed in the new world (in Lima, Peru, in the 16th century, long before English Protestants landed on Plymouth Rock) and until fairly recently, was standard lenten reading even by married laymen in Russia. The beautiful editions found today in religious bookstores in Greece demonstrate its continuing vitality.

A fine and incisive study of the "Ladder", entitled "Ascent to Heaven", written by Father John Chryssavgis (his doctoral dissertation at Oxford), is available from Holy Cross Press. The best English version of the "Ladder" is published by Holy Transfiguration Monastery in Boston, based on (and improving) a translation done originally by Archimandrite Lazarus (Moore) published in the '50's by Faber's. Another, less complete and somehow less successful version is published by the Roman Catholics (Paulist Press). We were glad to see the Boston edition in use wherever the "Ladder" was in evidence throughout the Holy Land, and glad to hear monastics everywhere calling it the best edition for English-speaking readers. It is that.

Particularly moving for us is the fact that our patron, St. Gregory of Sinai, was here, albeit briefly, and as we look up into the conch of the apse above the Holy Altar, at the great mosaic of the Transfiguration of the Lord, it is something to realize that he also stood here looking at the same great ikon, as did, apparently, St. John of the Ladder - and how many, many others whose names we hear at the dismissals through the year. This Church is one of the few Byzantine constructions still above ground and in use, and the sense of connectedness with the culture that is normative for the Church, and especially for monastics, is overwhelming.

A pilgrimage like this is not for everyone. The pace is intense, and the constant Israeli military check-points and the presence of uniformed soldiers armed with machine guns everywhere is frankly oppressive. There is no need to comment on the Palestinians' grievances against the Israeli's and no need to comment on Israel's need to eliminate terrorist attacks. On the whole, it was interesting (upon return to the US) to compare notes with non-Orthodox and non-Christian visitors to Israel over the past 20 years or so: the vast majority come away with a markedly pro-Palestinian tilt. This might have something to do with the characteristic preference for the "underdog" to be sure. It may, however, have wider sources as well. Never has the phrase, "Pray for the peace of Jerusalem" meant more, however, and while instances of unfortunate behaviour were encountered on both sides of this deep human divide, one is grateful to remember kindnesses on the part of both communities as well.

Towards the end of the pilgrimage, one began to hear from all age groups the idea that it would take a long time, after returning to the US and Canada, to "unpack" this experience. That has turned out to be so, writing this reminiscence about a month after the pilgrimage's end.

We were told by "old hands" that this was a most remarkable pilgrimage. First, the weather was uniformly wonderful, mild and pleasant day after day. There have been times when from beginning to end the pilgrims had to cope with cold, or heat, and often with constant rainstorms. We had light rain in Jerusalem off and on for the last 2 days, and it was welcome and refreshing. Secondly, at 36, we were a small group, moving more conveniently and able to hear more of Father Panteleimon's descriptions of the sites accompanied by reminiscences of what the places were like almost 50 years ago when he lived there. There have been as many as 50 on these pilgrimages, making for a more crowded, more slow-moving and less agile tour overall. Third, in spite of hearing from time to time of "incidents" here or there in Israel, we were remarkably secure throughout. We had one unpleasant encounter with conservative Jews - four men in their early 20's in yarmulkas at the pool of Siloam who heckled us throughout Deacon Chris Patitsa's chanting of the Gospel associated with that site, but the Israeli soldiers the four Jews summoned and encouraged to tell us to leave instead pushed them off and when, a few minutes later, they returned alone, their catcalls and derisive gestures were much toned down. And at the end of the tour, a power outage one night caught some of us (me among them) out in the labyrinthine, tunnel-like streets of the old city on the way to the Holy Sepulchre, and for a few minutes there was a sense of unease, quickly overcome. Minutes later we were all inside the Holy Sepulchre, a blaze of warm light from candles and oil lamps, finding the rest of our party already inside, and everyone feeling very safe indeed. In contrast to what pilgrims have encountered over the centuries of coming up to Jerusalem, we were in very comfortable circumstances indeed.

Around the turn of the 20th century, an Anglican named Stephen Graham wrote a series of books including one about a pilgrimage he took alongside Russian pilgrims of that era. Three nuns from our convent in Boston were on this pilgrimage and they had copies of that book with them which they loaned to our California pilgrims. It remains a fascinating book on its own merits but, for us who were there, it became a wonderful revelation of that world of piety bludgeoned into bloody graves by the marxists who short years after Graham's pilgrimage, imposed a lawless power in the world's largest Christian nation, ending a thousand years of national aspiring to that salvation to which we are summoned by the Church, and driving the Church herself underground into the pre-Constantinian world of catacomb Christianity, having murdered St. Constantine's last heir, and his family. Nothing could inform a pilgrimage like ours more deeply and movingly than the view of those earlier pilgrims coming from a radically different culture than our own, yet who gave evidence everywhere of our own ecclesiastical life.

Next year, as God wills, three more from the forests of Lake County will be part of the pilgrimage, all things earthly being equal in Israel. We have some idea of what they will be feeling as they move from sacred site to sacred site. We ask their prayers, long in advance, at those holy places.

Archimandrite Sergios

The Dormition Fast begins with the feast of the Procession of the Honourable Cross, a Constantinopolitan office for taking a fragment of the True Cross processionally through the neighbourhoods of the City each day until the feast of the Dormition. It was the high season of contagious diseases in the hot, humid eastern Mediterranean Summer, and Constatinopolitans poured out into the streets to share in the purification of the air, praying to be either delivered or preserved from illnesses.

The other side of the feast has to do with the inauguration of a fast which, on Mount Athos and undoubtedly in the many equally great, now-vanished monastic centres of the world of New Rome, is taken as seriously and observed as intensely as is the Holy Forty Day fast before Pascha. And of course no fast - no effort involving ascetic struggle - is possible without that personal self denial which is the unique gateway to the Cross of the Saviour.

August was always - as it is today - a season of intense labours in the agriculturally-based empire of the New Romans. Long as the days are, there is never enough time to finish the work of the day and the level of physical exhaustion for the great majority of the New Romans was high. And yet, coming just at the centre of these hard months is this great 15 day fast. The surviving literature from the period attests to the seriousness with which all parts of society fasted and prayed, certainly inspired by the ubiquitous figures of the monks and nuns living everywhere across the face of the empire of the New Rome.

With all the well-known and glaring defects of that Christian civilisation, with all its short-comings and outbursts of heresy and violence and the sinful betrayal of the Gospel, the Church still provided the calendar of a structure of life which kept the incarnate Logos in full public view, and at prime focus. The great public processions that constitute so striking a feature of the liturgical experience of the early Church, beginning at Jerusalem, and which have been virtually ruled out today by an increasingly-strident secularism that stifles the Church's public role and her visibility, those great processions were indeed the popular rallies that kept the faith so vibrantly a part of the populist Christian culture of the eastern Mediterranean.

The fragment of the True Cross, moving solemnly from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, stopping at the great squares of the City for special litanies, purified more than the fetid air of an August Constantinople. Through the rite, the nation itself prostrated in prayer before the All-Holy Trinity and referred itself forward to Christ as the central figure in the human saga.

And here on the southern flanks of a small mountain in Northern California we, too, "clear the air" for the beginning of another fast, another time of opportunity, to redress the wrongs of the inner man, to repent of those things that tend to go off so long as we are alive in space and time, to let go of all things corruptible and corrupting - to let the dead bury their own dead - and, relieved of darkness and the stink of death pervading life on earth, to find again in Christ that blinding light in which we see never so clearly, in Whom already we find the fragrance of eternal life.

Like most of the people living in the Christian empire of the New Romans, this Brotherhood is also for the most part an agricultural work-force, struggling not only with the usual round of tasks every day of the long growing season but coping this year with an unusually-long heat wave that has sapped our strength and left us very worn down. And yet, no matter how much fatigue we bring to the Vigil for the feasts of the season, we are always remarking how quickly we are revived and provisioned with stamina aplenty to accomplish what must be done.

The Vigil for the Procession of the Cross could not be simpler and is shorter than most, a mercy under the circumstances. As in past years, everyone left after its final words last night, renewed for the great engagement of self-denying love that has been laid out by the office as the main matter to be considered until the fast is done.

This morning's liturgy began early - still in darkness - and after its communion, we blessed water and then, after blessing the Monastery itself with the new holy water, carried it out into the fields and gardens and orchards that we have started - all growing organically - and which are now in their second and third year - and blessed them and the work of our hands.

And what might seem to be somewhat odd - a fast in the midst of the season of hard, physical work - becomes another gift of the liturgical calendar, another joyous excursion during the slow unfolding of the Christian year. Everything is filled with the spirit of thanksgiving for all things and the sanctification of the time of our lives.

Igoumenos Sergios was blessed to travel again this Summer to Greece, arriving in Chios in late June and spending several days on the adjacent islet of Oinoussis. In sharp and pleasant contrast to last year's pilgrimage at the same time, this year the weather was moderate and blessed with cooling breezes day and night. The revered Gerontissa, Mother Maria, in her 90's, continues to be alert and dynamic, participating actively in reading the appropriate parts in services, and continuing to offer exemplary leadership to her nuns and the many pilgrims coming to the community.

Another full week was spent in Athens and again, as in past years, the city's wealth of sacred relics beckoned us as did sites hallowed in recent times by the holy lives of such 20th century luminaries as Papa Nicholas Planas and Fotis Kontoglou. We visited the monastery and venerated the relics of the renowned Elder of Aigina, Geronta Ieronymos, who played such a decisive part in the spiritual formation of the founder of Boston's Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Archimandrite Panteleimon, as he did in the lives of so many others, including Mother Maria of Oinoussis and her family. While on Aigina, we also venerated the relics of St. Nektarios of Pentapolis.

Another full day was dedicated to visiting the relics of St. John the Russian on Euvoeia. In addition, we visited monasteries in Kapandriti and Keratea and were hospitably received by the active sisterhoods in those places, which have played such distinctive roles in the history of the Church of Greece since 1924.

Athens was very hot, in contrast to Chios, and pounding with the din of street and building renovations in preparation for next Summer's Olympic Games.

On the Holy Mountain for the Sunday of the Athonite Saints and the following week, Father Sergios visited old friends, staying in the Kapsala region, and made an extensive day pilgrimage to Prodromou Skete, Lavra, St. Athanasios' Well, Iviron, Skiti Iviron, and Protaton in Karyes, meeting new friends along the way.

The uncertainties surrounding the fate of the biggest community on Athos today, Esfigmenou, have disturbed much of the usual peace of the Athonite community. The matter is in the hands of the Greek Supreme Court, which will hand down its decision later this year regarding the demand of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew that the 120-strong Brotherhood be expelled because of their refusal to commemorate him at their services.

Even members of commemorating monasteries give strong expression to their dismay at what is regarded as an unwarranted interference by the Patriarch into Athos' internal affairs, feeling that the Athonites themselves should resolve this matter in their own way, and with patience. Patriarch Bartholomew, however, is not a patient man, and is particularly impatient at any signs of disapproval of his unionist/ecumenist agenda, and he has enforced his will in this matter with the help of the younger, more recently-installed Abbots, whose education in the secular institutions of "the new Greece" has disposed them to think in terms less resistant to modernist ecumenism than did their immediate predecessors.

The general feeling among traditional Christian monks on Athos at the moment seems to favour the view that the Supreme Court will decide the case against the Esfigmenou Fathers, that they will be expelled and replaced with a community led by an Abbot favourable to the agenda of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, and that eventually the large community of non-commemorators scattered hither and yon throughout the Athonite peninsula, living in sketes, hermitages, caves and small cells, of whom the great majority will not commemorate an ecumenist Patriarch, will also be expelled.

This does not seem to engender any panic or bitterness, and is spoken of with humble acceptance everywhere. Truth to tell, the last mass-expulsion of Athonites, in the 19th century, when the Kollyvades Fathers were scattered throughout Greece by decree of the ruling Athonite communities and of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of that day, saw the re-education and the renewal of ecclesiastical life throughout the country as Kollyvades monks exiled from Athos took up residence everywhere, on the mainland and on the islands. In pursuit of his ecumenist goals, the current Patriarch may actually be doing traditionalists a great service in the long run.

This Summer brought Father Sergios into contact with a hitherto-unsuspected group of gifted, educated, non-commemorating Athonites, coming from new calendar families, from non-observant families, even from communist backgrounds, most of them having been entry-level professionals - engineers, teachers, lawyers, medical personnel - who at various times and in various ways underwent a conversion experience, usually to the new calendar, ecumenist State Church, and then, encountering the doctrinal crisis brought about by that community's decision to embrace syncretist ecumenism, a further conversion to what is popularly, if inadequately, called old-calendarism, who later became monks, and today are quietly absorbing the unique gifts of the Holy Mountain for whatever time they are given to be there. Those Father Sergios met live scattered here and there in small, often very remote cells.

The non-commemorating movement on Athos has recently received unusual and unexpected support from one of the ecumenist State Church's most prominent public figures, Father George Metallinos, a professor on the theological faculty at the University of Athens and Greece's best-known ecclesiastical television personality, who has bluntly stated in the national media that the Esfigmenou Fathers are indeed right to not commemorate any Patriarch who embraces the theory and practice of institutional ecumenism.

Other voices from the State Church, perhaps emboldened by the public statements of Father Metallinos, have been raised to similar ends, and as of this Summer, the debate over the Esfigmenou matter has become far more serious (albeit admittedly marginalized in contemporary, secular Greece) and far more responsible than any debate involving the question of the calendar since 1924 - and this is because the debate has largely ceased to be about the calendar, and has become, rightly enough, a debate about the real question raised by the shift of calendar in 1924, namely, about religious syncretism.

That in turn will increasingly reveal itself to be a debate about the person of Jesus Christ and the nature of the Church, amongst the competing dogmas of the world's religions, just as, at a certain moment, the ikonoclast question ceased to be a question about ikons and became a question about the Church's teaching about Jesus Christ.

Again, the unintended result of the current Patriarch's decision to call the question of Esfigmenou may turn out to be the reinvigouration and renewal of the badly-divided, and often inadequate and irresponsible character of contemporary traditionalist movements in Greece.

But, as the Athonite Fathers say in mild voices, "As God wills".

+ Archimandrite Sergios Gregoriosinaitis

Monday in Saint Gregory Palamas week, the 24th (11th on the Church calendar) of March - and we are celebrating the Memorial Service for the renowned Athonite Elder and confessor, Archimandrite Ioakeim of St. Evthymios Skete in the desert at the end of the peninsula, next to the Cave of St. Neilos the Myrovlite, who reposed on Friday the 21st (8th).
I met Father Ioakeim in January 2000 under challenging circumstances. A blizzard had blown up after the small boat carrying me from Daphne to Kavsokalyvia had left port, and instead of disembarking at the Kavsokalyvia port, the boat discharged all passengers at the port of Katounakia, far distant from my intended destination. By the time I had clambored up a sharp ascent from sea level to the top of a rock face along lightly-indented steps cut into the rock, the snowfall was accumulating alarmingly, cutting off the mid-afternoon light and leaving me wondering when - and eventually if - I would find shelter before sundown locked all the gates on Athos.

And, although I arrived after sundown, the famous zealot Skete of Saint Basil had left its gate open, and took me in, finding room in an upstairs hall usually occupied by one of the many young novices crowding this small facility in recent years. More than half the monks living on Athos live in the deserts, not in the ruling monasteries, and the vast majority of the desert-dwelling monks will not commemorate the ecumenist Patriarch of Constantinople, a matter which divides the contemporary Athonite community tragically.

By morning, the snowfall was a meter deep on average, and the Skete Fathers forbade me to attempt to continue my journey. But by 8 am I had convinced them that the inexorabilities of a fixed-date airline return ticket necessitated my attempting to move on and, promising to return at the first sign of trouble, fortified by toast and jam and raki, and several cups of hot "nes", the updated form of coffee on the Holy Mountain, I set out, arriving at the katholikon of the great Kavsokalyvia settlement on the eve of the Feast of Saint Maximos of Kavsokalyvia, whose intense freedom from attachment to the comforts of this world took the form that gives the settlement its name - he periodically burned down the hut he happened to be living in, with all its contents (they could not have been many, given the austerity of this monk) and moved on.

He had lived around these steep, forbidding parts in the 14th century, he was a contemporary of our Saint Gregory of Sinai, and a famous conversation held by these two great hesychasts, recorded by a disciple, forms part of our modern Philokalia. I spent the festal eve with the Fathers of this Skete, well-supplied with a feast prepared for an expected 100 pilgrims, none of whom came given the storm, and slept in a large guest dormitory - also well furnished for the multitudes - by myself. Early the next morning, after the Liturgy and another overly-laden table, I went to a cave once inhabited (and not burnt!) by Saint Maximos, and thence on to the Skete of Saint Evthymios, laden with greetings from a monk in Boston who had lived with Father Ioakeim for some time, and with other greetings and gifts.

Father Ioakeim was ill when I arrived but insisted in sitting up in the spartan arkhondariki - the guest reception room - in a very small, dilapidated stone building, in process of rehabilitation by the 4 or 5 young monks and novices who formed his Brotherhood. While reduced to a real minimum of elaboration, the building, its rooms and furnishings were scrupulously clean and the small guest area, accomodating 5 guests in a single, and two bunk beds, was thankfully supplied with a small wood stove to take the damp chill out of the low-ceilinged room in the evening.

The first thing one noticed about the Elder was his voice - clearly coming from within and, at the same time, in a most amazing way, coming from a place not within himself - truly a voice from another age. He was entirely calm at all times, and fixed his attention both on the Skete's daily program of activities, and on its guest, and at the same time, on a deeper level, his attention was always clearly somewhere else. It was an entirely wonderful 2 hours' conversation, made more wondrous by his strange gift for making himself understood to someone not fluent in Greek.

Father Ioakeim was a strikingly handsome old man, and shows up here and there in the standard photograph books on Athos - twice in a volume called "Athonite Moments" published in German and English, on page 101 (over the caption, "Fromme Gestalt - A Saintly image") and on page 196 (over the caption, "Asketen" - "Ascetics"). The photographs are accurate and show a face dominated by large, ikonic eyes, just as he really was in life, his austere face framed with a great white beard and hair. The photographer saw what truly was to be found in that face, in those eyes - meekness, humility, charity, and the courage that these virtues engender - a face, really, on which is written St. John of Sinai's wonder-working book "The Ladder of Divine Ascent", a face on which is imprinted the Gospel, for which he had ears with which to hear. What the photos do not capture is the transparency of the face and hands.

Any who can consult these books will also see, in the photo on page 196, one of his own monks, in fact his eldest monastic son, Father Evthymios, to the far left (the other two are neatly-attired visitors from elsewhere) and it was the vigourous Monk Evthymios who acted as my guide to the immediate region of St. Evthymios Skete, taking me on a hair-raising climb down into the Cave of Saint Neilos the Myrovlite on my first two visits, he skipping like a goat, and me lagging far behind in vertiginous terror at the great height of the place, and the sheer drop into the sea.

In discussions of the contemporary crisis in the Church at large and on Athos, Father Ioakeim was dispassionate, never evincing the slightest anger or passion of any kind, but maintaining always a complete and, one could say, saturated peace, reminding me of that peace in the heart spoken of by Saint Seraphim of Sarov. When mention was made of some clear breach of faith on the part of Bishops or Athonites still claiming the name of Orthodoxy while embracing the heresy of ecumenism, he would merely gesture quietly heavenward with his hand and, pointing there, say in the mildest voice, "O Theos" (God), or again, "God will judge".

When a currently-famous remark of a well-known Elder, to the effect that the Virgin Mary had advised the man, in a vision, to support the program of the current Ecumenical Patriarch, Father Ioakeim said, again in an entirely uncombative voice but with firmness and with the complete confidence that comes only from an authentically humble heart, "Psemmata" (Lies), as the content of this well-known tale was repeated, clearly not for the first time, in his hearing. It was very odd to hear such a strong word of condemnation spoken with a complete absence of rancour, bitterness or anger: it was not only Father Ioakeim's face that was "ikonic"!

Father Ioakeim had a great respect for the founder of the venerable monastery in Boston, Holy Transfiguration - Archimandrite Panteleimon - and spoke of his remarkable achievement in founding a truly Athonite house in the uncongenial environment of the contemporary, paganized culture of the U.S. He was particularly concerned that his admiration and support for Father Panteleimon and his work be realized.

I visited again in January of 2001, and last year in July. With each visit, I became more familiar with this small, intense community, some of whom hailed from traditional Orthodox families in villages, and two of whom were the sons of new calendarist families in Thessaloniki. Quiet, self-effacing, given to the hard work days required for survival in the desert of the Athonite peninsula, without self-pity or sentimental expression, an air of quiet, sober joy permeated the place where prayer without ceasing reigned in the hearts of all who dwelt there.

When, a few years ago, Father Ioakeim made the demanding trek from his Skete to Great Lavra, from which the Skete is leased, to have his youngest monk written in according to Athonite custom, the Fathers at Great Lavra refused to accept the name, as the policies of the current Ecumenical Patriarch harden against those who will not commemorate the name of an ecumenist Ecumenical Patriarch. Father Ioakeim shrugged peacefully, turned and said to the young monk, "Well, the Panagia will write you in" and they departed, after venerating the relics in the Katholikon.

What will now be the fate of these young, dedicated monks of true confession, in the increasingly rigidly-polarized world of the Holy Mountain?

Perhaps they will be allowed to continue their lives in this historic Skete. One of the factors motivating commemorating ruling monasteries to allow zealot, non-commemorators to inhabit their sketes, kellia and hesychastiria, is the fact that the zealots take very good care of the ruling monasteries' far-flung properties, rehabilitating them and providing an otherwise economically-unattainable work-force, in the long run, improving the monastery's assets.

Another is the fact that even within the ruling monasteries' in-house communities, there is almost everywhere a significant population in overt or covert sympathy with the zealots' position on the matter of syncretist-ecumenism. The cold expulsion of a small house of zealots can have a disproportionally disruptive effect on the home community, and simply not be worth the trouble.

But finally, the pressure to expel numbers of zealot Athonite Fathers into mainland Greece may also be restrained by memories of the 1920's, when the expulsion of the first generation of so-called "old calendarists" into Greece merely spread the cause of rejecting the uncalled-for - and already often ecclesiastically-condemned, and deeply-divisive - new calendar across the nation. No government in Athens is openly courting the galvanizing of one of the country's most significant, if also most unreported and unacknowledged fissures, especially in times that daily seem more unsettled, above all for a country in as vulnerable a position geographically, socially, economically and politically - not to mention spiritually - as contemporary Greece.

"As God wills", would say the newly-reposed confessor of the faith, and, "God will judge". "Aionia i mnimi tou", we sing in the Memorial Service - "Eternal be his memory". There will be many who, having sung that, will be quickly seeking the intercessions of this dispassionate, confessing monk, this quiet zealot who, already in this earthly life, was a truly heavenly man.

--Archimandrite Sergios Gregoriosinaitis Monday 11/24 March, 2003 Feast of Saint Symeon the New Theologian