Michael N. McGregor - Pure Act (Catholic Practice in North America)

Years had passed since my last visitsince he was aliveand I had no idea how Id feel. His niece had offered me his home, a humble whitewashed haven high above the islands harbor. Id been in it countless times but only once or twice alone, while he was shopping for his cats or strolling by the sea. Hed leave the key out in the lock when he was gone, inviting anyone who happened by to enter. Poised there by the frosted glass, it said that he had nothing to hide. Nothing worth stealing. Nothing he would keep from anyone, even his time. Hed moved to Patmos, called the Holy Isle, in part because people on the island he loved most, Kalymnos, suspected him of hiding things. Of stealing secrets. Of being a spy. Nothing could have hurt him more or been further from the truth. He loved them more than they would knowthe fishermen, the captains, the sponge divers. He had searched for them throughout his lifea society as pure and true as theirsand they meant more to him than anyone, except perhaps his circus family or the man whod been his closest friend, the monk and writer Thomas Merton.

It was Merton who had led me to him in the first place, painting such a vivid portrait of him in his autobiography that I wanted to meet him, not knowing he was living on the same Greek island I was as I read about him. Twenty years had passed since then, years of mentoring, of friendship, decline, then death. How would I feel, I wondered, when I saw the door without the key, the room without his bed, the walls without their quilt of postcards, quotes, and childrens drawings? Acquire the spirit of peace and a thousand souls shall be saved around you, one quote said. Had that spirit lingered there? Or had it died with him?

By the time I reached Kos, the nearest island with an airport, Id been traveling for thirty hours from my home in Oregon. Nowhere had I felt the joy I always felt when I returned. Was it only that he wasnt there? Or that Id stayed away too long? Or that my life had changed too muchthat I was married now, a tenured professor, closer to his age the day we met than to my own back then? As I set my bags down on the hydrofoils floor for the four-hour crossing to Patmos, I felt weary, wondering why Id traveled all that distance, what I hoped to find. I looked out at the stillness of the sea, the bright Greek light I knew from all those mornings all those years ago, and like a swell of sunlit waves, it all came back: the joy and peace of all those visits, all those talks, all those days I climbed those whitewashed stairs and knocked against that glass, waiting with the sightless cats to hear his tender Yes?

It felt like cheating then to take the shorter hydrofoil route, the easy flight from Athens. The ferry ride once seemed the only way to reach his island, a nine-hour journey from the modern world back into the stark simplicity of Patmos. Id sit out on a hard-backed bench to feel the sun or press myself against a wall to keep the wind from whistling through me, and when the day had hardened into night, Id stare into the black ahead until I saw the lights of Chora floating like the orbs of some celestial city, high above whatever cares Id brought along.

Have I grown soft, I wondered as the engines thrummed, accepting comfort in a way he never did? Then the hydrofoil was shooting forward, shuddering on its slender shafts, and I was flying like a bird toward Patmos, winging toward that land we call the past. If only he could be there on the dock, I thought. If only we could climb the stairs together. If only I could go back to that day I read about him, unaware that he was living steps away.

Id gone to Europe that year, 1985, because I had questions. Huge questions. Seemingly unanswerable questions. They were questions about how to live in a world full of pain and violence and need. A world in which few people seemed to think about the way they lived and its effect on others. For the past three years Id been writing about poverty, oppression, and illness in the worlds poorest countries. Id interviewed subsistence farmers in remote areas of Bangladesh, Khmer Rouge refugees on the borders of Cambodia, and children in Nepal and India crippled by diseases long eradicated from developed nations. In a camp surrounded by barb-wire, Id listened to a beautiful Vietnamese refugee describe repeated rapes by Thai pirates. I didnt know what to do with her tears, or with the endless lines of homeless people on Calcuttas streets, or with the orphan girl who took my hand and squeezed it tightly in Thailand, as if a touch could make up for the sight shed lost to disease.

From reading everything I could about the causes of entrenched poverty and how the Third World came to be, Id learned that people werent poor because disease or drought alone had devastated them or because they had too many children. They were poor because history had made them poor or kept them poor while others grew rich. They were poor because the world was arranged the way it was, with structures in place that kept the wealthy nations wealthy. America was part of the problem, but so was Europe. Most of the history I read, in fact, was a history of European occupation, European extraction of natural resources, European imposition of cash-crop farming and enslavement or virtual enslavement of native populations.