I was recently recommended the book ‘The Way of the Pilgrim’. This is translated from the Russian by R. M. French, and tells the account of an unknown wandering pilgrim in the mid- nineteenth century. He travels through Russia and Siberia going from one holy place to another in his search of the way to use the Jesus prayer: ‘to pray without ceasing’.
The Introduction warns us against trying to copy the life of the pilgrim – indeed it would be nearly impossible to replicate in this 21st century, but we are invited through the pilgrim’s story to pursue true prayer and to engage in the Jesus prayer: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me’.
In his wanderings the pilgrim eventually learns this as interior prayer from a kindly old ‘starets’- a spiritual director and religious teacher in the Eastern Orthodox Church. The old teacher shows the pilgrim by using teachings from ‘The Philokalia’ – a collection of texts from spiritual masters between the 4th and 15th centuries. The pilgrim is to begin by imagining looking into their own heart, and inwardly say while breathing out the Jesus prayer, initially by moving the lips or simply in the mind. The starets tells the pilgrim to always come back to talk with him as such an inward process needs guidance. The pilgrim gradually increases the number of times he says the Jesus prayer in the day moving from his mind, into the throat, and down into the heart. The old teacher dies and the pilgrim continues at times in bliss, and in other times dealing with different sometimes challenging encounters. Gaining a copy of ‘The Philokalia’ the pilgrim begins to understand how the constant praying deep in his heart changes his consciousness and amongst other things opens up creation:
‘The trees, the grass, the birds, the earth, the air, the light seemed to be telling me that they … witnessed to the love of God … that all things prayed to God and sang His praise. … I saw the means by which converse could be held with God’s creatures.’
Without his previous teacher, the pilgrim soon feels lost in his reading of the old texts, and so prays deeply for help. When he sleeps, he dreams that he is with the old teacher again who then helps by showing what order the pilgrim needs to read the book, particularly advising that he turns to one part to begin with.
‘In my dream I held the book in my hands and began to look for the passage, but I was quite unable to find it. Then he [the teacher] turned over a few pages himself and said “Here it is, I will mark it for you.” He picked up a piece of charcoal from the ground and made a mark in the margin.’
When the pilgrim wakes the book is open at the very page, and in the margin a charcoal mark just as in the dream.
‘Even the piece of charcoal itself was lying beside the book! I looked in astonishment, for I remembered clearly the book was not there the evening before, that it had been put shut, under my pillow, and also, I was quite certain that before there had been nothing where now I saw the charcoal mark.
It was this that made me sure of the truth of my dream, and that my revered master of blessed memory was pleasing to God.’