The Way of a Pilgrim and the Pilgrim Continues His Way

"An extraordinary account of the life of a pilgrim, a wanderer-in-Christ who perhaps without ever intending to do so, has done a great deal to bring the soul of Eastern Christianity to light in the Western world. By his own confession he was neither a professional-gran of letters, nor a journalist; neither a preacher, nor, as far as we know, a saint. The fact is we know very little of this man except what he has chosen to tell us of himself. His name is lost, his manu-script unsigned; we do not know whether he wrote his own story, or told it to someone else who wrote it down, or whether-as has occurred to some readers-the account we have of this pilgrim's life was an almost miraculous fictional tour de force. All we can gather from written evidence is that this man lived a hundred years ago: a peasant of Central Russian origin; that he was crippled in one arm from childhood (due to the malice of an older brother), and that, at about the age of twenty, he started on his spiritual journey. "The Way ot' a Pilgrim is unique among devotional books. It has a special purity and simplicity of spirit. Parts of John Woolman's Journal, and the writings of Brother Lawrence, are the closest analogies to the chronicle of the wanderings and spiritual adventures of this unknown l9th-century Russian pilgrim. His spontaneous ministry of love to his fellow men, his earnest wrestlings with the problem of how to pray continually, his humble receptive-ness to the promptings of God become a shared religious experience. with the reader. It is wholly accessible to persons unschooled in formal theology or complex mystical devotions"