Several slaves had come and seated themselves at the base of the monastery wall. They were smoking, gesticulating, conversing in loud voices. Among them were some filthy barefooted women wrapped in black robes, their hair done up over their foreheads in pointed buns, like the pommels of packsaddles, their faces covered from the nose downward by delicate chains, at the ends of which were shells and tiny silver piasters. Each of the women parted her robe and brought out an infant which she placed on the stones in front of her. All were waiting for the monks to appear and toss down their daily rations from above: three small round loaves of bread for each man, two for each woman and child. The rule was that they had to come in person to receive this food, and they had left their tents hours earlier in order to arrive on time. But these small loaves do not satisfy their hunger. They also collect grasshoppers, which they dry, grind, and knead into bread.
I was deeply moved as I regarded these distant brothers. For centuries they have surrounded these Byzantine walls, and the tiny loaves (made mostly of bran) have been thrown down to them like rocks. They live and die by threatening the monastery. Today, just as in the time of Jethro, only girls tend the sheep. No one molests them. When two young people fall in love, they slip away in secret and go to the mountains at night. The young man plays the flute, the girl sings; at no time do they touch each other. Then the boy comes down to attempt to purchase the girl. He seats himself outside his future father-in-law’s tent, the girl arrives, he throws his burnoose over her and covers her. The boy’s father comes along, as does the sheik. The two fathers grasp a palm leaf and pull it into two parts. Then the girl’s father says, “I want a thousand pounds for my daughter.”
“A thousand pounds!” exclaims the sheik. “But your daughter is worth two thousand. And the groom is willing to give this amount. . . . For my sake, however, allow him a five-hundred-pound reduction.”
“For the sheik’s sake,” the father replies, “I allow five hundred.”
Meanwhile, the various relatives have been arriving one by one and seating themselves cross-legged in front of the tent. At this point they rise.
“Allow him a hundred more, for my sake.”
“And another hundred,” says someone else.
“And fifty . . .”
“And another twenty-five . . .”
Until finally the amount is lowered to one pound.
At that precise moment the women who have been grinding corn in a corner begin their cackling: “Lou . . . lou . . . lou . . . lou . . .”
The girl’s father rises.
“For the sake of the women who grind the corn, I give my daughter for half a pound.”
They eat, drink, and dance on the eve of the marriage, lavishing all they own.
Thus, for thousands of years, the customs of the desert have abided unshaken.
The young Cretan came and said to me, “The holy fathers are waiting for you in the reception hall. Go in, please.”
Approximately twenty monks were seated in the large hall where guests are received. They stared at me with curiosity. I was going to kiss each one’s hand, but there were so many of them that I decided this would be tedious, and kissed only the abbot’s. Emaciated and severe, he sat in the middle without speaking. Once again the coffee, the spoonful of jam, a glass of date wine, the kindly age-old words—Where are you from? Who are you? Welcome!
The abbot, an ancient oak incised and carbonized by God’s thunderbolts, regarded me, but I am certain that he did not see me. His eyes had begun to grow dim. They no longer distinguished the visible universe clearly; now they saw only the invisible one. He regarded me, and behind my shoulders he viewed great cities: the “world” that was wallowing in sin, vanity, impudence, and death.
I told him I was going through a crisis, and I asked permission to stay a few days at the monastery so that my soul could concentrate and reach a decision.
“Do you desire to find God?” asked the abbot. I realized that he saw me now for the first time; earlier he had been simply looking at me.
“I want to hear His voice,” I answered. “I want Him to tell me which road to take. It’s only here in the desert that the soul can hear Him.”
“All voices can be heard here in the desert,” said the abbot. “And especially two which are difficult to tell apart: God’s and the devil’s. Take care, my child.”
Two monks entered the reception hall in order to see the new pilgrim and greet him. One was the guestmaster, a chubby soul with a curly beard and merry blue eyes; it was his job to look after strangers. The other had a weary, ironic smile; he was tall, with mustache, whiskers, and eyebrows as white as snow, and long-fingered hands also strikingly white. He did not speak to me, but simply stared, his eyes flickering and laughing. Laughing, or mocking? At that particular moment I could not tell; a few days later I could.
The abbot rose. Giving me his hand, he said, “God grant that you may find in the desert what you sought futilely in the world.”
A monk ran to open the door for him. Walking heavily, with slow steps, he disappeared.
The guestmaster came up to me. “It’s dinnertime,” he said. “Come to the refectory, please.”
The monks were seated around a long table with the abbot at the head. The monk who was serving brought in the meal—boiled lobsters and vegetables, with bread and a cup of wine for each. The fathers commenced to eat. No one spoke. The lector mounted a low pulpit and began to chant the commentary on the day’s lesson, the return of the prodigal son.
Many times, in many different monasteries, I have experienced this liturgical rhythm of the collation. In this way the meal assumes its great and proper mystical significance. A rabbi once said, “In eating, the virtuous man liberates the God found in food.”
The lector chanted with coloratura flourishes about the prodigal son: his torments and humiliation far from his father’s home, how he ate carob beans like the swine, and how one day, unable to bear this any longer, he returned to his father . . .
In the midst of this deep mood of Christian piety I thought to myself, In another monastery more in keeping with today’s spiritual unrest and rebellion they would have read the splendid conclusion which an apprehensive contemporary fashioned for this parable. The prodigal returns tired and defeated to the tranquil paternal home. That night when he lies down on the soft bed to go to sleep, the door opens quietly and his youngest brother enters. “I want to go away,” he says. “My father’s house has grown too confining.” The brother who just returned in defeat is delighted to hear this. He embraces his brother and begins to advise him what to do and which direction to take, urging him to show himself braver and prouder than he did, and nevermore deign to return to the paternal “stable” (that is what he calls his father’s house). He accompanies his brother to the door and shakes his hand, reflecting, Perhaps he will turn out stronger than I did, and will not return.
How can I ever forget that first night I spent in God’s desert fortress? The silence had become ghostlike; it towered up around me as though I had fallen to the bottom of a dark dried-out well. Then it suddenly turned to sound, and my soul began to tremble.
“What do you want here in my house? You are neither pure nor honest. Your glance flits first this way, then that. I don’t trust you. You are ready to turn traitor at any minute. Your belief is an unholy mosaic of many disbeliefs. You do not realize that God sits waiting at the end of every road; you will always be in a hurry, will always become discouraged at the halfway point and turn back to take another road. The common people do not see Sirens or hear songs in the air. Blind and deaf, they sit bowed over in the earth’s hold, and row. But the more elect, the captains, hear a Siren inside them—their soul—and gallantly follow her voice. What else, do you think, makes life worth while? The poor woebegone captains hear the Siren and do not believe, however. Entrenched behind prudence and cowardice, all their lives they keep weighing the pros and cons on a delicate assay balance. And God, not knowing where to throw them,
desiring them neither to ornament hell nor defile heaven, orders them suspended between corruption and incorruptibility, upside down in the air.”
The voice ceased. I kept waiting, my cheeks fiery red from shame and anger. And then somewhere—was it from the desert itself, I wonder—I gained the strength to lift my head rebelliously and object.
“I did reach the end, and at the end of every road I found the abyss.”
“You found your own inability to go further. Abyss is the name we give to whatever we cannot bridge. There is no abyss, no end of the road; there is only the soul of man, which names everything in keeping with its own bravery or cowardice. Christ, Buddha, and Moses all found abysses. But they erected bridges and crossed over. For centuries now, human flocks have been crossing over behind them.”
“Some people become heroes through God’s decree, some through their own struggles. I struggle.”
A frightening laugh broke out all around me, and also inside my vitals.
“Heroes? But to be a hero means to subordinate yourself to a rhythm transcending the individual. As for you, you are still full of anxiety and shiftlessness. Unable to subdue the chaos inside you and to create the one integral Word, you whine away in self-justification: The old forms are too confining . . .’ But if you advanced further in thought or action, you would be able to reach the heroic boundaries wherein ten souls such as yours could fit comfortably and be able to work. If you received your impetus from known ecclesiastical symbols, you would be able to propel yourself into religious experiments of your own, and to give (you are seeking this but have not yet discovered it) a contemporary form to the age-old passions of God and man.”
“You are unjust. Your heart knows no pity. I have heard you before, O merciless voice—every time I’ve halted at a crossroad to choose my path.”
“And you shall hear me always: whenever you run away.”
“I have never run away. I always advance, abandoning what I love, and my heart breaks in two.”
“How long will you continue to do this?”
“Until I reach my summit. There I shall rest.”
“There is no summit; there are only the heights. There is no rest; there is only struggle. Why are you astonished? Why do you stare like that with protruding eyes? Don’t you know me yet? You think I am God’s voice, do you? No, I am your voice. I travel with you always, never leaving you. Alas if I ever did leave you by yourself! Once, another time when I sprang angrily out of your bowels, you gave me a name which I have kept, because I like it. I am your Traveling Companion the Tigress.”
The voice ceased. Recognizing it, I felt reassured. Why should I fear this Tigress? We always travel together. We have seen everything, enjoyed everything together. The two of us have eaten and drunk together in foreign lands; together we have suffered, together enjoyed cities, women, and ideas. When we return to our quiet cell laden with spoils and covered with wounds, this Tigress silently claws her way into the top of my head, where her lair is. She deploys herself adhesively around my skull, thrusts her talons into my brain, and the two of us, without resorting to words, ponder all we have seen, and yearn for all we have yet to see.
We rejoice that the whole of the visible and invisible world is a deep inscrutable mystery—incomprehensible, beyond the intelligence, beyond desire, beyond certitude. We chat together, my Traveling Companion the Tigress and myself, laughing because we are so hard, tender, and insatiable. We laugh at our insatiability, even though we know for certain that one evening we shall dine off a handful of dust and be sated.
O soul of man, O my Traveling Companion the Tigress: what a joy to live, love the earth, and look upon death without fear!
I got up at dawn, anxious to walk in the desert. The morning star still stood watch; a faint light had already invaded the mountain peaks. The partridges had awakened, and the entire mountain with the Holy Summit to which Jehovah had descended, rang with cackling. The sky had cleared, the low-lying snows had melted and been swallowed by the sand, but high on the mountains the snow glittered pinkly in the first beams of the sun. Not a single voice, no sign of water, no green grass. Inhuman solitude made of sand and God.
Surely only two kinds of people can bear to live in such a desert: lunatics and prophets. The mind topples here not from fright but from sacred awe; sometimes it collapses downward, losing human stability, sometimes it springs upward, enters heaven, sees God face to face, touches the hem of His blazing garment without being burned, hears what He says, and taking this, slings it into men’s consciousness. Only in the desert do we see the birth of these fierce, indomitable souls who rise up in rebellion even against God himself and stand before Him fearlessly, their minds in resplendent consubstantiality with the skirts of the Lord. God sees them and is proud, because in them His breath has not vented its force; in them, God has not stooped to becoming a man.
Two prophets were once traveling in the desert and disputing. One claimed that God was fire, the other that He was a honeycomb. Though they shouted themselves hoarse, neither was able to bring the other over to his side.
Finally, the first pointed in exasperation to the mountain opposite them. “If I am telling the truth, the mountain will begin to shake.”
And even as he said this, the mountain began to shake.
“That’s no proof!” answered the second prophet scornfully.
“If I am telling the truth, an angel will descend from heaven and wash my feet.”
And even as he said this, an angel descended from heaven, crouched, and began to wash his feet.
But the other shrugged his shoulders. “That is no proof,” he said.
“If I am telling the truth, God will call out, ‘It is true!’”
And even as he said this, a voice sounded from the heavens: “It is true!”
But the second prophet only shrugged his soulders again. “That is no proof,” he said.
At that exact instant Elijah was passing by heaven. Seeing God laughing, he approached and asked, “Why are you laughing, Lord?”
God answered: “Because I am pleased, Elijah. Down below on earth I see two men talking, and they are my true sons.”
As I went along I kept thinking with admiration of the two fierce prophets; it seemed to me that I could still see their footprints in the sand. Happy is the father deemed worthy of begetting such sons, I said to myself; happy the desert that saw walking upon it such lions out of God’s jungle.
The next day, together with Father Agapios and Father Pachomios the painter, I climbed the Holy Summit, the sheer fortress where Moses saw God “face to face” and spoke with Him. From a distance the supremely abrupt ridge line looked like the mane of a wild boar. “What are ye worth, ye remaining mountains,” asks Scripture, “ye mountains covered with grass, flocks, and cheeses? One and one only is the true mountain, Mount Sinai, where God descended and which He now inhabits.”
Jehovah, Israel’s fearsome sheik, sat atop this Hebraic Olympus, sat on His Summit as fire, making the mountain steam. No one could touch Him; no one could view Him face to face. Whoever saw Him died. Jehovah was identical with fire. He devoured whatever the Hebrews threw into the flames. And above all else, He loved to devour their children.
As we mounted the 3,100 steps leading from the mountain’s foot to its top, we passed a low arched doorway opened into the rock. In the times when men trembled to touch the Summit, a confessor sat here and heard their confessions. Whoever climbed the Lord’s mountain had to possess clean hands and an innocent heart; otherwise the Summit would kill him. Today the doorway is deserted. Soiled hands and sinful hearts are able to pass by without fear, for the Summit kills no longer.
We passed by.
Farther above us was the cave where the Prophet Elijah saw his great vision. He entered the cave, and God’s voice thundered, “Tomorrow, go forth and stand before the Lord. A great and strong wind will blow over you and rend the mountains and break in pieces the rocks, but the Lord will not be in the wind. And after the win
d an earthquake, but the Lord will not be in the earthquake. And after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord will not be in the fire. And after the fire a gentle, cooling breeze. That is where the Lord will be.”
This is how the spirit comes. After the gale, earthquake, and fire: a gentle, cooling breeze. This is how it will come in our own day as well. We are passing through the period of earthquake, the fire is approaching, and eventually (when? after how many generations?) the gentle, cool breeze will blow.
Still farther above, Pachomios halted and pointed to a ledge. “This is where Moses stood on the day the Hebrews fought the Amalekites. As long as he kept his arms raised high, the Hebrews conquered, but when he grew tired and lowered them, the Hebrews were put to rout. Then two priests, Aaron and Hur, held his raised arms in place, until finally the last of the enemy was ‘discomfited with the edge of the sword.’”
In Pachomios’s guileless soul all these legends assumed an unequivocal significance; he stared in goggle-eyed amazement, as though telling about sacred monsters—dinosaurs and megatheria—that still roamed the mountains and could be seen by whoever was pure of heart.
Slender, sear Father Agapios led the way with youthful agility. He did not talk. Displeased by Pachomios’ chattering, he was anxious to reach the top.
When he set foot on the Holy Summit, my heart shook. Never had my eyes enjoyed a more tragic, more extraordinary sight. Below us, Arabia Petraea with its deep purple mountains; in the distance the blue ranges of Arabia Felix and the bright green sea glittering like a turquoise. To the west, the desert steaming in the sun, and behind it, far in the background, the mountains of Africa. It is here, I reflected, that the soul of a proud or despairing man finds the ultimate happiness.
We entered the little chapel on the summit. Pachomios began scratching the walls with his fingernails, searching for the remains of ancient frescoes. He pointed triumphantly to the window’s diminutive Byzantine columns and proudly summoned me to see the symbol of the Holy Spirit, two Byzantine doves with joined beaks. He was struggling to discover and reconstruct the old life, not wanting to allow the past to pass away. Here on this summit where God descended like an insatiable flame, this spirit of archaeological excavation annoyed me. I turned to the monk and asked him, “Father Pachomios, what do you imagine God is like?”