Way of a Pilgrim

The Way of a Pilgrim and The Pilgrim Continues His Way by Anonymous, translated by RM French, 224 pages

Sometime in the 1850s, an anonymous Russian peasant attending Divine Liturgy heard St Paul's injunction to "pray without ceasing" and went in quest of a method to put it into practice.  In time, he found this in hesychasm - the practice of praying, with every breath, the Jesus Prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me."  The purported record of his journeys, both physical and spiritual, was supposedly discovered some time later in a monastic library, and circulated widely among Russian monks before being discovered by the outside world.

In the opening passages of this memoir, the author rejects the sound advice of a variety of holy men on growth in the spiritual life, as none of them are able to offer him a concrete technique to accomplish his specific goal of living in a state of perpetual prayer.  This is the danger of the book - it is easy to ignore the repeated insistence on the necessity of spiritual direction and seize upon hesychasm as a shortcut or "simple trick to grow closer to God".  This danger is heightened by the apparent speed of this pilgrim's progress, but will be avoided by the careful reader.  Such a reader is also likely to notice that the sequel is very different in style and tone from the original, lending credence to the claim that one or both is a pious fable rather than a genuine memoir.  This in no wise detracts from a genuinely moving story of faith and growth in holiness.