As-if or As-Is: A Cretan Encounter

On a quest for the skull we enter Aghios Titos, sit on a back bench in the main chamber and survey the interior. In the center a wagon-wheel chandelier of filigreed olive wood, inset with foot-high stained-glass portraits of saints, topped by as-yet unlit (electric) candles. Filigreed also the wooden façade at the front of the church bearing icons and wall paintings of multiple saints – with Titos and Pavlos: Nikólaos, Tabitha, Petros, and others.

Just in from the street, a shaved-bald tanned man gathers and shapes the energies of the room with long fingers. White t-shirt and jeans, sandals. Slender, tall. Balletic movements. Shamanistic. It’s not protocol, I know, but it is beautiful. Tourists click cameras. I step closer to view a small icon prominently displayed on a podium – long-bearded Titus and dome-headed Paul. Chiaroscuro paintings on walls all around the room, some with heavily silvered hands and silvered halo crowns. Inaccessible upper-story loaded with icons also. Is the skull up there, or behind the façade, removed from public view to be displayed only on high holy days? Or only available any time to eminences, ecclesiastical and otherwise?

As we begin to leave, my beloved Agapi notes a sign in the foyer pointing to a small side chapel. The skull is in there, inside a dazzling encasement shaped like a diving helmet, a reliquary of gold and jewels and miniature saints’ portraits, and that encased in a glass globe. An opening in the top of the helmet (actually representing an Orthodox miter) allows a glimpse of the sutured bone. Energy emanates, powerful, frightening. We both feel it. I feel about to faint. It is as if my heart is beating fast, but isn’t. It is as if my breath has been knocked out of me, but hasn’t. What makes it be what it is?

There is no denying the effect it has on us. Standing there, looking at the shrine, with its reliquary, its aura arcing inside the glass, I the non-theist have a powerful urge to make the sign of the cross. Not in veneration as many are doing, but as a kind of protection against the object, against what I am feeling. It is way too powerful for my mere-human being.

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The saint Titos (Titus) was born in the 1st Century A.D., died in 96 or 107 A.D. at Gortyna, Crete, aged 94. Some pinpoint the date he was appointed bishop of Crete by Pavlos (Paul) as 57 A.D., others say 65 A.D. Titos was a gentile originally from Antioch (some disagree) or from Corinth (others disagree) or Crete or Cyprus. He was present at the Crucifixion, or only among the Cretans during Pentecost, or his first visit to the Holy Land was during the Council of Jerusalem (Apostolic Synod) recorded in Acts. He appears to have been Paul’s fixer, smoothing things over, a peace-maker. Pax Kritika.

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Several weeks later we are in Iraklion again. I walk toward Aghios Titos (once a mosque that was once a church, now a church again) on my own. Agapi, unwilling to experience that feeling again, waits in the square.  Repulsion-attraction, permission-prohibition, yes-no. I let the saint decide and enter as if I have decided. I go into the side chapel immediately, sit on a bench, commune in Quaker silence with the saint. The hair-on-end weirdness does not cease for a second.

Believers come and go, performing various genuflections, touching lips to the glass cover surrounding the jeweled helmet that contains the skull, conducting other rituals. One person does something with the holy water, another squeezes into the side of the shrine to kiss the glass there – germ-aware, I suppose. No one stays long. It is as if they have come merely to say hello to St. Titus. For me, “transcendence” does not describe it – for the spirit, the power, is awfully present, in the here and now, and of a high pitch. An energy, a magic, a presence, frightening, a heightening of sensation and mentation. Is it the saint after all?

Is it not human energy invested thousands of times into the relic through veneration to be returned to whoever stands before it? That is my thesis, that is my thought.

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Titos’ place of power, Gortyna, was the first center of Christians in Crete, under the Romans. The basilica where he served as bishop burned to the ground in 300-400 A.D. Then the appellation Aghios Titos was given the stone structure in the middle of Doric Gortys. The Byzantines chased out the Arabs who had come from Spain, and who had ruled from 824 A.D. The cathedral in Iraklion was built in 961 A.D. Icons and Titos’ remains were transferred there and remained in that church until 1669, when the skull was transferred to Venice as the Ottoman Turks came in to claim Crete from the Venetians. In 1966, the skull was returned to Iraklion.

Film (b & w):

The women gather, the priests, the soldiers gather – officials and priests walk along the tarmac. The plane has landed, propellers turning. A uniformed man or woman waves it in. The Orthodox bishop comes down the staircase first. The Catholic follows with the skull in its jeweled encasement, carefully picking his way, watching the steps. The Catholic bishop holds it by the wooden base, fingers spread widely. Pictures are taken under the wing. The police are near. The military trumpets play, their band leader salutes, the procession moves on to the parking lot. Now the relic sits in an open car, not quite on the lap of the Catholic bishop, kind of on the back of the seat in front. Believers cross themselves all along the route. The group is now inside the church. Orthodox priests kiss the glass that englobes the skull and its helmet. As do men in suits and boys in cardigan sweaters. Kiss, kiss. 1966.

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In bed or on the balcony of the apartment we are renting in the village of Avdou Pediados, I have only to recall the feeling to have it. The state of hyper-awareness returns and with it a sense of being gifted with compassion for a lost world.

So, today I attempt to find the vocabulary to describe the experience. I look it up, actually get directed to, side-tracked to, “The Incorruptibles,” entire bodies of saints, but also skulls, hearts, tongues, hands, etc., that purportedly have not decayed, or at least have retained skin, hair, and “flexibility” to the point of being recognizable as individuals.  The guardians of the relics, nuns and the like, do openly admit that acids and preservatives have been used, even wax, to augment the state of incorruptibility. The corpse of Mary Magdalene in one church has blackened and hardened over time to the point of further corruptibility being unlikely. Soot, incense, and candle vapors have coated her to a rich ebony.

But back to Titos. Power Object is what comes closest in my mind as to what that relic might be – imbued with the desires, thoughts, prayers, respect (i.e., veneration), imagination, and the holy energy of thousands upon thousands of believers, tourists, janitors, etc. Yet, in my meditations, I have come to the belief it is no longer the object itself, or at least the object alone, that creates the effect on entering the chapel. The entire space is filled with Titos, palpable, transformative.

Science acknowledges nothing that is not measurable and material. Neuroscience, especially, offers that there is a location in the brain where spiritual experience manifests or at least has been recorded, based on feedback from volunteers and scans. It is in the parietal cortex, says one study. Yet, another study places that experience in the thalamus/hippocampus area– and another makes a (rational) distinction between transcendence through focused meditation and ecstatic forms such as speaking in tongues (not found to be connected to the language centers of the brain, by the way), or trance states achieved through dancing and/or drumming. None of these of which was our experience, by the way – an instant, spontaneous, overwhelming sense there was a power in the room. How do you measure experiences described/considered as spiritual when there are so many variables? Nobody knows anything, I say to Agapi. She agrees.

Here I might say there are two etymologies suggested for the word “hallucination.” One is “wandering in the mind” and the other is “unable to face the light.”

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In the biblical Book of Titus, Paul tasks the apostle to rebuke the elders and reorganize the bishopric:

For there are many rebellious men, empty talkers and deceivers... One of themselves, a prophet of their own said: ‘Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.’ The testimony is true.  For this reason, reprove them severely so that they may be sound in the faith...

This statement about Cretans being liars is credited to Epimenides of Knossos, Crete, who lived around the 6th or 7th century B.C. It is known, and was probably known to Paul, as the Epimenides Paradox, that is, this Cretan saying Cretans are liars could not be believed and so Cretans must typically be telling the truth and so on.

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So, then an interesting discovery, suggesting the Book of Titus itself may have been a product of deceit:

There is a growing consensus that the Pastoral Epistles (1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus) were not authored by Paul. That the diction and vocabulary differ markedly from the undisputed Pauline epistles and that the mode of argument seems to reflect a more authoritarian position of Right (i.e., established) Doctrine as opposed to Paul’s point-by-point wrestling with an adversary’s position.

One blogger, Kenton Sparks, (Cognitive Discopants is the site) notes that Paul in the undisputed letters also has a more favorable attitude to the role of women in religious life. Women there can be apostles and they can preach. In the Pastoral Epistles, they are encouraged to focus on the home and domestic life and to worship “in silence.”

Sparks suggests the Jewish/Christian authors of these texts were appeasing their Greco-Roman hosts, who likely found Paul’s (earlier) acceptance of women in leadership roles as scandalous and a threat to their way of life.

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So, since that second visit I had no opportunity to return to the cathedral. During our few remaining weeks in Crete, before heading back to the States, I could still conjure up that feeling-sensation of being present with Titos. I could go through the whole process again, picture myself approaching across the square to the church, entering, peeking into the main chamber, then turning right into the small chapel on the way out. As I would figuratively step across the threshold, I would feel the energy hit again. I would see the reliquary to the right and sit on the bench in my imagination as I had in fact. And I would talk to the saint. His tone always reassuring and accepting, tinged with a sly humor. The conversation in no way master-disciple but that of friends. At times, I would float into becoming him, observing the goings on from the p.o.v. of the shrine.

As we returned to the States in the airplane, I kind of knew that interaction was at an end. He belonged in Crete, his spirit quite place-based. One night only, back home, I half-dreamt of the shrine as an entire room in itself. A gazebo-like space with four pillars holding up a glass domed roof.

Now I can imagine but not conjure that awe-filled feeling. I remember the people entering the chapel and performing the obeisance, planting their lips on the glass, lighting the candles, making the signs, bending their knees, touching the ground before the shrine. In the side-chapel of Aghios Titos, I had felt the saint thinking, something like thought in the sutured skull under the lights, visible through the top of the helmet, thinking: poor idolaters, they are missing the essence. Was I? It was too big of an experience to envelop in religious signing and signaling. Were they not sincere? Yes, but a sit-down with the presence would’ve benefited them so much. Agapi said I was glowing when I exited the cathedral that second time. At one point, I imagined the four legs of the shrine lifting and galloping away. What happened? What did I experience?