When Maine’s apple trees began to bloom in 1991, Kyriacos Markides was across the globe, waist-deep in research on lay healers and mystics. His passion had been ignited when he witnessed miraculous “healings” on previous travels.

This time, the University of Maine sociology professor was on sabbatical in Cyprus, and his personal and academic attention was about to be refocused.

“If you really want to meet saints,” a friend from Athens had challenged him, “come with me to Mount Athos.”

Without expectation or intent, Markides made the journey to the 30-by-10-mile Greek island that is inaccessible to the public and inhabited by about 2,000 monks and hermits. He would later refer to it as a Christian Tibet. Father Maximos was there: the first monk Markides met at the first monastery he visited.

“And something just clicked,” Markides said with a broad smile and welcoming eyes in a recent interview at his office in Orono. “It was when I met him and I started talking to him that I realized that there is a whole book here, and instead of one book, it became three.”

Father Maximos shed light on a mystical tradition in Orthodox Christianity that Markides had assumed existed only in Eastern religions – a value on intuitive, nonmaterialistic knowledge of reality.

This fall, Markides, 63, published “Gifts of the Desert: The Forgotten Path of Christian Spirituality,” the third book in the trilogy. It is an anecdotal chronicle of conversations between Father Maximos and a group of spiritual students on an array of topics such as anger without sin, near-death experiences and faith as a healer.

The book is a follow-up to 2001’s “The Mountain of Silence: A Search for Orthodox Spirituality,” in which Father Maximos played a key role.

At their first meeting, Father Maximos was in his early 30s; Markides was in his late 40s. An attractive, congenial man in a long black robe and with a black beard, Father Maximos asked Markides, “‘Are you going to take Communion on Sunday?’ And I said to him, ‘Why not, sure.'”

When Father Maximos, who was named an elder at age 30, asked if the professor was interested in attending confession, the response was more hesitant. “I said, ‘Father, we’ll see,'” Markides remembered. After all, the professor

hadn’t stepped inside a confessional since he was a 12-year-old growing up Greek Orthodox in Cyprus.

But later at the church, Markides felt a tug at his arm. As the professor turned around, the father said, “Come on, your time has come,” and Markides thought, “Oh, my God, what am I getting into?” An hour later, when the confession had ended, Markides thought, “He had some unusual, uncommon wisdom, that man.”

The men would spend time during the remainder of Markides’ sabbatical taking mountain walks to discuss theology and philosophy, and over the next decade, they kept in touch. Markides visited Mount Athos frequently.

From a visit in the summer of 2003 came revelations on specific themes, such as how to distinguish mental illness from demonic possession, and the broader project of how to see God apart from worldly influences, that Markides would eventually include in “Gifts.” A theme in the book is the abandonment of the material world and the five senses in order to experience spirituality through an intuitive relationship with God.

The juxtaposition of Christianity with this kind of spirituality stunned Markides. Mysticism – the understanding of spiritual realities beyond perception or intellect – he expected in Eastern faiths such as Hinduism.

Mysticism in Buddhist worship, sure. But in Orthodox Christianity?

“What I have discovered,” Markides said, “is that those things that many people are searching the Himalayas and India for, they are also found right in the Judeo-Christian spiritual legacy.”

At least one reader is following Markides’ vision. Father Maximos, wrote an anonymous reviewer on Amazon.com, “provides the insights into the Christian tradition that most of us have never received in our catechism, Protestant or Catholic.”

After his journeys to the American Southwest, Cyprus and Greece, Markides returned to “the quiet of Maine” to process the experience and assemble his notebooks-full of observations and copied conversations into a book of “academic standards.” He crafted the chapters from his small, dimly lit office overlooking a small grove of bare trees on the second floor of Fernald Hall at UMaine in Orono and at his home in Stillwater.

The book was written in a travelogue style, Markides said, to make the heavy ideas within its pages more easily digestible to casual readers.

As Markides considered the day-to-day existence of Americans, reflecting on the society’s material fixation, his wide grin pursed. “I believe we need to incorporate into our culture the wisdom of the great mystics of all the great religions if we are to survive. I think by reducing all of reality to the material level, we are heading toward disaster.”

But it is the very nature of American society that gives Markides hope, as well. This kind of worship, he writes in “Gifts of the Desert,” “could not have emerged and taken root at any other period in American history. The uniqueness of contemporary America may very well lie in its considerable tolerance, diversity and openness.”

“Gifts of the Desert: The Forgotten Path of Christian Spirituality” by Kyriacos

C. Markides, published by Doubleday/Random House, can be purchased at the University of Maine Bookstore, Borders and Amazon.com. Tracy Collins can be reached at collinstb@gmail.com.