The archbishop chuckled. “ Amenable? He will be grateful to me for sending him an internationally known scholar on the life of Christ, though he will not know he was denied a visit by this very lovely archaeologist who wished to accompany him.”
“You are very generous, Your Beatitude,” Shannon said with a shade of blush, “and we are deeply in your debt. Ef charisto.”
“ Parakalo, my friends. Parakalo.”
After a week in Athens getting approval for subsequent teams to photograph biblical manuscripts at the National Library and the University of Athens, Jon and Shannon revived the tourist aspect of their journey by renting a car and driving northward on Greece’s National Road 1 toward Thessalonica and Mount Athos. The “Holy Mountain” indeed, Athos had more monasteries per square mile than any place on earth.
While Shannon snoozed, Jon was ruminating to himself on the why of monasticism in almost every creed in the world, especially including Christianity. In the Old Testament, Elijah, Elisha, and the other great prophets each seemed to have had a desert experience-either alone or with like-minded followers. In the New, where did John the Baptist, the forerunner of Jesus, hold forth? In the wilds of Judea, of course, though near the Jordan for his baptisms. And Jesus himself? Forty days in the wilderness at the start of his ministry, the background for his famous temptation by Satan. St. Paul? Same story. Following his celebrated conversion on the Damascus Road, he spent almost the next three years in the Arabian desert, gearing up for his ministry.
The lure of the solitary tracts, the wilderness, the wastelands. And not just in Judeo-Christianity. Five centuries before the birth of Christ, an Indian prince named Siddhartha Gautama had left his wife and nine-year- old son for meditation in the forest to explore the meaning of life. And what was a forest, in terms of solitude, but a desert with many trees? He was there for seven years until he finally found the answer while sitting under the Bodhi tree and became the first “Buddha,” or “Enlightened One.” Zarathustra had had his wilderness experience as well, and the list went on and on.
Clearly, you couldn’t be a self-respecting religious luminary unless a desert experience was in your resume, Jon reflected. But why? Probably it was a case of clearer communication with God when one was in the wilds and far from the blandishments and seductions of life in the everyday world. Jon doubted that God spoke more loudly in the desert; it was just easier to hear him there.
Yet early Christianity was very outgoing and social, and for a time it had even seemed that it might be the first world religion without monks. Then, in the third century, a holy man by the name of Anthony fled into the Egyptian desert for a life of solitary contemplation, until the tour buses full of pilgrims, so to speak, arrived from Alexandria to see the holy hermit and the cave where he lived. Others, similarly inclined, sought out caves nearby and eventually monastic communities were born.
Except for anchorites like St. Simeon Stylites, who climbed atop a pole in Syria and sat there for the next thirty-plus years, monasteries were the rule thereafter. It remained only for St. Benedict, in the sixth century, to provide his famous threefold vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience to guide monasticism thenceforth.
But the monastic to whom Jon and his colleagues owed an incalculable debt was Cassiodorus, the sixth- century monk who had suggested that monasteries not only worship the Lord seven times a day and grow their own groceries, but also recopy ancient manuscripts so that priceless information from antiquity would not be lost. And so it was that monks in the medieval world preserved so much of the past tense of Western civilization.
Now they neared Kalambaka on the plains of Thessaly, beyond the halfway point to Thessalonica, where Jon left the main roads for an inevitable visit to Meteora. They had to take in Meteora, of course, and its series of monasteries that were perched precariously atop huge towers of rock. Quite aside from their role as tourist magnets, the monasteries were second in importance only to Mount Athos itself.
“Wake up, Sleeping Beauty!” Jon said as he parked the car at a vista observation point. “You’re about to see something that’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen before!”
Shannon opened her eyes and gasped. Before them was a sight that came directly out of a fairy tale or fantasy novel. Or was it the most outlandish panorama that Disney artists or Steven Spielberg or George Lucas could ever have contrived? It was as if some colossal device in the earth’s crust had extruded broad, thousand-foot columns of sheer rock that loomed so dizzily over the plains below that the Greeks had named the place Meteora, meaning “things hanging in midair.” And, impossible to believe, atop each of these gargantuan sandstone pinnacles was perched a monastery complex.
“When the Ottoman Turks invaded the Balkans,” Jon explained, “hermit monks sought refuge atop these gigantic rock piles, which were quite inaccessible to the Muslim occupiers.”
“How could they ever have built those structures way up there? Wasn’t that in the Middle Ages?”
“Yes, thirteenth, fourteenth century. The story goes that St. Athanasios, founder of the first monastery, was carried to the top by an eagle.”
They both chuckled.
“Well, truth to tell,” Jon went on, “they scaled some of the cliffs by cutting steps into the rock, though often they used long, rickety ladders lashed together.”
“Horrifying!” observed Shannon, who admitted to a touch of acrophobia.
“There used to be more than twenty monasteries here. Now there are six, and only four are still active. As in all branches of Christianity, monasticism is not exactly overrun with applicants.”
“It’s an incredible view,” Shannon said appreciatively. “Which one are we headed for?”
“Our appointment is with Father Simonides, the abbot of the second-largest monastery up there to the right: Varlaam.” Jon pointed up to structures that seemed to belong to the heavens rather than terra firma. Varlaam was perched atop a cliff towering nearly twelve hundred feet above the valley below. “With any luck, he’ll give us permission to inventory and photograph their most ancient manuscripts, and maybe he will even persuade his fellow abbots to do the same.”
As they walked to the base of the enormous butte below Varlaam monastery, Jon pulled out his cell phone to announce their arrival. After many nods of the head and choruses of “Nai… nai… nai,” Jon pocketed the phone and said, “Bad news and good news, Shannon. Which do you want first?”
“The bad, of course.”
Jon was grinning, so even the “bad” news couldn’t be all that devastating. “Well, we were going to drive up to the mesa opposite Varlaam and take the bridge to the monastery, but cracks were discovered at one of the bases of the bridge and it’s closed for inspection.”
“And the good?”
“I couldn’t be happier. They’re going to winch us up in a large netted basket or raft, just as they used to do for people and goods in past centuries.” Jon gestured to the contraption as they walked toward it.
Shannon laughed. “I don’t think so.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not going. If you are suicidally minded, you can go, Jon. I’m staying here.”
“Aw, c’mon, Shannon. It’s perfectly safe. Where’s your spirit of adventure?”
“Where it should be: next to my feet, which are planted firmly in the realm of sanity.”
“Look how sturdy these lines are-one-and-a-half-inch hemp. Now they’re calling to us from the top. Please hop on board?”
Shannon looked very skeptically at the contrivance. It had a small wooden floor, something like a raft that was covered with netting underneath and along the sides. The netting was bunched together at the top, where it was secured to the main hoisting rope cable. Two smaller ropes were attached to each side to stabilize the rig. It was interesting to look at, to be sure, but hardly worth risking one’s life, she concluded.
Just then, a monk came along to join them for the trip to the top. Smiling genially, he climbed onto the conveyance as if it were an Otis elevator. His confidence seemed to melt Shannon’s qualms, and she finally boarded also.
“Hoist away!” the monk called up in Greek.
Slowly the ascent began. Shannon actually enjoyed the first part of their voyage upward because of the spectacular view. But when they were two hundred feet off the ground, she made the mistake of looking down. She gasped and clutched at Jon’s arm.
“No, darling,” Jon soothed. “Don’t look straight down. Just keep looking out over this once-in-a-lifetime panorama.”
“But what’s that clickety-click sound up there?”
