village sunday

photo by sophie


I arrived at the church a little late, sat towards the back, directly, as my luck would have it, in the priest’s line of sight. “You’ve got a week,” he was saying, “before the start of Lent. You should think carefully now, and spend this time with your conscience, because the devil is always waiting. You may think 40 days is a long time to be deprived, but that’s nothing in the face of eternal hell.”

He’s a likeable guy. He must be all of twenty. And he’s not only young. He’s also a foreigner, Bulgarian. In the village, foreigners are either loved or reviled. Americans are loved, remembered fondly for the help they and they alone gave the village after the Germans left it in a ruin of ash. But Bulgarians, Albanians, these people could go either way. It’s an agricultural area, and somebody’s got to do the hard work.

The priest is tall, imposing but gangly, and still soft somehow, young. He knows the liturgy, but even I can detect a few mistakes in the language.

I’ve just finished reading Margaret Mead’s autobiography, Blackberry Winter. She must have been a force of nature, but still, she could go to remote and unheard of villages, and within three months, not only learn the language from scratch but also be so immersed in it and the culture as to explain it all in a best-selling book in a matter of months. It’s been a year since I started spending a lot of time in the village, and, loved or hated, I am still as strange to it as it is to me.

After the service, the priest, along with everyone else, came over to the hotel for coffee and cookies. After a lot of hand-shaking, which made it impossible for me to even think about eating the cookies, I made a minor faux pas, shaking the hand of the priest instead of kissing it. I felt justified, though, when I heard him say to the widow, “It’s been a year, and I know it’s difficult, but only in the church, only in the church, can you find comfort.”

There was a whole village around her, and a whole world around the village, the sea to the south and a mountainous ridge, many, to the north. There is comfort everywhere, though it may not look like much. I went up those mountains til my stomach turned inside out. On the way back down, the dirt road in a whirl of dust, I looked forward to lunch, and the people who had made it, with me in mind.