And the potential to become a monk and priest? That lurked deeper beneath the surface.

Zembillas had some experience as a counselor at Colby, serving as head resident to the flock in the Men's Quad, "kind of a big brother to anyone who needed the help," recalled Noyes, the Malignants' drummer, who lived in the Quad as a freshman. Zembillas spoke Greek at home and served as a Greek Orthodox altar boy and reader. But there were no Greek Orthodox communities near Waterville, and Zembillas was looking for a break with his Greek past. Early on at Colby he took a philosophy course and was first exposed to rational bases for the existence of God. "I hadn't realized in my days as a Midwest kid that there were such things as arguments for the existence of God and that they're not really good," he said. "And so that whole experience was really corrosive to my faith."

But only temporarily.

Zembillas was an inquisitive student, given to folding so many sources into a single question that classmates recall that Ed Kenney, the late professor of English, once, in jest, called him "an argument against a liberal arts education." In Foss dining hall Zembillas led hours-long discussions of everything from R&B to foreign policy. By his senior year, Zembillas had been drawn back to Greek Orthodox religion, not from the approach of rational argument but from the position that religion is a compulsive force, something that, in all traditions, has changed the direction of people's lives. Zembillas became fascinated by "the literature of religious experience" and, after graduation, continued reading.

He was in Boston then, working as principal roaster for The Coffee Connection in Harvard Square, singing with a New Wave band called La Peste. When he had time off he studied St. Basil, St. John of Damascus, Maximus the Confessor–the great thinkers of Eastern tradition. Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan was preaching the doctrine of winnable nuclear war. To Zembillas it was an apocalyptic time, while the spiritual world beckoned through the words of early

Christian monks. "I decided I had to make a radical break. I distributed all my clothes and records and books and all that stuff and just left with a one-way ticket to Mount Athos, the holy mountain."

Zembillas's intention was to stay there, on a rugged peninsula in northern Greece dotted by some 20 monasteries. And he did, sleeping on planks set on sawhorses, spending at least eight hours each day in church, 17 hours on feast days. He knows his Colby friends thought the monk thing was "the Savas flavor of the month."

"I thought he'd be back in three months," Lizza said. "He didn't come back. He didn't come back. He didn't come back. . . . "

Father Savas Zembillas, Chancellor of the Greek Orthodox Archdioceses of America, in the library of the church's Manhattan Offices.

The monks let the young American stay for a couple of months, a stint marked by this exchange: "One monk asked me if I'd made any intellectual errors in my life," Zembillas said. "I asked him what he meant by that. It was a little chapel, three in the morning. There were olive-oil lamps and he's got a beard down to his waist and I'm sitting on a stool and it's freezing and he's whispering, asking me if I've made any intellectual mistakes. And I said, 'What do you mean by that?' He said, 'Have you read any Freud or Marx or Nietzsche? Have you listened to the Beatles?' I was still mourning for John Lennon because he'd just been shot. Just to mention his name would make me cry. I said, 'Well, I'm willing to discuss those ideas but I'm not going to confess that it was a sin to have read them.' He said, "Well, you have a lot to learn, young man.' I said, 'Well, not from you.'"

So from there Zembillas made his way back. First stop was a monastery in Patmos, Greece (where a monk was devastated to learn Lennon had been killed), then on to a Greek Orthodox community in Oxford, England. Zembillas mixed cement and read for several months before leaders there advised that he should go on to get an advanced degree. He did, at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology in Brookline, Mass. While Zembillas said he wanted only a limited degree, he went well beyond that. "There was a need for parish priests that was impressed upon me, and I kind of acknowledged the need and succumbed to the pressure," he said.

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