The Holy Mountain

Several weeks ago, I stumbled upon these photos portraying one of Eastern Orthodoxy’s holiest sites–Mt. Athos, a penninsula in Greece and self-ruled monastic state. I am both confused and drawn to monasticism (not as a personal vocation–I’m a married man, mind you). Such a life, to me, is simultaneously strange and beautiful, alluring but repulsive, mysterious, paradoxical. The men who live on the Holy Mountain, as it’s called, in their various monasteries and hermitages, inhabit a world far removed from my own (they adhere to a different calendar, for instance)–the otherness of which is fascinating.

I wonder at the peace of that place, what it would be like to live amongst so much silence and prayer. What holiness abides there, what transformation of heart, mind and body would it spark to visit, if any, if at all?

See more pictures here.

Read an excerpt of Scott Cairn’s Athos memoir, A Short Trip to the Edge. I recommend it.