Where the Temporal and the Eternal Intersect

The Friends of Mount Athos

This report appeared in The Daily Iowan Online Edition, Wednesday, February 9, 2005. Reprinted with permission.

Where the temporal and the eternal intersect

By Beth Herzinger - The Daily Iowan

Published: Wednesday, February 9, 2005

As the director of the UI International Writing Program, Christopher Merrill is responsible for bringing the world to Iowa. But he is far from just an administrative official - he is also an author who has seen the wars and the spirits of the world, experiences he shares with readers in his latest book, Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain.

He will read from the nonfiction work today at Prairie Lights, 15 S. Dubuque St. Although he has written about his experience covering the Balkan wars as a journalist during the 1990s - in The Old Bridge: The Third Balkan War and the Age of the Refugee and Only the Nails Remain: Scenes of the Balkan Wars - Things of the Hidden God explores the spiritual aspects of his journey, as he details the five pilgrimages he made to Mount Athos in Greece to visit ancient monasteries and the self-discoveries he made during his journeys.

Although Merrill said he has always had an interest in spirituality, and even considered attending seminary, his decision to travel to "the Greek equivalent of Mecca" came from the intense fatigue and depression he experienced after a period of grueling war reporting and the news that he was about to become a father for the first time.

"The time I spent covering the war was a very intense period of my life, at times frightening and awful," he said. "Living in a war zone makes you think about last things. When you're writing a book about war, the hard part is surviving."

Only a handful of visitors are allowed on the holy mountain each year, which admits 100 Orthodox visitors and 10 non-Orthodox visitors each day. Merrill hiked between the monasteries on the mountain peninsula, relying, as most visitors do, on the hospitality of the monks, who provide small meals and rooms for travelers. The nature of monastic life presented the poet with two challenges - because women are not allowed on Mount Athos, he would need to describe an experience that half of the world's population would never attain and to find the words to translate a spiritual existence into a literary work.

"I envisioned this as a much quieter kind of book and needed to adopt a different approach," he said. "I learned to look for meaning in smaller encounters of events."

Because of his journalistic work during the war and the forthcoming publication of Things of the Hidden God, Merrill was selected to receive the 2005 Kostas Kyriazis Award, Greece's most prestigious journalism award. The Iowa City resident is only the third American to receive the honor, joining acclaimed writers Tom Friedman and Kati Marton.

He is equally renowned among his colleagues at the UI, who recognize his boundless energy for writing and life that makes him successful in his job and his art. Garrett Stewart, the James O. Freedman Professor of Letters in the English department, chaired the search for a new IWP director that resulted in Merrill's appointment.

"He is a diplomat of American letters," Stewart said about Merrill. "He is just superb at communicating the mission of the program to other state departments and embassies around the world, in part because he listens to what other writers say about their countries, needs, and ambitions. By no means does he portray a one-way street of Americanism."

UI President David Skorton, who oversaw the recruitment for a new IWP director as the vice president for Research at the time, named many admirable qualities that made Merrill the ideal candidate as the UI's ambassador to the world's writers.

"First and foremost, Chris is an excellent writer," Skorton said. "Second, he is very versatile and eclectic as a poet, journalist, and essayist, excelling at all forms. Third, he posses a very good set of people communication skills, which came out immediately when I had the chance to meet him.

"He is very interested in the public good. Anything I have asked him to do above and beyond his own sphere of focus, he has been eager to do. He has been instrumental in re-establishing community confidence that the program is stable."

The down-to-earth author is quite humble about his role in the university, but both Stewart and Skorton acknowledged that the IWP director's job has become increasingly difficult in the aftermath of 9/11 and the emphasis on homeland security.

In addition to Merrill's journalistic publications, the versatile and accomplished author has also published four collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Peter I.B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. His work has been translated into 16 languages.

"For an author to be a poet and a journalist is not a common combination," Stewart said. "Poetry is rooted in emotion, journalism in keen objective observation. But Christopher's gifts are transferable and allow him to cross the board between genres."

Merrill's intense curiosity about the world, his firm grasp of a universal poetic language, and his keen observation as a journalist make Things of the Hidden God a profound work about the nature of spiritual journeys and is a veritable road map of the inner workings of the soul. He is able to tell his story with a quiet passion that transcends religious and national boundaries and becomes a deep meditation on the yearnings of the spirit.

"I hope the book will illustrate the drama of the unseen war, the war of the heart," he said. "This war is every bit as important as physical warfare."

E-mail editor Beth Herzinger at:
b_a_dreamer@hotmail.com