Pilgrimage to Holy Mountain 23

23

That’s All There Is:

It was against the rules to smoke cigarettes inside the close wall at Saint Anne’s Monastery and I don’t smoke anyway, but some of the other pilgrims did.

One evening after dinner I was talking to one of the visiting pilgrims and he wanted a cigarette, so I went with him outside the wall on the mountain side of the monastery. We sat on a low stone fence enclosing a little garden while he smoked. Beside us on the wall was an old cardboard box containing some bones. For no particular reason I took one of the bones from the box and was turning it over in my fingers as we talked when Father Athanasius walked by.

“That’s Brother Johan”, he said, looking at the bone in my hand, “That’s all there is.”

It took me a moment to realize that I was handling the remains of one of Saint Anne’s monks and when I did I felt like I had not been very respectful to Brother Johan since I had mistaken his bones for the scraps of some dinner.

It seems that when a monk from Saint Anne’s Monastery dies, his body is buried in a shallow grave in that same little walled garden for one year—then his bones are dug up. If the ants and worms have polished them clean it means he has been a good monk, but if the bones still have some meat or tissue clinging to them, it is a sure sign he has not and they are reburied for another year. Finally, when just clean bones are left, the skull is taken away and displayed with other crania in rows like books on a library shelf in a little chapel next to the garden. I was shown the whole bizarre collection another day: some headbones decorated with the departed’s name or perhaps with a cross inked on what had been the forehead.

The rest of the monk’s bones are tossed out with the garbage to the foot of the cliff.

Indeed, that’s all there is.

Tomasito, 2009


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