Pilgrimage to Holy Mountain 16

16

Outlaws at the Top:

I wake at first light feeling fine. Breakfast with the monks and the handful of pilgrims that stayed overnight at the monastery: coffee, halva and fresh bread with olive oil.

All of the Greek pilgrims are continuing their pilgrimage which means they will hike back down to the dock and take the boat on to the next monastery–or they will hike to the next monastery which is seldom more than an hour’s easy walk away. But, since I have been invited to stay on at Saint Anne’s and since I have been assigned no tasks for the present, I am free to wander.

And what I want to do first is to climb to the top of the mountain.

Saint Anne’s is one of the closest monasteries to the Holy Mountain itself– right below the peak–so I take a plastic bottle of water and some bread and start off.

Outside the main monastery gate there are mazes of paths to chose from–some leading to gardens and the dwelling sketes of solitary or small groups of monks living nearby– but I follow a dry and dusty path heading upward between stones, desert shrubs and trees which I hope will take me to the summit. There are many paths branching off the one I take but I always follow the one going up.

After about an hour’s climb I reach a stone shelter near the top. Three young men dressed, not in robes, but in well-worn hiking clothes, are lounging at the door of the shelter. They welcome me to the highest shrine on Holy Mountain and invite me in. They are Greek but speak passable English. They have removed the concrete cover of a water cistern beneath the floor of the shrine and, using a small kettle and a little wood fire, are making tea-- they offer me a cup. One of the men has just returned from England and has brought back a package of the British “digestive biscuits” which I grew to love during my pilgrimage in that country. He gives me a couple to my great delight. Tea and digestive biscuits on the top of Holy Mountain!

These young men describe themselves as “outlaws”, but not bandits. They say they spend several months of every year living up here–since almost no one visits this mountaintop shrine. The Holy Mountain government knows they are here, they say, but does not bother them since they do no harm.

They are rather scornful of most of the monks living on Holy Mountain whom they describe as mere Greek retirees and not religious persons at all. They dislike the bureaucracy of the Holy Mountain theocratic government and declare that they are the “true seekers” in the pattern of the old desert fathers.

They remind me of the idealistic young students of the Viet Nam War protest days I knew in Hawaii during the short-lived “greening of America”.

I spend an interesting hour with the outlaws listening to their theories, for example their explanation of the real meaning of making the sign of the cross which they claim is more of a yogic exercise than a purely symbolic gesture and then I make my way back down the mountain to Saint Anne’s.

Tomasito, 2009

...