I’m lying in the dirt listening to the wind. My mind is being crucified to the cross above me.
I arrived here late last night. I’m all bald tires and jagged teeth. Prayer and a printed map got me here. 222-mile drive in silence, my old truck doesn’t have a radio so I listen to my mind and truck groan up the windy roads.
A little dog named Beegum barks at me at the end of a bumpy dirt road where the monastery stands deep in the mountains. A monk walks out and waves and tells me to park down the road with a thick Russian accent. I wear black jeans, black boots, and a thick black sweater, which is what I imagine Johnny Cash’s version of a cassock is. They refer to me as a pilgrim. An old priest relying on a cane more than his legs shuffles out, I kiss his hand and he blesses me. It’s late.
There are tiny shacks below, three to be exact. They call them cells. He says pick one you like and go to sleep. The three cells are named ‘faith, hope, and love.’ I take a step towards faith but double back to love. Maybe because it’s the thing I want right now. Maybe because it’s the thing that comes after faith and hope.
There’s no power, cell reception, or running water here. I pray my nightly prayer out of my small prayer book with a flashlight. I watch my ribs and stomach undulate in my peripheral with the whispers of my lips, the words act as a brush that has been scrubbing my soul every night for months.
I climb onto the plywood bed, listen to the cogs turn in my mind. Mischievous joy and sorrow colliding in the ocean of my mind until I fall into a deep sleep.
I wash my face and comb my hair with cold water in the dark at 5:00AM. I run into the Russian monk as I’m stumbling up the dirt hill towards the monastery. I ask him where I should go, he says “To the church.” matter-of-factly.
I push the door open. Incense, chants, candles, and the breath of God rushes my senses and obliterates my mind.
I kiss the Mother of God’s face, then I stand there and begin the great tango and wrestling with God. I light a candle and give him the sorrows and joys my mind excavates for the next four hours to the chanting of these wild monks who have dedicated their lives to the marinating in God’s holiness, to being digested in God’s stomach. They resemble less men in a high castle and more like holy animals, metastasized down into wildness. The priest looking like some strange bird poking his head out of the holy doors as he chirps ancient words out of a candle wax stained book.
Afterwards I talk to the only other pilgrim on the mountain with me in the dining hall. His name is Timothy, the same name of my late brother. He’s from the Santa Cruz mountains and when he tells me I feel a pang in my heart, how all those years ago when I lived in the same mountains I blindly stumbled past the thing I was looking for. A beautiful kindness and intense humility emanates from his eyes, he alludes to AA, alcohol, and anger. His intimacy with the topography of the underworld and how this thing we’re participating in ushered him out of it. He has this jagged softness and depth. I have an affinity for people like him, they’re a dream, I look up to them.
Honesty oozes out of him, he is tattered Carhartts and rough capability. The light in his sawdust eyes a torch ignited and carried through hell, now a great flame of God’s Love. Infinite mercy is his inheritance and he carries it well.
Then I’m climbing deeper into the mountains. Dust and sweat compounding on me. I’m at the top of the mountain in front of a humble wooden cross fashioned out of dead tree limbs. Before I know it I’m lying in the dirt underneath it. The loneliness being evaporated out of me in the hot sun, as I wriggle in the dirt and the wind.
My God, my Guillotine. My neck is yours. I am ash, and bones, and dirt, and rot. Purify me. I feel humility knowing the closest I’ll get to perfection is repentance. The paradox of when I make myself the lowest I am closest to the highest. I relish in it. I’m spit back down the mountain in the drunken blissful haze, cleansed.
The sun is setting, I make my way back to the monastery for the nighttime vespers. I’m swept back into what feels like endless initiation. The holy demise from the crashing waves of chants, candles, and incense. I’m waved down to the underground chapel by an old priest with a black eye from a fall. His blue and gold robes sparkle in the dim light, the eyes of saints painted on the ceiling watch me from their vantage above. The sacrament of confession, like my tongue is a dog in a race it begins to move.
I whisper the sins that this place has slowly been negotiating out of my flesh, I regurgitate them. I then place my head on the melted cross, a cross pulled out of the rubble of the first monastery that burned down where this one now stands. The same one Seraphim Rose used when he started this place over fifty years ago. I, like thousands of pilgrims before me, am extracted into the wellspring of mercy. I ascend back into the church leaving the tattered rags of my psyche below. Then continue my unraveling into sore feet and smoke.
After dinner the abbot sits alone at the end of a table. I nervously slide next to him, I tell him who I am and why I am here. “Death to the world, the last true rebellion.” I say. A film from a magazine published in the 90’s about how the true punks are monks. How punk rock got half the truth right in the rejection of the world, but they were missing the other half of the truth. I talked about how the piece resonated with me, how in my youth I was all tattoos and rage, but I had replaced the rejection of the world with the void. In my continued search for truth I discovered Holy Orthodoxy. The abbot lit up, “I was one of the two authors who wrote The Last True Rebellion.” Chills ran down my spine. “You’re the reason I’m here father.”
I court the wild for a bit longer on the steps of my shack, then crawl into bed. Sunday morning, after the twists, turns, and tangos of the last two days I go to the monastery for divine liturgy. The same prayers and songs I’ve been listening to for a year crawl into me, ancient but never old. Compulsively, rhythmically doing the sign of the cross over my body. A father with his two boys stands next to me. Sincerity, humility, and love emanates out of him. I can see the goodness in him through his rough blue collar exterior, and how that goodness has transferred to his boys.
The memory of me being washed in a thunderstorm in the Arizona desert comes crashing through the floorboards of my mind and into my heart. How it broke something in me that needed to be broken, communing with the wild angels of the desert is where I decided maybe I could be a father one day, and with the decimation of any bigness in me it’s where I started praying to God again. And all these years later, why I’m here with this knowing in my bones.
The siege continues on my heart, soul and flesh. Finally like God’s drunken lullaby I stumble up to the priest with arms crossed, and then he feeds me my God, to remember I’m the madness he died for.
I say my goodbyes. Then dirt is spinning around me, climbing down gears while climbing down the mountain. I head back towards the great big machine, feeling less like a human and more like I’m actively being imagined by God.