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.<\/p>\n
The importance of touch<\/h3>\n
Danae Sioziou, poet<\/em><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Touch, so often overlooked in Western culture, is also the sense that most intimately connects us to the world around us: from our mother\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Reflecting on the nature of the sacred, the philosopher Simone Weil famously wrote that \u201cattention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Every age redefines its relationship with spirituality and the sacred. In her essay \u201cDecreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete, and Simone Weil Speak of God,\u201d Canadian poet Anne Carson explores how these three women \u2013 living respectively in ancient Greece in the 7th century BC, and in France in the 14th and 20th \u2013 approach the divine through both their writing and their lives, and how they \u201chad the nerve to enter a zone of absolute spiritual daring.\u201d<\/p>\n Each of them underwent an experience of \u201cdecreation,\u201d she argues, using the term introduced by Weil. Carson observes that the bold and unconventional spirituality of these women led society to \u201cpass judgments on the authenticity\u201d of their \u201cways of being.\u201d<\/p>\n Weil has been described as \u201cneurotic, anorectic, pathological, sexually repressed or fake.\u201d Porete was tried and condemned not only as a heretic but also as a \u201cfake woman\u201d (pseudo-mulier), while ancient biographers of Sappho sought to undermine her seriousness by portraying her as leading an unrestrained erotic life.<\/p>\n Yet these women, Carson suggests, \u201cknow what love is\u201d \u2013 that is, \u201cthey know love is the touchstone of a true or false spirituality\u201d \u2013 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.<\/p>\n In poetry \u2013 the art to which I have dedicated myself \u2013 things often have a soul. In his poem \u201cMy Sister\u2019s Song,\u201d Yannis Ritsos writes: \u201cI watch the plains \/ peacefully breathing in \/ the evening silence \/ and I greet the souls of things.\u201d Art and love have taught me the value of attention, but also how to observe and to leave myself behind \u2013 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Giorgos Koumendakis, artistic director of the Greek National Opera<\/em><\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n When I started going to the village church to help Father Vassilis, I didn\u2019t realize the change within me. On the first Easter \u2013 if I remember correctly \u2013 in 2005, we gathered to prepare the church. It was just before Holy Week, when we were supposed to do the \u201cchanging of clothes\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Through a small offering to our village church, through a new spiritual communication, through the ritual of the island\u2019s nature blossoming, that Easter brought an inner resurrection \u2013 not with the fireworks of the celebration, but with the small and silent changes within me.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cclothes of my composition\u201d also changed along with that very humble and handmade \u201cchange of clothes\u201d in the village church.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s faith.<\/p>\n Alekos Kyrarinis, painter<\/em><\/p>\n There are moments when an ordinary human being who has stood the test of time encounters their most sacred self \u2013 or rather, the closest and most intimate expression of God\u2019s 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 \u2013 what we might call a sense of divine intervention and watchfulness.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Among the monks of the monastery and the lay visitors, there prevailed an atmosphere of harmony, cooperation and sensitivity \u2013 a kind of sacred accord rooted in inner coexistence and shared presence.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 an inner landscape visibly renewed and uplifted.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 one that had never fully been summoned into awareness, almost as if it had never quite been articulated before.<\/p>\n 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 \u201conly the moment sanctifies.\u201d In that fleeting instant \u2013 when you call upon the Lord and choose the path of virtue \u2013 you too become a kind of nectar, a sweetness of joy, like a drop of honey. A \u201clittle candy,\u201d as I said before.<\/p>\n I am describing a state in which a space within you is illuminated \u2013 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 \u2013 an elevation that occurs even as you bend down to gather at your feet the scattered shavings of an until-recently futile life.<\/p>\n One fraction of time follows another, each contained within the next. Life becomes a continuous unfolding \u2013 a synthesis of time, existence and revelation \u2013 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 \u2013 as a disposition, as a way of being \u2013 returns to include us once more.<\/p>\n Let us not await the Lord only as God, but also as a human presence \u2013 one who, in a single moment, through that very instant, can fill our lives with grace and make them lighter.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\nIn a village on Tinos<\/h3>\n
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An expansion of the soul<\/h3>\n