The Jesus Prayer
By: Anonymous
I. THE WAY OF A PILGRIM
His name is lost to us.
All we know of the anonymous writer, who chronicled a spiritual quest through Russia's forests and steppes some time in the 1850s, is that he was a literate peasant, 33 years old, widowed and physically disabled. He tells us of his unending ascetic pilgrimage across open country and wilderness, a journey that's difficult to imagine – let alone replicate – in our world of interstate highways and all-night motels.
On his wanderings, he meets other refusniks on the road to nowhere and anywhere -- convict gangs, women fleeing forced marriages, men who abandoned lives of military command and aristocratic privilege, and fellow seekers of Truth. One of the latter, a Russian starets monk, gives him the means to confront his own spirit by ruthlessly, totally committing his consciousness to God.
The record he left us is titled The Way of a Pilgrim. First translated into English in 1930 by R.M. French, it is considered the most penetratingly personal look into the soul of Eastern Christianity, and has been a perennial religious-titles bestseller for decades.