Day 20[-26]: Of Past and Present Greeces
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
-Rumi
"But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found."
-Luke 15:32
I’m sitting at a picnic bench on the Greek Bible College campus. The hum of cicadas surrounds me, and sparrows chirp in the trees overhead. A breeze breaks through the college’s lush greenery, making the outdoors a viable and enjoyable option even in this Grecian summertime. This pocket of Athenian suburb has become a refuge for me, evoking sighs of “home, sweet home” whenever our troop returns from adventures to Athens or Korinth (or Poros, Evia, Epidavros, Nafplio). But today, even this idyllic place of rest and refuge doesn’t sit right. I feel dislodged, unsettled. Hundreds of miles away from Pikermi, sailing 35,000 feet above terra firma, is a plane we were supposed to board.
I’ve spent the night in airports before, so I’m aware things could be much worse than this. We could still be under the garish fluorescent lights of Athens International Airport, a bewildered herd of almost-passengers staring off into space or lining up for more of Hannah’s spontaneous back scratches, wordlessly wondering, “Why does home feel especially far away right now?”
Since we couldn’t check in at the airport, many of us have checked out. A lost child and professional dissociator myself, I broke off from the group as soon as I could and stress-napped in the basement lounge. As I come to again, I remind myself of Henri Nouwen’s words, that life begins at moments of interruption. That helps a little, but the sense of displacement lingers.
I didn’t want to leave Greece, but I was prepared to—so prepared to leave that it’s been hard to tolerate a deviation from the sequence of events I was expecting. I was starting to think homeward thoughts: the responsibilities that await me in West Palm and ways to integrate the eureka moments I’ve had here in Greece into my daily rhythms. I was envisioning where in my yard I could plant fig, olive, and lemon trees, mapping out where to start a jasmine hedge. I was pondering what saying goodbye to this wonderful, thrown-together community I’ve come to care for will feel like at the Orlando airport. We had already done a round of cathartic, heart-felt goodbyes with Saint Dominic and the good people of GBC. Immediately returning to them mocks the poignant farewells and disrupts the seamless closure process I'd been anxiously trying to curate.
For me (and no doubt for many others), life’s in-betweens are often a struggle. So are goodbyes. I’ve been bracing for the separation, trying to minimize the impact. This hiccup in the plan is a reminder that life is messy despite my best attempts to unmessify it. I can’t "technique" or "life hack" my way out of sadness or missing people.
I want to step back from the whiplash of the day—partly because younger parts of me are confused and sad and I’m not sure what to tell them, but also because this trip has been a meaningful check-in point for me, and I don’t want a down-in-the-grumps moment to color my entire blog post.
As I ponder what this trip has meant to me, I keep returning to a moment in Poros, at the Temple to Poseidon. It was the first time this trip that I felt truly alone, but it was a refreshing kind of solitude: a wholly and holy aloneness. Not a soul for a miles—or at least that’s how it felt in that remote corner of the island. In the deafening stillness of the sanctuary, far above the whisper of the waves, with only ants and ancient rubble to bear witness,
I danced.
I sang.
I celebrated.
[random French couple walks by, then leaves]
I danced some more.
I grinned.
I cried tears of gratitude.
It’s been impossible to think about this second trip without thinking about the first and everything that has happened in the intervening year. It felt like a birthday of sorts—a “rebirth day” that I was honoring. Greece last year initiated in me a season of painful shedding. It was three weeks of grief, rage, and confrontation—with others and especially with myself. I will never forget the moment I realized that my parents’ faith could not possibly become my own (turns out God doesn’t have grandchildren—just children). I came late to the mess hall, eyes already pink and puffy from weeping on the bathroom floor. I plunked myself down at a table full of fellow students and unapologetically drenched my moussaka in tears. Didn’t care. I’m sure the apricots were sweet as always, but that day they tasted bitter.
The year between the “Greeces” was a time of dying to old things that were no longer helping me. Within weeks of returning from Greece last year, I committed to weekly therapy, left a church that was harming me more than it was helping me, and broke up with the woman I was hoping to marry. It was a lonely summer, but there on that mountaintop in Poros, in a place where people for centuries brought their praise and longings, I flashed a knowing smile at a year’s worth of pain. It spread into a grin as I celebrated how far I have come since then. My inner child needed to know how proud I am of him. Like the father in Luke 15, we had to celebrate my movement along the journey home. I had to mark the moment.
As eager as I was to mark the moment, the moment seemed just as intent on marking me: I stepped back onto a rebar spike in the middle of the sanctuary. When people asked about my torn-up leg, I told them I’d gotten into a scrap with Poseidon on his holy hill. There is more truth in the joke than I realized. It’s been an intense wrestle with divinity for a while now. Many crucial existential trailheads began in Greece last year. They all came bubbling up from my inner depths, awakened enough to poke above the threshold of consciousness. I came down the mountain limping, but somehow that felt fitting. (Update: the scar's coming along nicely 👌)
Returning to Greece was a reminder of the joy and relief of being surrounded by the beauty of Greece and like-hearted community. Most of my traveling companions were strangers to me three weeks ago. In such a short time, kindredness has grown up between us. As I picture the faces of these people I’ve been with, I see a group dedicated to becoming free and committed to learning the art of being with people well.
And so, my dear SEU-ligans and good guests, I struggle with goodbyes, but I have a hunch that this is more of a ‘see you later’ anyway.
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