What does sacredness mean? How is it expressed and where is it experienced? What are Easter and the Resurrection? Kathimerini asked three people of the arts and letters to share their thoughts and personal experiences of Holy Week and Easter, from a ritual in a village on Tinos and a gesture of comfort in a moment of fear and insecurity, to the sense of harmony experienced during a visit to a monastery on Mount Athos.
The importance of touch
Danae Sioziou, poet
One cold February morning, just weeks before what would be the hardest Easter of my life, I lay on a metal operating table, shivering and afraid. Doctors and nurses moved in and out of the room. Then the surgeon came over and took my hand, holding it tightly for a few moments. I felt a quiet sense of gratitude and closed my eyes, just before the anesthesiologist put me to sleep.
Touch, so often overlooked in Western culture, is also the sense that most intimately connects us to the world around us: from our mother’s caress at birth to the gentle closing of our eyelids in death. It is, among other things, a way of expressing solicitude for another person and, perhaps, the quintessential expression of the sacred.
Giving attention to another person sharpens perception, deepens feeling and expands both experience and our capacity to relate. For some anthropologists, the origins of human civilization lie not in tools or fire, but in caring for others.
Reflecting on the nature of the sacred, the philosopher Simone Weil famously wrote that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” She did not mean a mere state of observation, but a stance, a way of life, in which we cultivate our ability to be in a state of humility, to transcend the self and to invite transformation.
Every age redefines its relationship with spirituality and the sacred. In her essay “Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete, and Simone Weil Speak of God,” Canadian poet Anne Carson explores how these three women – living respectively in ancient Greece in the 7th century BC, and in France in the 14th and 20th – approach the divine through both their writing and their lives, and how they “had the nerve to enter a zone of absolute spiritual daring.”
Each of them underwent an experience of “decreation,” she argues, using the term introduced by Weil. Carson observes that the bold and unconventional spirituality of these women led society to “pass judgments on the authenticity” of their “ways of being.”
Weil has been described as “neurotic, anorectic, pathological, sexually repressed or fake.” Porete was tried and condemned not only as a heretic but also as a “fake woman” (pseudo-mulier), while ancient biographers of Sappho sought to undermine her seriousness by portraying her as leading an unrestrained erotic life.
Yet these women, Carson suggests, “know what love is” – that is, “they know love is the touchstone of a true or false spirituality” – and each of them finds a way to speak of God. Such societal reactions express differentiation, aggression and misogyny, but also the alienation and lack of reciprocity in the modern experience of the world.
In poetry – the art to which I have dedicated myself – things often have a soul. In his poem “My Sister’s Song,” Yannis Ritsos writes: “I watch the plains / peacefully breathing in / the evening silence / and I greet the souls of things.” Art and love have taught me the value of attention, but also how to observe and to leave myself behind – to be present and to relinquish control. They have also shown me how to return to myself in order to reconnect with the world and the things around me.
I see the sacred in the hand that holds mine to drive away fear, or the one that eases a fever by laying a cool compress upon a hot brow. I see it, too, in two horses drinking water, so wholly absorbed that they seem to breathe the water in as they quench their thirst. For me, the sacred emerges in those moments when the world ceases to be an object and becomes a presence, a presence we can finally enter into dialogue with.
In a village on Tinos
Giorgos Koumendakis, artistic director of the Greek National Opera
In the 13 years I lived in a village on the island of Tinos, my inner shifts were not only painful, but mostly unpredictable too. In the poetic calm of winter mornings, in the island’s springtime bloom, in the nights when the sky seemed to descend, in the wild melody of the raging winds of the sea, the inner processes took on the slow tempo of the surrounding space, of loneliness, of the unexpected influence of faith.
Looking back, I realize that the moments I now recognize as milestones of change seemed fleeting at the time. The decisive influence that my fellow villagers had on my musical identity, but also on my character, seemed like everyday life. Now I know that it was a milestone in the middle age of my life.
When I started going to the village church to help Father Vassilis, I didn’t realize the change within me. On the first Easter – if I remember correctly – in 2005, we gathered to prepare the church. It was just before Holy Week, when we were supposed to do the “changing of clothes” in our church. It was a process that would be completed in different phases. First, it was the mourning clothes of Holy Week, then the ones for the resurrection. My trembling hands and emotions did not prepare me for the inner change I would experience upon completing this unofficial and manual ritual.
In the silence and safety of the small community of people, friends and fellow travelers we were blessed to live with in the village, every movement, every touch, every small seemingly insignificant achievement took on the characteristics of a mental catharsis. A catharsis that came slowly, organically, without anyone having anticipated or requested it. When that first Easter was over and the few visitors left, self-realization came from every pore of my skin, from every opening of my eyes, from every breath.
Through a small offering to our village church, through a new spiritual communication, through the ritual of the island’s nature blossoming, that Easter brought an inner resurrection – not with the fireworks of the celebration, but with the small and silent changes within me.
From the shifts that occurred in my thinking, observation and gaze, a new shift began to emerge in my compositional perception, which gradually brought about a change in my musical language. The “clothes of my composition” also changed along with that very humble and handmade “change of clothes” in the village church.
Just before we gather the flowers from the fields to decorate the Epitaph, just after the decoration of the church for the resurrection service, it is our self that abandons itself to the sacredness of an inner change, far from the grand gestures, empty declarations, and empty meanings of a supposedly modern life.
The memory of Father Vassilis is always alive in me. I owe him what I became within a small community of great people in a village in the Cyclades, all those Easters that followed. This, for me, is the transcendence of life, through the sacredness of people’s faith.
An expansion of the soul
Alekos Kyrarinis, painter
There are moments when an ordinary human being who has stood the test of time encounters their most sacred self – or rather, the closest and most intimate expression of God’s divine presence within them. In such moments, through a quiet interplay of lived experience and prayer, and within a silence guided by the inner necessity of each passing instant, one receives a kind of awareness – what we might call a sense of divine intervention and watchfulness.
A few years ago, I visited Mount Athos. I spent five days at the Gregoriou Monastery, where I was accompanied by an elderly friend and fellow traveler. As the hours of my stay unfolded, a subtle, delicate joy began to take hold of me, releasing me from the usual concerns and burdens of everyday life. I would gaze out at the sea to the south and feel a gentle hesitation about returning to the clamor of the city that awaited me. Even thoughts of my parents and siblings were filled with love, yet touched by a faint sense of reluctance.
Among the monks of the monastery and the lay visitors, there prevailed an atmosphere of harmony, cooperation and sensitivity – a kind of sacred accord rooted in inner coexistence and shared presence.
The days passed beautifully and swiftly. Something had undeniably taken place within me. I recall later, back in Athens after my return, moving among both familiar and unfamiliar faces as though someone had offered a blessing on my behalf. I found myself in a state of sweet bliss and vital connection, as if I constantly held a little candy in my mouth. It became effortless, even while praying, to speak with others and to savor each passing second. I felt a new ease in expressing something meaningful in just a few words, carried by a deep sincerity of heart – an inner landscape visibly renewed and uplifted.
The mind begins to turn toward memories different from those it once believed had defined it. A sequence of moments and events emerges, hinting at a deeper purpose – one that had never fully been summoned into awareness, almost as if it had never quite been articulated before.
Even the desire to draw closer to God and to the Church revealed itself as a gentle and meaningful convergence of moments, circumstances, and human encounters. For, in the end, I would say that “only the moment sanctifies.” In that fleeting instant – when you call upon the Lord and choose the path of virtue – you too become a kind of nectar, a sweetness of joy, like a drop of honey. A “little candy,” as I said before.
I am describing a state in which a space within you is illuminated – decisively, irrevocably. A room, a hall you had never known existed. A realm where the soul is brightened and stands with quiet dignity. This is what I mean by an expansion of the soul – an elevation that occurs even as you bend down to gather at your feet the scattered shavings of an until-recently futile life.
One fraction of time follows another, each contained within the next. Life becomes a continuous unfolding – a synthesis of time, existence and revelation – whose truth quietly prevails over what is trivial or base, though they need not be spoken aloud. For we know: it may be so, or it may not be. Perhaps that is not what matters. What matters is that this lingering sense of humility – as a disposition, as a way of being – returns to include us once more.
Let us not await the Lord only as God, but also as a human presence – one who, in a single moment, through that very instant, can fill our lives with grace and make them lighter.