the monastic life

What do you do after a week of intensive tutor-hunting produces no useful results? Personally, I get ice cream, buy new clothes, and repeat to myself Maria's words of consolation to Liesl in The Sound of Music: "Well, you cry a little. And then you wait for the sun to come out. It always does." It works best if you can really hear Julie Andrews' voice intone on the "ALWAYS."

This time, though, I decided that more drastic measures were (also) called for. The solution? Fleeing to a desert monastery to spend a night literally getting away from it all.

The monastery is Deir Mar Musa, about 80 km NNE of Damascus. You can take services to get most of the way there, then hike the remaining 1.5 km steeply uphill to the monastery's rocky perch. Here is a view from the "new" wing back to the main building:

The original monastery dates back to the 11th Century. It has been inhabited by a variety of denominations over time, and is currently occupied by a small group of Roman-ish Catholics (as opposed to Orthodox). Major renovations have been done in the last 25 years, under the guidance of an Italian priest/archaeologist who was unfortunately in Turkey during my visit. The church is particularly beautifully restored; these frescos are from the 12th Century:

I went to mass the evening I arrived. A Catholic liturgy, but in Arabic, with a combination of group and individual readings, silent meditation, and a theological/social discussion (?) Everyone sits on the floor, leaning against cushions, and most of the service is entirely candlelit.

Visitors can stay at the monastery for free/donations. The room I was in could be entered by a door or by window and ladder! The following pic is similar to the view from my room and shows how supplies are sent up from the valley. No, I don't think they'd let tourists take the quick route back down!

Meals are also communal and available to residents and all comers; both groups include a mix of Western and Arab tourists and locals. Breakfast and dinner are basically the same meal: olives, tomatoes and cucumbers, hummus, leben, cheese from the monastery's goats, and of course bread and tea.

I got lots of french and arabic practice during my visit. But staying at the monastery isn't all contemplation and conversation; if you're staying, you're expected to also do some work, contributing to the community. I joined a group that got dispatched to the monastery's (quite impressive) library. Our task: clean the books.

This involved taking each book of the shelf, dusting it, and returning it to its place, keeping the desert at bay for a bit longer. It was really something to realize, first, that this process would be repeated ad infinitum, until each of the volumes finally and inevitably disintegrated and, second, to find myself engaged in the same activity that monks had been doing since the Middle Ages: preserving books. We had an advantage over the monks, though: Bach, pumped in through the library iMac. "Air on a G String" turns out to be great music to dust books to. Who knew? Although I have to say that after 2 hours, I was happy to break for tea.