Prayer with Chips!

FoMA member Philip Lambert journeyed to Mount Athos in September to join the path clearers – but found himself joining a very unusual kitchen brigade instead. This is his story

With passports (Diamoniterion) in hand, we waited excitedly to get on the ferry to the Holy Mountain. I was in an Ouranopoli shop buying my nuts and raisins. Suddenly, my leg gave way – it was very painful and I hobbled, with help from my friend, to the ferry.

Unfortunately, it did not improve much, which prevented me from doing any of the footpath work. Instead, work was found for me helping in the kitchens of Konstamonitou, one of the poorer Greek monasteries. I was so disappointed not to be working on the footpaths. Yet sometimes disappointment can be the black hole that leads to another place.

With a little trepidation, I knocked on the forbidding kitchen door. No answer. Eventually, a monk came along and let me inside. The kitchen was a series of rooms where meal preparations were in hand. It was very busy, steamy and warm: vegetables being chopped, steaming pots being stirred. In this monastery kitchen there were monks and lay workers-Russians, Greeks, Romanians, labourers with calloused hands delicately cutting up vegetables. A motley group of men from all around the world with different languages, abilities, education. It looked noisy and chaotic yet it worked.

I was asked to sit and cut the potatoes for chips. They had to be a particular shape and size or they would be rejected! A welcome coffee arrived, and occasionally a monk would come to inspect my work.

There was – as in all kitchens- laughter, banter, and barked commands when something was needed urgently. Nothing unusual in that. What was unusual, however, was that all of this was interspersed with the Jesus Prayer, whispered on the lips of the one stirring the pot, or preparing the wood fire in the oven, or..…The heartbeat of the kitchen – as with my own, rhythmically pumping, working continually, noticed only when pausing to listen.

Every now and then I would be asked for the English name of a pot or a herb. Later there might be a brief theological discussion and a bit of banter. A real melting pot – in which food was being prepared prayerfully, and without pious pretension. It was in some ways like being in the chapel praying except that we were working in a kitchen.

When I left to return home I felt strangely renewed. I had experienced the regular things of life in the kitchen, yet somehow I had also experienced a different, maybe more “real”, normality. It was a reality where material things became membranes of the Spirit. It was a normality that embraced both heaven and earth.

It reminds me of a stanza from the Anglican priest George Herbert’s poem The Elixir,

A man that looks on glass,

         On it may stay his eye;

Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,

         And then the heav’n espy.