Aghdgoma - Easter!

Aghdgoma -Easter!
05-01-05

I’ve been reading about Baptism recently. In the old Christian world, Baptism traditionally was connected with the Easter service, and people would prepare for Baptism during Great Lent.

After my incredible experiences in Betania Monastery at the beginning of Holy Week, I decided to try to spend my first Orthodox Easter back in the Monastery. Father Iacobi was very excited at my offer to bring chanters to the service, so with Luarsab’s help, we arranged to come back with our chanting friends Mamuka and Avtandil.

The service began at 11:30pm on Saturday night and lasted until the minutes before sunrise, Easter Morning. Even given it’s remote location, there were at least 150 people attending the all night vigil services in the Monastery.

The service began with the priest censing the congregation with an insense censor, then all the icons were taken off the walls, and Luarsab, Avto, and I began chanting Aghdgomasa Shensa: “To your Resurrection Lord we honor you and praise you. Let us here on Earth be worthy to sing your praises!”

Following the priests, we walked outside and circled the entire church three times in the rainy gloom, singing continuously as the congregation followed. When we came to the doors, the priest knocked and we sang the Resurrection hymn, “Christ is Risen!”
The doors opened and we entered the church, the old stones glowing in the faint glow of candles, the faces of worn frescoes peering down at us. We kept singing. When the priest came out from the iconostasis with the censor, we stopped and he said again, Kriste Aghsdga, ‘Christ is Risen!’ Everyone roared back, Cheshmaritad, ‘In Truth he is Risen!’ making me jump right out of my shoes in the shock of the communal response.

The service continued for many hours. We sang chant after chant to the glow of the kerosene lamp attached to the front of our podium, the 13th century fresco of Queen Tamar looking down on us. The acoustics were so warm that our three voices filled the room and in the excitement palpable among the faithful, we were never cold.

Father Theodore stood with us, and in a whisper, excitedly explained to me what was happening and how the rituals differed slightly from the other Orthodox monasteries that he had lived in. I gave a confession in english, expressing in my own words my difficulties with judging others, self-doubt, and lack of patience. I took communion and felt other-worldly.

While in Betania Monastery the entire service seemed somehow normal, but in retrospect, taking communion from an old toothless priest in a 12th century monastery in the middle of the night in the middle of the forest in the Republic of Georgia, having sung medieval three-voiced chants at the foot of historic frescoes for four hours without drinking any water, well... there’s no way to put it really. Where the heck am I?!

We finished around 5am, the Monastery still shrouded in night. Mamuka led us in another fifteen minutes of prayers in the candlelight, then Luarsab took a small group of us out to the graves of two sainted monks who had lived here as caretakers for Betania Monastery during the most difficult communist period, 1920-1960. On their graves at the west end of the church, two small lanterns illuminated freshly carved letters in Old Georgian saying, Kriste Aghsdga - ‘Christ is Risen!’ We sang the chant of this inscription, and I listened as Luarsab and the old priest said moving words dedicated to the two saints.

Luarsab confided he has a photo of these two monks standing exactly where we stood, at the head of their future gravesites. Can time pass so quickly? Our lifetimes are only a blink of space. What different circumstances we live in now than then. At that time, the monks were secluded, almost completely alone in the world, now, 150 people come for midnight services and foreigners sing chants.

A supra was laid out on long tables for one hundred people. Father Iacobi was Tamada, and as he said his first toast, a hint of pink glowed down the valley. The church was a pitchblack silouette against a gradually graying sky. I was delirious with hunger, tiredness, and the kind of indescribable over/under-oxygenated feeling one gets from singing for many hours. Plus the vocal chords were hurting. But they served strong wine, cheese! meat! so we sang two or three Mravalzhamiers for the occasion.

Suddenly the church was visible and the lawn was green, the gray overcast light appearing miraculously and without announcement. When I tried to take a picture, my camera read that it was still dark out, but to my eyes, each dewdrop was in sharp detail, my vision somehow augmented in the silvery new dawn light.

We took red eggs in hand, and cracked them one against the other, whoever’s broke, he must give it away to someone else. There is a story: ‘A saint, holding an egg, went to the Roman Emperor and said, ‘Christ is Risen!’ The Emperor replied, just as that egg you’re holding is white and not red, so it is impossible for a man to come back from the dead. At that moment the egg turned red...!’ But I can’t help thinking there must be an older fertility ritual involved in the red egg at Eastertime story. Also, I wondered, did the Emperor then try to crack the egg to make sure it was real, adding more legitimacy to our tradition of cracking the eggs?

The chanters were the last ones at the supra table, the exhausted happiness of our all night service still beaming from our faces. Luarsab said he had not been so happy in a long time. As usual at amazing moments in my life, I was in a half-daze, half-excarnated into another plane, but so it is.

Happy Easter!