6. The Prayer of the Heart

6

The Prayer of the Heart

Two women were responsible for directing my love of travel and adventure and my latent spiritual longings into the path of pilgrimage.

An older German woman concerned herself with my education in the cultural/religious traditions of Europe when I was living in Germany. She was the one who first told me about the old pilgrim’s path to Santiago de Campostella in Spain and later asked me to undertake a pilgrimage to that holy place on her behalf since she felt herself too old to make the journey.

The other woman was a devout Greek Orthodox Christian I met in California. When she found I was contemplating a pilgrimage to Campostella, she asked me to extend that pilgrimage on her behalf to Holy Mountain Athos, in Greece, since women are not permitted to visit that monastic province but may commission a male to make a pilgrimage there as their proxy.

This Orthodox woman also introduced me to a little book written by an anonymous Russian more than a hundred years ago: The Way of the Pilgrim.

In this book I read for the first time about the Prayer of the Heart, also called The Jesus Prayer, a short mantra-type prayer recommended to the devout seeker as an important spiritual exercise to be done while making a pilgrimage.

Oddly enough, this book and this prayer captured my interest and I began to repeat the mantra—at first more or less as a joke with no seriousness, but gradually, when I started to understand that the prayer could be a possible foundation technique--a key-- to spiritual growth, I started repeating the prayer just as the Russian pilgrim had suggested

Tomasito, 2009


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