His Life is Mineby Archimandrite Sophrony
Contemplation, prayer, spirituality these words have
become popular in our day among those despairing at the banality and
emptiness of the contemporary scene. But popular as well are a myriad of
pseudo-spiritualities, each offering its own shortcut to spiritual
satisfaction. His Life is Mine is a refreshing contrast. The
book deals with prayers, and especially with the 'Jesus Prayer' of Orthodox
monasticism. Yet it is not simply a presentation of 'techniques.' The
book is permeated by the awareness that prayer is not just the cultivation
of a particular spiritual state, not the investigation of an abstract Idea
or dissolution in an anonymous Whole, but an encounter with the personal
Being, I AM, demanding in turn our own growth in personhood. As remarkable
as the book is its author, Archimandrite Sophrony. Like a
good plot, his life has proceeded from possibility to probability to
necessity from marked success as a painter exhibiting in the great Paris
salons after the Russian Revolution via a brief period of study at the
Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris to Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain of
Eastern monasticism, where he spent twenty-two years, first as a monk in the
Russian Monastery of St. Panteleimon and for the final seven years as a
hermit in the 'desert.'
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