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Experience Joy Without Ceasing
The Way of the Pilgrim and Post-Ego
The Way of the Pilgrim is an autobiography written by an anonymous Russian Orthodox mendicant monk sometime in the second half of the 19th century. It was made famous a hundred years later by J.D. Salinger, who in Franny and Zooey depicts a college student obsessed with the book as a way to see God.
The hippies embraced the book and its thesis, which is that through “prayer without ceasing” one can attain the state of hesychia, or stillness.
The prayer the pilgrim discovers is known as the prayer of the heart, or the Jesus prayer. Through synchronizing this little phrase with one’s breathing, and attempting to say the prayer all day and even all night, one achieves an altered state of grace, or stillness, where one feels the cup runnething over, as it were, and the abundance of generosity of the God who made this beautiful place, our home, the Earth:
“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.”
I really recommend this book as one of my top five spiritual texts. It presents the desire to achieve “stillness” as a heroic quest, not unlike a medieval knight’s quest or a Homeric odyssey. One really gets behind the humble, simple narrator’s desire to achieve “enlightenment” or whatever you want to call it.
Wouldn’t it be nice to live in this state of stillness, gratitude and peace for all of one’s hours? Well, it seems that it’s not impossible. Look at this excerpt from the book:
After about three weeks I began to experience a soreness in my heart, followed by the most delightful kind of warmth, joy, and peace. This increasingly stirred me and kindled my desire to practice this prayer more diligently, so that I thought about nothing else and was filled with an immense joy. From then on, at times I would experience different sensations in my heart and in my mind. Sometimes my heart would bubble over with such sweet delight and was filled with such lightness, freedom, and consolation that I was totally transformed and enraptured. At other times I would be consumed with a burning love for Jesus Christ and for all of God’s creation. Sometimes sweet tears of gratitude to the Lord, for His mercy to me a cursed sinner, would pour out of me of their own accord…
