To the Holy Mountain—and Back

by Richard Friedlander

It’s difficult to say how long I was a monk. If, as in the western Church, it’s the number of years after my official tonsure, I never was one. But if you use the measure of the Church of the East, where anyone who wears black, doesn’t eat meat, abstains from women, and lives in a monastic community is a monk, then I was a monk for ten to thirteen years—ten being the years I lived in community, and thirteen the (in retrospect) excruciating length of my celibacy.

Should I measure my commitment from the time I felt that someone had unzipped my chest and sunlight was pouring into my heart? Should I include the three years of my decline, when I was living on the fumes of my beliefs?

What does it matter, really? That’s a big chunk of time to remain focused on anything. And I was focused to the degree that allowed for nothing else in my life.

I was born in Brooklyn in 1942. My father was an esteemed labor lawyer whose passion was horse-racing and betting of any kind; my mother was an artist and tennis player first, a wife and mother second; and, for more than half of the 20th century, president—and then docent—of the Brooklyn Museum.

We were Reform Jews. I played on the temple basketball team, my father went to services to criticize the rabbi, and my mother was partial to the delicacies served at the Oneg Shabbat. I got thirteen hundred dollars in small donations for my Bar Mitzvah, which I later spent on a Volkswagen, a purchase that hardly thrilled those in my family who thought eating liverwurst was supporting the Nazis.

I went to Erasmus Hall High School, a classmate of Barbra Streisand and Bobby Fischer.

I went to Yale, undergraduate and Law School.

I escaped Vietnam with a heart murmur and a pulse of 43; as one doctor said, rather pointlessly, “You should be dead.”

In 1968, I moved to London, worked as a carpenter, and wrote seven plays. My first was a comedy called Miniver Cheevy. My mother read it. She asked me why I didn’t try writing a comedy.

I wrote a thousand pages of short stories, revising the myths on which my life then stood with what I believed to be the truth. Short stories gave me the distance I needed to be honest. And I wrote what I knew would be my final play, not coincidentally about a man who was constantly tripping over his own will.

I stopped going to parties and spending time with people I didn’t really like, and I slipped into vegetariansim.

I also stopped sleeping with women. To me, this was like admitting to myself that I had no reason to live.

These were not acts of will. It was as if I had been given three wishes. I said what I wanted to happen, and it happened.

In May, I gave my last play to an Australian director who liked my work, stored a few belongings with a friend, and got rid of the rest. I said goodbye to a bewildered girlfriend, and took a train to Athens. I had no idea why. I only knew where I was going because I had pointed a finger at a map and it landed on the island of Paros, in the dead center of the Aegean.

Out of habit, I picked up a German woman on the ferry from Piraeus to Paros. We looked at a room in Parokia, the tiny capital of the island, and then at each other. We said goodbye.

I took a bus to the fishing village of Naousa, on the north end of the island, rented a room from a gentlemanly widower named Louie for 50 cents a day, and spent the next few days trying to amuse myself on an island that is very short of opportunities for amusement.

In ancient days, Paros had supplied the wonderfully translucent marble for the Parthenon, but when I arrived it was perhaps the poorest island in the Aegean. Except for a valley overflowing with beautiful butterflies and a sunlight that attracts artists, its main claim to fame is 37 monasteries, only two still inhabited. My landlord suggested I visit the “monkeys” at Longovarda, a monastery about six miles away. He thought I might find the 17th-century buildings interesting.

The next morning, I set out for Longovarda. Why not? At worst, it would wear me out. It was a hot day, and the hour and a half it took to ascend to the monastery left me tired and drenched with sweat. It was a little after noon. I knocked on the green wooden gate of the monastery. I waited. I knocked again.

I was about to turn around and begin my retreat to Naousa, when an elderly man came around the corner and out of some long-ago century. He was wearing a white shirt with a collar, a black vest, and black knickers with white knee socks. His hair was straight and white.

He said something to me in Greek, and I replied in English. What it was didn’t matter, since I didn’t speak Greek and he knew no English. He pushed me down on a sagging wooden bench under an enormous eucalyptus tree, and disappeared the way he came.

A few minutes later, the “needle’s eye”—the small door inside the gate—opened, and a gray-haired monk with a bushy gray beard ducked through it and strode toward me. In clipped but nervous English, he introduced himself as Father James.

He had been an Anglican parish priest whose parish in southeast London had been left untouched by the German bombs that obliterated the parishes on either side. After the War, he decided the Church of England was not a “true church,” and he converted to Greek Orthodox Christianity. He had been a monk at this monastery for the last 20 years.

Father James asked if I was hungry, and when I nodded, he led me into the monastery and up to the refectory on the second floor. We were the only ones there. The long, narrow room was wonderfully cool.

My host sat me down, went into the kitchen, and returned with a bowl of cold fava—what in England he would have called pease pudding—a wedge of hard cheese, half a loaf of heavy, dark bread, a carafe of wine, and a pitcher of water. He dribbled some olive oil onto the fava. It was a meal of cold leftovers, but it was one of the great meals of my life.

Before he took me to the guest room, he went to his cell and returned with a small book. I accepted it, even though I was wary of everything about this strange man, and on my guard against any attempt he might make to proselytize me.

“I’m Jewish and I’m happy,” I told him in no uncertain terms.

“Read the first paragraph,” he entreated. “If you don’t like it, put it back in our cell, and choose something else.”

The book was The Way of a Pilgrim. In “the world,” the only mention I have seen of it is in J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. From what I remember, Franny thought the pilgrim was cute. I personally know of three people who were sucked into conversion to Orthodoxy by this book. One of them was me....