The Power of Positive Prayer

To the mystic, prayer is not an occasional petition to God, but full-time work as tangible and varied in technique as anything a man can make with hand or mind. Sometimes a mystic is able to leave behind some manual or blueprint to help others with the work of prayer.

One delicately wrought signpost to the spiritual life is a small book, apparently written some time in the mid-19th century and published in Russian under the title: Candid Narratives of a Pilgrim to His Spiritual Father. Its author is unknown, its exact date uncertain. It made its first appearance in manuscript form in the hands of one of the famed monks of Mount Athos. The abbot of St. Michael's Monastery at Kazan, Russia, discovered it, copied it, and it appeared in 1884. Though one of the classics of Russian Orthodoxy that sounds a note often heard in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, it is only now published for the first time in the U.S. under the title: The Way of a Pilgrim (translated by R. M. French; Harper; $2.75). Its subject is mystical prayer, not as something for the sanctified few but for all men and women.

A Bubbling Joy. The book's message is told in narrative form, purportedly by an unnamed peasant who wanders through Russia and Siberia with a knapsack of dried bread for food and the charity of man for shelter. His first concern is to find out how one may fulfill the famed Biblical admonition to "pray without ceasing." He consults a number of authorities, only to come away emptyhearted until at last he meets a holy man who teaches him that to pray without ceasing is to pray the Prayer of Jesus. "The continuous interior Prayer of Jesus," the holy man says, "is a constant, uninterrupted calling upon the divine Name of Jesus with the lips, in the spirit, in the heart . . . during every occupation, at all times, in all places, even during sleep. The appeal is couched in these terms: 'Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.' One who accustoms himself to this appeal . . . can no longer live without it, and it will continue to voice itself within him of its own accord." The peasant's teacher trains him to say the prayer over and over until he can repeat it more than 12,000 times a day without strain and "this frequent service of the lips imperceptibly becomes a genuine appeal of the heart." The prayer becomes a constant, warming presence within him that brings a "bubbling" joy.

Thus equipped, the pilgrim sets off on his wanderings through a world of serfs and soldiers, wild weather and mud-rutted roads.

Spiritual Greed. Everyone he meets lends force to the argument that all Christians were meant to "pray without ceasing." Like a self-helper by Norman Vincent Peale, The Way of a Pilgrim is crammed with appropriate case histories --a social gamut of unhappy people whose lives have been changed by the practice of interior prayer. Unlike a modern religious bestseller, though, the book does not suggest that he who prays will become healthier, wealthier or wiser--just happier.

Modern Christians may well find some use for some of the pilgrim's practical pointers, such as the warning against letting prayer get sidetracked by "spiritual" thoughts. "If the [Devil] cannot turn us from prayer by means of vain thoughts and sinful ideas, then he . . . fills us with beautiful ideas, so that one way or another he may lure us away from prayer, which is a thing he cannot bear . . . [My teacher] taught me . . . not to admit during times of prayer even the most lofty of spiritual thoughts. And if I saw that, in the course of the day, time had been spent more in improving thought and talk than in the actual hidden prayer of the heart, then I was to think of it as a loss of the sense of proportion, or a sign of spiritual greed."

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