Moscow, 14.10.92: Purgatorial Pilgrims and Contemporary Saints

3 A.M. Something that struck me at the Danilov monastery: how the Russians we’ve met recount stories of the founders of the monasteries as if they’re contemporaneous. Don’t know quite how to put the point, except that the guides spoke of St. Sergius and St. Danil in a living way. These weren’t just hagiographical tales of historical accounts: they were stories of one simple person who still lives on for those who live in and come to the monastery.

Much fruit for thought here. Inter alia, I think of how resurrection means at least in part that one who lived in a memorable holy way is remembered in a living way, as a living and continuously effective presence. At Danilov monastery, they told us the monks all gather to pray before the tomb of St. Danil for two hours daily. Very early Christian.

But also I think of how the life of one committed person can change history forever. If we went back beyond the gloss of centuries of hagiography and piety, what would we find? A person, one who dared live with courageous faith. In a sense, oddly, that’s what Russian Orthodoxy seems to recognize—even in its most lavish accounts of miracles by the saint, there’s nonetheless almost a colloquial, endearingly familiar, way in which the faithful speak of the monastic founders as if they’re beloved contemporaries.

This makes me wonder about how Christianity may grow via saints in the future. We assume the age that welcomed a Sergius or a Danil was somehow a simpler age, one in which it was easier to be a saint, to be acclaimed by the simple faithful. And in one sense it was.

But maybe it actually was no less complex and challenging than our time. Saints for every age: this seems to be a promise of Christianity, and if monasticism is now integral to the life of the church as a school of saints, then one may also say, new founders of monasteries for every age.

Where Russian Orthodoxy seems to have the advantage over Catholicism is in its relative lack of organization. By the fact that it encourages a kind of do-it-yourself spirituality and liturgy, it also encourages non-standardized forms of monastic life—or at least, seems to have done so up to the revolution. In this respect the Russian church is like the pre-Whitby Celtic church—organized far more around the monastery than the bishop, or that is to say, conjoining monastic life to church office. And I imagine in the Irish church, the saints, the monastic founders and hermits, were also long spoken of with the same familiarity and ease as in Russian Orthodoxy.

There’s a great hopefulness in all this, for a church able continually to revitalize itself, even for me as one who can live (as Rilke says) more for the coming God and the future with which the present is now pregnant, than for the past or present. One of the things I wanted to see spiritually in Russia is how to live more decisively that way.

What I lack is clear direction: live for the future how? As a theologian, college teacher of theology? If so, at Belmont Abbey College? If not, where? Or live as a monk, writer, hermit? How, where? This Russian trip is a pilgrimage of sorts in which I’m praying, praying, to see more clearly and have the courage to act. I invoke my contemporary great saint, Oscar Romero, and pray he’ll protect and guide me in a special way here, and I also entrust myself to the patroness of Belmont Abbey, Mary Help of Christians. Pray for me: I am a miserable sinner, much in need of mercy and tender consolation.

4 A.M. Terrible stomach upset. Can’t sleep. Can’t even begin to rest . . . .

10 A.M. Did not go on tour. Hope I can rest, but, Lord—alone, in Russia, full of fear and dread?

Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet: “Being an artist means not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree.”

4 P.M. Have rested some today, till noon, then the adventure of ordering a meal in the restaurant. Because I stayed her alone, the meals not provided. The waiter mercifully spoke a little English, and I managed to get borscht, chicken tabac (fried in the abominable grease everything here is fried in), and a few dabs of red and green cole slaw with raw sliced onion.

The food is so horrible I stay perpetually nauseous. Practically everything is fried heavily and inexpertly in tired grease, and I’m not sure if it’s animal or vegetable. The salads (i.e., cole slaw and occasionally tomatoes) are dressed with an oil that is absolutely revolting—may be walnut, but tastes like some ring-worm medicine we used as children smelled when it was applied, a medicinal tea made from green black walnuts boiled.

Smell is the word. Often when I get onto elevators, I almost gag with it. Even at the opera the nicely dressed woman next to me was intolerable: months and months of stale sweat mixed with the smell of fried food, onion and garlic, and heavy tobacco smoke. I dread the Aeroflot flight to Tashkent tomorrow—six hours!—for that reason alone.

The whole hotel reeks, and nothing is clean. I see flies on all the food.

What else today? Walked up the street after lunch. Amazing variety of faces in Russia: broad blond-red Slavic ones, narrow dark ones, I suppose from Georgia, an Asian-Slav look that Chuck’s friend Peter has. And one sees out and out Asians, and a few black folks.

Just before I finished lunch, the hostess seated a young Russian across from me who looked, in fact, a lot like Peter. His English was poor, and I could tell he didn’t understand me. I asked about leaving a tip, and he launched into a monologue re: how everywhere—U.S., Russia—all is theater. Or that’s what I understood. He told me he was a veteran of the Afghan war.

Other than that, I feel truly awful. Have been thinking how traveling with a small group of people is the parable of life’s journey people like Chaucer and Katherine Anne Porter have made of it. One feels the misery of others, one suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous daily intercourse with others as imperfect as oneself, and yet one must cling to the group because all outside is threatening, in that one does not speak the language of the land.

Jean M. proves impossible to bear. Everyone else I can tolerate, even enjoy, but she attacks me at every turn, and irritates the life out of me. I don’t even want to write about it, am so upset with her from something she said last night.

Canterbury, 2.5.06:: Pinx and Moving Baptismal Fonts

If a liturgical gesture can bear such freight, our pilgrimage began in earnest yesterday at evensong at Canterbury cathedral. At which a group of gentlemen from the states were welcomed and prayed for. At which all pilgrims and the Queen were prayed for.

At which the most enthralling little boy—not English-looking in the blond and stolid sense that will all too soon turn to beef and port wine complexion, but in a pixiesh way, dark hair and dark expressive eyes—sang with his heart. His mouth rounded out to every O, his hands could not remain still, his head and shoulders moved to the music in a way I imagine the choir master would seek to suppress as outré.

In which Chuck and I both imagined the beedle as a witch. She kept escorting people—the lectors—down the choir hall to the reading stand, a silver wand (the mace, I imagine) in her hand, held precisely forward as if it clove the malicious air ahead of her, warning it to behave itself. Her black robe and secretive half-smile fitted her to a T.

Steve had just said—coffee in a bakery on the High Street—that we should try to imagine our own religious spectacles as if seeing them for the first time, new-minted eyes.

I did so with the witch, and saw not some seemly Christian show, but something distinctly ancient Egypt, thaumaturgic and a little wicked simultaneously. She definitely spiced up what would otherwise have been a rather stuffy 45 minutes of prayer and praise.

And what did I feel, think of, through it all? I’d like to say I’ve received intimations—of meaning, of a direction for pilgrimage, of a roadmap for life’s journey, of the sense that there is a roadmap.

I felt tired, back racked by seats designed to keep a body bolt upright. I felt self-conscious, as I always do in church services in which one faces a watching group across.

Some lines moved or amused me: the psalm that prayed we be mended in all our ways (there is nothing now about me that doesn’t need mending); the prayer for peace that told God only God can fight to make peace; the muted English O Phos Hilarion, ushering us into the muted light of a beautiful English spring evening.

I felt like a pilgrim: befuddled, weary, praying to see the way, the next step ahead; praying for strength to take that step; aware of all the others in the ark, each needy in his or her own way.

And then we walked to dinner in an Italian restaurant (run by Spaniards) in the High Street, called Ark. Where the tables were too close and we were unlucky enough to sit beside one of those smug middle-class English couples who imagine themselves more urbane than they are. Who smirked when they heard us talk. Who smirked solely because we are Americans, a private joke of such self-professed urbane middle-class couples.

Whom, I’ll admit, God help me, I played with a bit by recounting the story of how I saw Ellen’s family treated in the Yale Club—solely because they were Italian, working-class, not one of us.

I saw that my words reached her ears, at least, and bit a tiny bite out of her imperturbable superiority, such that they didn’t know where to put “the” Americans in their catalogues of amusing creatures. Such that he decided to employ the oh-so-banal trick of calling us crazy, Steve said, who saw him twisting his finger around a circle outside his ear, the secret smile turned to more openly dismissive secret hand signals.

And my God, why did I—why do I—even care? She had a moustache and a too-tight pink bodice that no one in her right mind with such a figure and complexion would think of wearing. He had a frog’s mouth attached to pig’s eyes. They looked the embodiment of . . . stupidity that doesn’t know it’s stupid. I was heartily glad when they left, and also a bit at a loss to know to what next to turn my attention.

Catty? Or Chaucerian awareness that one’s fellow pilgrims are part of the hair shirt (and high drama) of any pilgrimage as one is no doubt in turn to them.

This was far from the whole day, and it’s backwards narrative. The day began with rain but turned to glorious sunshine as we drove to Whitstable. Which I thoroughly enjoyed, though our b and b owner dismissed it as a mere fishing village and some guidebooks I peeked into yesterday sniffed and said not anything in the town is worth seeing.

But I enjoyed the seaside, the oceanfront booths selling cockles and whelks, and pinx, and prawns (and crawfish tails?!). We sat and picked at little paper cups of these.

Rather, Steve and Chuck and I did. I had had a rubbery, gritty chaw of a thing or two and then relinquished the cups for some oversized shrimp cooked with no seasoning and served with vinegar. One was good. Two tasted off, and I have diarrhea today—as does Steve.

We also got to see the Mayday parade on the High Street, as we stood in the upper floor of a bookstore and looked out the window. There were people dressed as May trees, people in blackface (!) twirling in Morris dances and then running into the crowd to boo at bystanders. There was a bagpipe. It was glorious (well, the blackface was disturbing, but maybe I don’t understand it), and then it was over—a perfect, undemanding little interlude in a very pleasant morning.

Fishing huts. Bright painted doors. An art museum cum community center, with a young attendant who had designs cut into his hair on one side—pleasant warm brown eyes and a nice smile.

St. Dunstan’s. Where I touched the font in which Marlowe (and Robert Wynne the emigrant) were baptized. Where I had the fright of my life while the others inspected the Roper chapel and I sat quietly looking at the font.

And began to imagine I saw the top piece, a carved cathedral spire, moving ever so slowly. Where I convinced myself I was seeing things.

Where I think realized I was seeing it move both directions, which then convinced me I couldn’t be imagining what I was seeing. Where I ran running to Steve, who pointed out—oh that German mind for solid reality—that it was suspended by a pull thingy that would enable the rector to lift the top easily, and thus was twisting and turning even as it appeared to be sitting on the font.

Canterbury, 29.4.06: Pilgrimage and the Whole Grab-Bag Selft

Calling a trip a pilgrimage has this advantage: it frees one to let happen what will happen. I like that sense of freedom, of not having to decide from day to day what I should see and do.

Ironically, if one considers a pilgrimage a response to God’s guiding hand, it’s freedom one is giving up. One remains open, supple, disponible, responsive to a will transcending one’s own.

I’m not sure if—for a long time!—I’ve believed in that kind of puppet-master God pulling all the strings. Such a God is always male, and always a tyrant.

The only variation in these puppet-master theologies is whether they tyrant is benign or, well, tyrannical . . . .

Yet I’m loath to give up the idea that God guides us. Amazing things happen, “coincidences.” Doors open. Injustice is reversed. Flowers spring forth in the unlikeliest places.

I picture the God accomplishing this (with us) as a more feminine force, weaving the woof on the warp of our freedom. And with leading strings of love . . . .

Surrounded as I write this in Atlanta airport by a bevy of soldiers, all in camouflage. Where are they going? ON the flight from Little Rock, a soldier in regular clothes told Steve he’s headed to Puerto Rico “to help our boys down there.”

Why? Is something we don’t know going on “down there”? Is Bush’s response to his plummeting poll numbers going to be to beef up military presence in Latin America—in other words, while mouthing support for illegal immigrants, cynically to exploit our fear of contamination at the borders (Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger is so enlightening on that point).

Things—our culture—seem more militarized than I ever recall. And yet we’re not at war—not in the engrossing sense of World War II, in which the whole nation was involved.

The military presence is especially pronounced in every airport we go to. Again, entry points, orifices: a symbolic gesture to remind us to remain on guard, to remember that we now need Big Papa (God’s emissary) to guard and protect us.

The flight here: horrendous. Steve said he can’t remember being on one so bad in a long time. I don’t think I can ever recall such a flight. It made turbulence and rough air sound like warm milk beside a hot toddy.

Things feel apocalyptic now. People look . . . odd—either messengers sent to pass on a cryptic warning, or menacing watchers.

Of course, I realize this has much to do with my mental state. If so, what does that state (and what it opens me to) portend for pilgrimage?

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Somewhere in the Atlantic approaching England. I’ve slept little and fitfully, but what sleep I got was at least moderately refreshing.

Why pilgrimage now? Why me? At one level, the answer is obvious. I just am not who I was a few years ago.

Which is to say, not sure who I am . . . . Aging, moving to death, yes.

I’ve been through a wreck. I lived. I’m not quite the same, though.

I’ve had lesions detected in my lungs. They’re apparently benign. But. They’re there, and what do they mean? Intimations of mortality?

Above all, we’re facing a move I absolutely don’t want to make. And yet everything tells me I should do so.

If nothing else, “my” life is hardly in my control. And I need guidance, strength, clarity.

Pilgrimage has to be about a lot more. Pilgrims who set off on the road to Canterbury in the middle ages, for instance: just as I do, they surely brought a whole grab bag full of petitions and thanksgivings along with them.

They brought their whole grab-bag self, rejoicing, muttering, praying, cursing, scratching, farting, kneeling.

If Chaucer tells us anything, he certainly tells us that. He tells us they went a-pilgrimage as much for a change of pace, and of scenery, as for pious adventure.

And who knows what they found along the way, each of them? And what I’ll find?