St. Athanasius of Alexandria

Greek to Me

"Yes, some really quite strange religions out there in the East. Coptic monks out in the Egyptian desert saying 'old Father Abbot who died last year appears to me when I look over my right shoulder.' " A polite titter. It was the genial bespectacled Englishman at the Almost Corner bookstore in Trastevere speaking. He meant well; he's a good fellow. Still...

I smiled and forced a chuckle.

He'd pointed to a weighty paperback called From the Holy Mountain, presumably a semi-humorous travelogue involving Greek Orthodoxy. It sat on the crowded center island of the even-more-cluttered shop along with Caring for the Neurotic Dog, and something about Nostradamus. Then there was was something like Great Hoaxes in Exploration and Route 66 A.D. with a centurion wearing CHiPs sunglasses on the cover. Neither did anything for me. On the floor was a manual on horoscope symbols.

Nothing was looking appealing, much to my surprise. Even great Homer nods, I suppose.

I'd asked him to recommend something "amusing." The scanty collection of cheesy Clancy-oid paperbacks that line the rickety metal shelves of the Notre Dame Rome Program Lending Library was simply not cutting it for bedtime reading. Neither was re-re-reading the collection of P.J. O'Rourke essays I'd brought over on the plane eons ago. While I'm always one to enjoy his making humorous hay out of the latest round of troubles in Trashcanistan or Upper Revolta, one can only get so many laughs out of a piece on violent South Korean student protests or Cory Aquino, especially over a period of three months.

I flipped through the book; it didn't look half bad, had some nice historical tidbits. Not too irreverent, and the price was about right for the cash I had on me. Though I thought it best, if only for the sake of dramatic irony, to pass over the fact I was planning to be at the Greek Rite Catholic Church on Via del Babuino in ten minutes time. Saturday Vespers, probably right up there on the quite strange meter for him. Maybe I could hide it in my jacket if the priest got inquisitive. "What is this? Is mocking holy desert fathers? Is outrage!"

But seriously now.

I suppose it's technically possible to get from the Lungaretta in Trastevere to Sant' Atanasio near the Spanish steps in ten minutes, but not without some of those pesky Coptic teleportation skills. I'd lingered perhaps too long at San Salvatore in Onda on the way over, paying a call on St. Vincent Pallotti in his silver mask entombed in the glass altar.

Anyway, I threaded my way through the Saturday night hordes of central Rome, passing a jaunty jazz band with portable drumset in Campo dei Fiori, ducking around a brace of young matrons with baby carriages and dodging a flock of nuns in white Birkinstocks. By the time I reached Sant' Andrea the bells of the nine hundred churches, oratories and chapels of Rome were clanging the hour away, and when I reached the Pantheon, it was starting to rain with sparse, indifferent drops.

The Corso was packed, almost verging on Dick Clark territory beyond the construction work near the column of Antonius Pius. Still, the fortune-tellers that sit next to the plastic webbing around the incomprehensible excavations seemed to have disappeared for the evening. I reached the Spanish Steps by 7:20, according to one of the colorfully inaccurate clocks on the street. I finally saw an elegantly nondescript baroque church loom up on one side. A large plaque to one side looked Greek to me, so I bolted in, crossed myself Eastern-fashion and entered another world.

It's mysterious, strange and wonderful, that alone was enough to draw me. Though a tip from my friend at the Irish College and the fact that my Confirmation name was almost Athanasius, well, it didn't hurt either.

Overhead, three vast crystal chandeliers blazing with lights hung from the whitewashed vaults, casting a mysterious twilight over the twin transepts. It was a curious mix of classical, feminine Roman and mystical, virile Greek, evoking some Romanov court chapel in long-ago Petrograd. Candles burned before icons the twin in classical side-chapels, one enshrined in a high gilded tower-shrine near the narthex. Everyone was standing, black silhouettes in the semidarkness. Before me blazed a grand iconostasis embellished with Bramantesque pilasters, painted marble patterning and elegant faux mosaics. A crucifix hovered overhead in the mellow light, while stiff doctors and bishops gesticulated with surprising grace and fluidity from icons decorating the lobed transepts.

Beyond the curtained Royal Doors, I glimpsed the back of the priest standing before the altar, his high black klobuk veil falling over the back of his dazzling gold cope. Two silver trikaria candlesticks flanked the ornate crucifix before him, amber-glassed lamps burning overhead beneath the eucharistic Dove suspended from the half-invisible baldacchino.

It was glorious in a strangely pacific way. The black-robed clerks were singing a complex, droning antiphon that could send shivers down your spine with harmonic, deeply masculine resonances. They stood in the south transept, grouped behind a strangely Latin pulpit with a carved eagle as the bookstand, reading their music from double-sided lecterns. Some were clean-shaven, others as bearded, olive and Byzantine as winged John the Forerunner on a transept icon.

The priest made his obeisances and then appeared at the side door, the curtain pulled across by an invisible supernumerary. He incensed us with a clattering, belled thurible. Vigorous jingling one-armed swings, a flurry of delicate tapping crossings among clergy, choir and some of the faithful.

I tried to fit in and follow suit, accidentally doing it "backwards" or possibly sideways and sometimes absentmindedly kissing my thumb in an effort to create some new hybrid Hispanic-Hellene rite. Not everyone seemed to be following quite as well as I was, a few strolling in and out, some sitting, most standing. A tall, elegant blonde woman left with her husband or boyfriend halfway through the liturgy, while others entered later than I, surprisingly enough. One black-robed clerk left early, too.

But it was still marvelous, with the long Kyrie litany with its chanted, exotic Greek tropes and quick, vigorous responsories. Or even the semi-incomprehensible Italian readings from St. Paul, curiously enough, given from before the pulpit rather than in it. The priest bowed and blessed and bowed again, and cried out in a stentorian voice, "Sophia! Orthi!" as the lectors began and ended, Greek versicles flowing into Italian and Italian back into Greek. Wisdom. Let us be attentive. Not a bad idea for us Latins to remember in our own liturgies.

The candles burning before the icons flickered, sometimes steadily, sometimes almost guttering, the colored lamps of the sanctuary almost glittering with the quickness of their flames. My gaze wandered around the church, over the baptismal font, over the westernized pictures of the Apostles or the foot of the vast image of the church's patron half-visible through the sanctuary doors. He appeared to be trampling on some Arian writings.

But soon the rite ended. The priest, clad only in cassock, golden stole and klobuk blessed us with an ornate Eastern gesture that recalls in the ritualized bent of the fingers the sacred initials of Christ in Greek. And we bowed and crossed ourselves, and I almost looked convincing. The great purple curtain of the sanctuary slowly closed, and the cantors lined up one-by-one to venerate the icons placed on two lecterns before the iconostasis with graceful kisses and bows. The priest joined them, draping his veil and cap curiously over his shoulder as he made his reverence, and then pulling it back over his venerable head.

And the congregation soon vanished, and I was alone in the half-darkened nave of the church, watching the clerks move silently in the darkness, strange black-cloaked figures extinguishing the candles and folding up the lecterns with ritual solemnity. I could smell warm candle-wax, and I could see the rose-pink glass of the icon lamps burning brighter in front of the Virgin and Christ. And so I chose to depart, my head full of resonant memory and warm flame. A clerk locked the door behind me as I exited.

And so I returned to the everyday world of Rome, stumbling into the Corso across from the Florence Moon leather coat shop, the grimy Augustinian church down the street. I strolled down towards San Carlo, had a curious "what-will-they-wear-next?" gander at the extravagant hounds'-tooth-sheathed vapid-eyed fiberglass covergirls in the big window of one of the boutiques and threaded my way back home.

Still, adventure stalked my steps, if only a little bit. I stopped long enough at Santa Maria Maddalena, my favorite Roccoco church, to see the candles burning on its steps and hear a choir do a last-minute rehearsal of a heavenly Mozartean Sanctus for their concert in half-an-hour's time according to the posters. And then out into the little Piazza Maddalena again to hear an accordionist playing the Radetsky March at a sidewalk cafe. I thought I heard applause in the portico of the Pantheon as I passed, but I never figured out why.

And so here I sit before my computer, ponder my evening, and wonder where it all leads. Very strange religions. A joke, I know. Still, strange is not always silly, best not to forget the strange and serious side of life. To see it with all its colors and gilding and weird holy visions, like the miracle of a service I attended, like the heaven on earth the emissaries of St. Vladimir saw at Hagia Sophia more than ten centuries ago.

For beauty, especially nowadays in this cluttered and crowded and hostile world, is often strange by comparison. All the more reason to treasure every last deep chanted note and every clinking swing of the censer.