The Way of a Pilgrim

An anonymous Russian account, first published at Kazan in 1881 and enlarged in 1884, of a wanderer who heard the words pray without ceasing read at the Liturgy and could find no one to tell him how. A starets finally does: he gives him the Philokalia and the Jesus Prayer, and sets him to say it three thousand times a day, then six thousand, then twelve, until the prayer moves from his lips into his heart and begins to say itself. The pilgrim then walks across Russia toward Siberia with dried bread, a Bible and the Philokalia in his knapsack, and tells what the prayer did to him and to the people he met. The book’s own starets insists that the prayer is learned under obedience, and Orthodox writers since have warned against reading it as a technique to be tried alone. Its author has never been securely named. In English it became the best-known book on the Jesus Prayer, helped by J. D. Salinger, whose Franny carries it in her handbag.