The Way of the Pilgrim
A Review for Paul Kingsnorth's Scriptorium book club series
[ This post was occasioned by Paul Kingsnorth’s Scriptorium book club on his blog, The Abbey of Misrule. I enjoyed meeting Paul last October, and I highly suggest his novel Alexandria. ]
For a pure and satisfying prayer one should choose simple but powerful words and then repeat them frequently.
Coming Upon the Way
Whenever someone recommends a work as a “spiritual classic,” I have a hard time concealing my sneer. For the past several decades, book marketers have slapped that title on so many different kinds of books that it means almost nothing now: Eastern religions, Christian lifestyle, metaphysics, psychology, self-help, productivity, and business books can all be considered “spiritual classics.” The most egregious abuse comes when publishers agnostically anthologize selections from all of these sources together into a cursory heap of platitudes that could have been said by anyone, at any time, about anything.
On the other hand, there is an older tradition of devotional and doctrinal works that have been considered “spiritual classics” longer than we’ve had that name for them. Rather than yielding an amorphous syncretism of various traditions or trends, these titles sometimes err in the opposite extreme. In this more devout mode, one might find some didactic narrator who descends from some serene and ethereal empyrean to clearly exposit some pious, religious principles in as dogmatically correct manner as he can muster for the vulgar readers down below. People often describe feeling “consoled,” “comforted,” or occasionally even “edified” by such works. These books rarely say anything wrong, and coincidentally rarely say anything interesting.
If Eastern Orthodox Christianity has ever had something that could be called a “spiritual classic,” The Way of the Pilgrim would surely be it. This recounting of one 19th Century Russian peasant’s pilgrimage throughout his country and into his own heart has been read by countless people—both inside of its Orthodox tradition and outside of it: Buddhists, Hindus, Catholics and Protestants, agnostics, and secular meditators all might treasure the Pilgrim even more than his own Orthodox brethren. Many like myself, now find ourselves inside of Orthodoxy because we once stumbled upon this book and the Pilgrim’s introduction to the Jesus Prayer and Orthodox spirituality. With such a wide appeal, can the Pilgrim avoid the pitfalls that come with being considered a spiritual classic?
Tools for the Way
By the grace of God I am a Christian, by my deeds a great sinner, and by my calling a homeless wanderer of humblest origin, roaming from place to place. My possessions consist of a knapsack with dry crusts of breast on my back and in my bosom the Holy Bible. That is all!
That is all. From the opening paragraph, the Pilgrim strikes us with his simplicity; his whole life is oriented by his single-minded pursuit to answer the question: “How does one pray without ceasing?” He is so consumed with this question that all the events in his life—the misfortunes that befall him, the hospitality he enjoys, the conversations he has—they all radiate from and return to this point: union with God through perpetual prayer. The pray which holds this story and his life together is the Jesus Prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner. Even if he were robbed of his knapsack, his Bible, and his dry crusts of bread, he would still have his prayer. And that is all he needs.
Perhaps the greatest gift in this book is the Pilgrim’s infectious sincerity and tenacity. Through this total “willing of the one thing,” he is a saint, at least in the Kierkegaardian sense. One cannot help but follow our dogged mendicant as he begs the world to give him the prayer which will sustain him; even vicariously, we hope the alms he receives might be given to us as well.
But before setting out on his pilgrimage into the Prayer of the Heart, his elder gives him a copy of the Philokalia and a prayer rope. These two vital tools aid in the practice of hesychasm or stilling the mind and passions for contemplation and union with God. When I first read this story in the early 2000’s, these were rare, exotic, and frankly almost mythical objects. Now, with the prevalence of videos, articles, and vendors online these days, I’m not sure if they can exert the same mysterious attraction as they did for us in that earlier age when they were almost unattainable. In any case, they certainly inspired a prayerful longing in our Pilgrim: they were gifts bestowed upon him and entrusted to him by his elder, and along with them, he took on the responsibility of using them well. If only we—who can so easily buy these things—would also take some time to learn how to use and truly own them.
These three spiritual items—the Bible, the Philokalia, and a prayer rope—are tools, as essential to the Pilgrim as a compass, map, and knife to a hiker. When given his prayer rope, he is told to pray the Jesus Prayer 3,000 times a day—as a start—and to increase several thousand more after that; at one point he even he risks life and limb to retrieve his prayer rope from the neck of a wolf that attacked him. When it comes to the Bible, verses are woven throughout the whole narrative; there are also extensive scenes of exegesis, where each line of the Our Father or the entire New Testament are systematically laid out according to what they have to say about prayer. Finally, there’s a sense in which The Way of the Pilgrim can be read just as footnotes to the Philokalia: St Nicephoros the Solitary, St Gregory of Sinai, St Simeon the New Theologian, Sts Callistus and Ignatios, St Maximus, St Isaac the Syrian—all of the Pilgrim’s anecdotes and conversations serve to illustrate and ground the ideas of those hesychast writers in a real story with a real person. Whenever these tools are mentioned, one perceives in his narration a reverence and a gratitude for the objects, the wisdom and grace he receives through them, and his elder who first gave them:
I held the copy of the Philokalia in my hands and was looking for the mentioned section but I was slow in finding it. Then the elder himself turned a few pages and said, "Here it is! I will mark it for you," and, picking up a piece of charcoal from the floor, he made a mark in the margin where the passage was found. I listened attentively to all that the elder explained and tried to remember it.
The Way to Pray
Along with the contagious devotion of the Pilgrim’s personality, there is the method to prayer he discovers along the way. Again, everything in his life revolves around the question: “How does one pray without ceasing?” Answering this question demands a bit of pragmatism, and our protagonist has it in spades; he goes to great lengths to outline, in minute detail, the methods of prayer. Methods are controversial. But why? And to whom?
Constancy will teach us attention, and quantity will definitely lead to quality. One experienced spiritual writer has said that to learn to do anything well it is necessary to do it as often as possible.
The first bit of controversy in the Pilgrim’s method comes from the from the emphasis that quantity leads to quality. Again, the Pilgrim’s elder tasked him with 3,000 Jesus Prayers at the beginning of his prayer practice, and in relatively short order his staretz ratcheted his rule up to 12,000 repetitions a day. Naturally, most of us have jobs to work, families to raise, and blogs to read. But even without these distractions gone, how many modern people could even imagine taking on such a commitment of attention? While the number might be daunting and even impossible for most, the principle is absolutely sound: “You just gotta get those reps in.” Orthodoxy knows it’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking rather than think your way into a new way of acting; it’s a practical religion where knowledge (θεωρία) only comes through practice (πράξις)—and actions need repetition to improve. Practice makes perfect. Thus, calling upon the name of the Lord more often will make you better at calling upon Him.
Naturally, one might ask: can uttering the Jesus prayer thousands of times be likened to the “vain repetitions” Jesus cautioned against in Matthew 6:7? On the one hand, the Pilgrim would answer, yes: the vocal dimension of the prayer is the lowest. If we just had the vocal level without the mind and without the heart, our prayers would be “told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (MacBeth). He draws an analogy between the vocal level of prayer with the alphabet in language: just as the child must repeatedly struggling through the illegibility of his letters to make their forms clearer, we too must struggle through our aimless and inarticulate prayers to the discover a more direct communion with God—the Prayer of the Heart. In fact, it seems that “vain prayer” made actually impossible because of the repetition. As he writes: “prayer purifies itself through repetition.”
What does it mean that prayer purifies itself? In several places, he describes the Prayer as “self-activating”: even just saying the words mechanically is sufficient to make the feeling, intentionality, and God himself come into the person to propel the prayer onward. Such language has caused several Russian hierarchs to worry that this encourages Imiaslavie or “Name Glorifying”; they fear this pseudo-magical perspective will identify the gracious energy of God with the utterance of his Name, thus turning prayers into spells. However, this abundance of caution seems unwarranted: many biblical writers, church fathers, and modern elders use similar language to connect the invocation of God’s Name with his presence: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them” (Matt 18:20). It seems a natural an logical conclusion that if the Name of God is connected to his presence, it would also be connected to his action. We can see this beautiful put, as one of the Pilgrim’s contemporaries, St Philaret of Moscow (1782–1867), ends his famous morning prayer: “Teach me to pray. Pray Thyself in me.”
However, the greatest controversy in the Pilgrim’s method comes from his coordinating the rhythms of his prayer and the rhythms of his body together. He listens to his heart; he syncs the syllables of the prayer with his heartbeat; he pairs the first half of the prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God” with the inhale of his breath, and the second half of the prayer, “Have mercy on me, a sinner” on the exhale of his breath; “Lord Jesus… Have mercy…”, “Lord Jesus… Have mercy…”; in and out, over and over. By bringing the prayer to the level of his body, his body itself begins to pray: “I stopped vocalizing the Prayer and began to listen attentively as the heart spoke… I became so accustomed to the Prayer that if for a short while I stopped reciting it I felt as if I were missing something, as though I had lost something.” Prayer as become a part of his autonomic nervous system, so that just as the heart and lungs sustain us without our deliberation, feeling, or decision, so too his prayer beats steadily within him. As he quotes Peter Damascene in the Philokalia: “It is more necessary to learn to call on the name of God than it is to breathe.”
Naturally, some people dismiss this psychosomatic technic by accusing it of being some kind of Hindu or Buddist mantra. In the book, a Polish manager from Vilna brings up the heresay that this technique comes from monks from “India and Bukhara,” who tried to achieve “a tickling of the heart by means of breathing.” In our own day, modern hierarchs are suspicious that people, by using this technique, will confuse “real prayer” with Eastern mantras or some other New Age meditation practice. But the Pilgrim’s elder clarified that it was the other way around: “the Indian and Bukharan monks took this method of interior prayer and distorted and ruined it; but all the directives about interior prayer found in the Philokalia have their source in the word of God.”
Both parties I sense are throwing caricatures back-and-forth at one another rather than describing a real practice. For one thing, mantras are not monolithic things. Buddhists, Hindus, and various groups and individuals within those groups, all have differing opinions about what a mantra is and how it is to be use. Additionally, how it might have been used in the past and how it is used in our own day is a moving target. For some, mantras are arbitrary sounds which are used merely to anchor the mind into stillness. For others, a mantra is an acoustic pattern past down through oral tradition which holistically resonates the one who utters it by its very sounds. Finally, some use mantras to invokes a deity and invite that divine being to present himself or herself in the life of the one who utters it.
There’s nothing wrong in acknowledging the analogy between the Pilgrim’s method of prayer and the levels described above. In the first sense, the Jesus Prayer is an arbitrary sense of sounds which can help still the mind (ησυχία), as it can be translated into languages you understand or don’t understand. In the second sense, the Jesus prayer does have a rhythm and a melody which has different emotional (and therefore somatic) effects on us, especially if we emphasize different words, as the Pilgrim points out. Finally, Finally, the Jesus prayer does invoke the God we call upon to dwell within us: what is the Holy Spirit (πνευμα) if not the Breath of God (πνευμα)?
For all our variety, we humans have a shockingly common structure, so it should be no surprise that our prayers do as well. We often use fears and suspicions to justify our ignorance. But there is no need to be scared of that which is common to all mankind:
"It is written in the New Testament that man and all creation serve vanity against their will, and that everything naturally groans and struggles to enter into the freedom of God's sons (Rom. 8:20-23). This mysterious groaning of creation and the innate aspiration of the soul is interior prayer. There is really not much one can learn about it; it is a natural quality in man…
Nature shows astonishing wisdom in every aspect of creation as well as harmony, order, and gradation and gives the basic material for the ascending ladder going from finite causes to the infinite. In this way man can come to the knowledge of God naturally. And for this reason there never was a nation or a people who were without some knowledge of God. The result of this knowledge is that primitive man without any exterior prompting, as it were involuntarily, directs his gaze toward heaven, falls on his knees, and utters an incomprehensible but necessary sigh; he feels spontaneously that something is drawing him to the heights, that something unknown compels him. From this inner knowledge arise all the natural religions, and what is extraordinary is that the essence of every religion consists in some form of prayer
But just because this is where all prayers begin does not mean that’s where they all end. The Prayer of the Heart cannot be reduced to two halves of a random sentence, paired with a breathing technique: it is not the caricature of a mantra. Prayer is not a vain exercise in self-stimulation for him; it’s a obedient and faithful response to the God who sustains him: “Receive this petition from me, as a cry of love which you have commanded.” For as much as he describes the manner in which the Prayer must be done, even more so does the Pilgrim magnify the content of the prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner. The technique of the prayer cannot be separated from the Lord it invokes:
The greatness of the Jesus Prayer is revealed in its very form, which consists of two parts. The first part, 'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God,' leads the mind into the history of the life of Jesus Christ, or as the Fathers explain, it contains within itself the short form of the Gospel. And the second part, 'have mercy on me a sinner,' tells the story of our weakness and sinfulness in an extraordinary way because it is not possible for a poor, humble, and sinful soul to express its petition more fundamentally and precisely.
The Pilgrim’s status of as a spiritual classic is clearly demonstrated by how contradictory his critics become. On the one hand, people accuse him of making prayer too hard: “How dare you do thousands of repetitions of the prayer day after day! Prayer isn’t measured by hard work!” On the other hand, people fault him for making prayer too easy: “If it’s as natural and involuntary to you as your heartbeat or breathing, you’re not really praying! It must take effort!” Regardless, the Pilgrim probably pays them no mind and just continues on his Way, praying as goes.
A Ways Away
Honestly, it’s been years since I’ve heard anyone talk about The Way of the Pilgrim. Maybe it’s because I don’t hang out with enough fresh converts, who arrive at church after recently reading this book. Then again, maybe today’s converts come to the church through YouTube channels and podcasts rather than books like we once did. But maybe people don’t talk about The Way of the Pilgrim because the Orthodox Church itself has strayed away from the concept of Pilgrimage itself.
For generations now, Orthodox churches have tacitly agreed to serve as culture enclaves for the communities they support. There is much talk about how “ethnic” Orthodox churches can be, and how they became the communal homes for the diaspora from Orthodox lands: Russians expelled by the Soviet founded a theological renaissance in Paris; every summer Greek parishes host food and dance festivals in every major American city; Lebanese and Palestinian immigrants fled civil wars in their homelands to find memories of home in their churches. In our own time, many American and European converts hope to find shelter in the Orthodox Church from the crumbling traditions and tumultuous politicization of their own culture. No matter a person’s cultural background, it seems every Orthodox Christian today wants the same thing: safety. They want refuge. They’re all grateful for a tradition with strong walls. But there also comes a time when we’re not hiding ourselves from the world anymore: we’re using the church to hide us from ourselves.
The fact is that we are alienated from ourselves and have little desire really to know ourselves; we run in order to avoid meeting ourselves and we exchange truth for trinkets while we say, 'I would like to have time for prayer and the spiritual life but the cares and difficulties of this life demand all my time and energies.’
In the end, religion isn’t about comfort, safety, or hiding. We say we care about prayer, but we get too bogged down in the busy work of church life to do so. People are reminded about the food festival, about coffee hour signups, about the teen group, and of course about their tithe. But who reminds people to pick up their prayer ropes or to say their Jesus Prayers? Our churches have been silent when it comes to hesychasm. But it’s worse than silent. Again, why are so many religious figures quick to caution people when it comes to practicing the Pilgrim’s method? Wouldn’t we rather live in a world where people are bold enough to try saying thousands of prayers in a day? How would that be worse than our current world where people are too scared to pray at all?
The Way of the Pilgrim is a spiritual classic because this incessant Pilgrim constantly presents a challenge to us: “Pray without ceasing.” Everything comes from and returns to this point, such that nothing else matters when one prays because nothing else matters if one doesn’t pray: “Pray and do whatever you wish.” Whether one is seeking, one is converted, one is a hierarch, he challenges all to change their life and take prayer seriously.
When the Pilgrim first passed by my spiritual village as a young man, I was eager to follow him. Several years later I converted and found my place in a new spiritual home. Whenever I thought back on the book, I remember being moved deeply, but like most things that affect us deeply, I completely forgot about its influence until I reread it this January. But then he arrived back in my life, with all his characteristic urgency and sincerity, and reminded me what the Christian life is all about: prayer.
At that point I realized, I had settled in my new church but in my old ways. My prayer life had become so comfortable and undemanding, it was practically non-existent. But one evening, the Pilgrim sits down and we drink tea while savoring the Psalmist’s words: “Every day will I bless thee; and I will praise thy name forever and ever” (Ps 144:4, LXX). He packs up and thanks me for the time, prayer, and hospitality we shared. Then he continues on his Way. As I see him head over the ridge I’ve always admired but never traversed, I turn and look at the table where my Bible, my Philokalia, and my prayer rope lie. Next to them is the notebook he left behind, with plenty of blank pages left within. I breathe in. I breathe out. I grab my knapsack.
Thank you. Very informative and ends on a moving note like encountering a dear old friend who reminds you of whats essential : prayer. I wandered away myself and the Pilgrim reminded me of the paramount importance of this one activity. A bit like remembering to call home regularly and often.
This is a great review. Really good to read something from someone with depth of experience in Orthodoxy. There's some good food for thought here. Funny how Christians of all levels of experience can so easily fall into our comfort zones. Perhaps the Jesus Prayer is the tool that we use to prevent this from happening?