"My marriage was in tatters, war reporting had taken the place of poetry, and I was of an age to realize that the resolution of my latest health crisis was just a temporary reprieve," writes Christopher Merrill, explaining his first pilgrimage in 1989 to Mount Athos, a males-only monastic community in northern Greece, considered by many to be the spiritual home of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
"I had traded," he writes, "the physical dangers of covering the breakup of Yugoslavia for the psychic risks of opening my heart to the possibility of grace." And it is risky, what Merrill refers to as "unlearning everything," "untelling" the story of his life "to write a new one based on Scripture and patristic literature." Merrill comes to Athos with all the symptoms of spiritual indifference, "the noonday demon."
His soul is sick: sick of war, sick of arguing with his wife. He has lost his faith in literature, the guide that, from the surrealists to our finest poets of nature, had always sharpened his "sense of how to live." Merrill makes three trips to Mount Athos, wandering from monastery to monastery. As he walks, he thinks aloud about the roots of Christianity and the appeal of asceticism.
He is frustrated by the monks' refusal to grant him access to rituals and texts but understands, quoting Pseudo-Dionysius: "Let your respect for the things of the hidden God be shown in knowledge that comes from the intellect and is unseen. Keep these things of God unshared and undefiled by the uninitiated."
Merrill's great strengths as a writer have always been his ability to braid the past, present and future; his lightheartedness; and his willingness to digest those books the rest of us may never read and give the reader the gift of their essential wisdom. In his new book, Merrill, ever God's fool, also gives us something of himself, of his own wisdom and transformation.
--Susan Salter Reynolds
L.A. Times, January 23, 2005
