Ordinary Graces: Christian Teachings on the Interior Life

Introduction by Philip Zaleski Sometime in the 1850s, on the 24th Sunday after Pentecost, in one of the most justly famous moments in Christian spiritual history, a 33-year-old Russian vagabond chanced to hear the following words from St. Paul read out in church: "Pray without ceasing." The phrase struck the man like a heavenly thunderbolt. Immedi-ately he shouldered his knapsack, pocketed his Bible, and set out to find the answer to this great mystery, the secret of unceasing prayer. The identity of the Pilgrim remains unknown, although vari-ous scholars have attributed his tale to one Russian monk or another. His anonymity seems wholly appropriate, for the Pilgrim is Everyman, man or woman, who longs for an answer to life's deepest mysteries. The Pilgrim's search led him to a specific solution, the Jesus Prayer, a method of interior devotion perfected in the cells of Russian monasteries and discussed in "Cycle Nine" of this splendid collection by Lorraine Kisly. But the Pilgrim's question has been, is now, and always will be Everyman's question. For by seeking to unravel the mystery of prayer, the Pilgrim is asking how to live the Christian life: What must I embrace, what must I surrender, to find my true self? How can I learn to love God, and love my neighbor as myself? How may I abide in Christ? These questions resound up and down the millennia, We hear them in the Gospels, in the urgent request in Luke, "Lord, teach us to pray, and in the plaintive entreaty of the bewildered young man in Mark, "Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?" We hear them, as Ordinary Graces attests, voiced down the cen-turies by saints and madmen, scholars and mystics, poets and prophets. We hear them today, not only in the books of the great Christian writers of our age--Thomas Merton, Simone Weil, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and their spiritual kin--but in living rooms, campuses, prison cells, wherever men and women pause long enough to hear the whisperings of the Spirit. To these profound questions there can be no simple answers, for what is at stake is supernally complex, involving the very nature of the human being. The Christian project proposes nothing less than a radical reevaluation of what it means to be human; the Christian is asked to awaken to a new reality -- "Arise, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light" as the ancient morning hymn has it--and wipe away the disfiguring crust of years of sin and self-love, a metanoia that will reveal each of us as we truly are, an icon of God. To accept this challenge is to take oneself and the world and God seriously. It is to harken to the Psalm: "Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me" (Ps. 51:10), and to St. Paul: "If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new" (2 Cor. 5:17). How do we shoulder such an overwhelming task? According to Christian tradition, the decisive action belongs to God alone, for God alone can instill faith in the human heart. But the soil of the heart must be prepared to receive the seeds of grace. This cultivation, this striving toward awakening, sanctification, perfection -- one can phrase it in so many different ways -- has been elaborated in minute detail by the Christian saints. Nonetheless, for reasons both historical and cultural, Christian spiritual practice remains largely unknown to the general public. Many people today are inclined to describe Buddhism as a school of practice and Chris-tianity as a system of belief. The truth is more complicated, for Buddhism has its essential beliefs and Christianity its essential methods. The path that Christ brought is indeed a matter of faith ("He that believeth in me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water" -- John 7:38) but it is also, decisively,Kisly, Lorraine is the author of 'Ordinary Graces: Christian Teachings on the Interior Life' with ISBN 9780609606742 and ISBN 0609606743.