The Friends of Mount Athos Book Reviews

© 2007

Short Trip to the Edge: Where Earth Meets Heaven – A Pilgrimage. By Scott Cairns. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2007. 263 pages. $22.95 hardback. ISBN 978-0-06-084322-9.

Academic, working poet, father, and dog-lover, Scott Cairns reveals himself as a driven, troubled, yet inspired man on his ‘Short Trip to the Edge’. It is a compelling and intricate book, packed with a wealth of interest and experience: travel, personal anecdote, biography, poetry, theology, and even a helpful ‘Pilgrim’s Glossary’.

As a convert to Orthodoxy from a Nonconformist background, the author touches on how he initially struggled to make confession, but on Mount Athos rejoiced in ‘walking where actual saints had walked’ and in venerating, for the first time, their relics. His ‘hunger for the fullness of the faith and … desire for genuine prayer’ led him to seek a spiritual father who could help him to perfect his prayer-life. Only later was he to realize that ‘by coming first to Mount Athos [he] had disregarded the local in favour of the exotic, ignored the near in favour of the far’.

Starting his journey, as all pilgrims must, from Ouranoupoli, the ‘Heavenly City’, Professor Cairns recognizes that its ‘concrete pier … marks the end of the world’ as he sets off for not so much a mountain-top experience as a cliff-edge experience. This is not a book for those who suffer from vertigo, as the author describes, all too vividly, the precarious terraces and balconies of the monasteries, set high on cliffs over the Aegean Sea! Scott Cairns’s odyssey takes in so much more than just three treks around the Holy Mountain and one to the Arizona desert. Like the Athos peninsula itself, the text is criss-crossed with a network of pathways into and around the thoughts and spirituality of the author and those he encounters. While identifying himself as a ‘slower traveller along the way’, he joins the monks and elders whom he meets in wrestling to hold on to God in prayer (and especially the ‘Jesus prayer’ which, used continually, he assures us, leads to ‘the gate swinging open to the kingdom of God, here and now’). Throughout the work, and especially in the last of his three concise poems, he leads us, with considerable energy and stamina, to look over the very edge of our comfortable lives into what he describes not ‘as an abysmal emptiness so much as an abysmal fullness’.

The usual controversies about Mount Athos are comprehensively covered: whether it is better to hike or squeeze on to the microbuses, the need for adequate signposts on the footpaths, and whether the modern visitor is a tourist or a pilgrim. Technically, the book is very well structured, with an impressive cast of clearly depicted pilgrims, labourers, and monks (from all over the world, including a Buddhist). Even the hermits, whose begging bowls can be found in the most remote areas, seem eerily present, though never seen. There is no lack of pace (will he catch the last speedboat home?) and drama (the dire consequences of spilling the elements during the Eucharist) while pathos seems to characterize the ‘dour Orthodox families’ who have settled near the otherwise bright and fruitful St Anthony’s monastery in Arizona. As one would expect, Cairns uses poetic devices to enhance the text, muses on the relationship between poetry and prayer, and asserts that ‘poetry itself is a pilgrim’s journey.’ His rich vocabulary can be provocatively vernacular (it required diligent research by an American Friend to furnish the correct definition of ‘a passel of grazing mules’!) but he clearly relishes the language he uses and occasionally stretches it to fit a concept (such as ‘beyond-us-ness’).

Cairns adapts his style admirably to the gravity of his subject, ranging from the deeply serious, through the light and humorous, to the banal ‘beeline for the buses – shoving and shouting …’ Above all, the book impresses as accurate and authentic in recording the percipience of monks like the confessor who advised the author: ‘Don’t wait for a guide. Pray.’

As a footnote, those privileged to have followed in the author’s footsteps will be delighted to recognize ‘friends within’: Yorgos, the Vatopedi sentinel who dispenses apples and spring water to travellers delayed at his gate, Fr Matthew who more than cares for the Footpaths team, and Dr Nick, newly tonsured at Simonopetra, who addressed the last Madingley conference so brilliantly.

GEOFFREY HOPKIN

Sheffield