Our next book, Way to Altotting by Thomas Wold is available for sale. It describes adventures of a pilgrim on old pilgrims' trail in Germany. Thomas has a talent to describe what it really feels to be a pilgrim. This story is a sort of sequel to Holy Mountain, though these two pilgrimages are more then a decade apart. If you enjoyed reading Holy Mountain, you will like this one as well. This book includes some color photographs that the author took while on pilgrimage in Germany. By the way the book explains why real pilgrims do not carry a camera.
- Click here to order Way to Altotting!
- Publication Date: Mar 22 2012
- Page Count: 26
- Trim Size: 5.5" x 8.5"
- Language: English
- Color: Full Color
- Related Categories:Travel / Road Travel
Read the excerpt from the book:
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, recognizing in it a foundation technique for possible spiritual growth I became user of the prayer.
I had abandoned the religious activities of my youth in a reaction against not only the hypocrisy I saw in the church, but even more to the hypocrisy I saw in myself. Regarding the “Jesus Prayer”, for example––at first I could not even recite the words comfortably in English, so I learned to repeat it in the original Greek—the meaningless sounds of that language: “Kyrie Jesu Christe eleson mas” were less repulsive to me than “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on us”.
The author of The Way of the Pilgrim recommended that a sincere pilgrim should repeat this simple formula continually as he walks, and since he walks all day, he repeats the prayer several thousand times daily. After a few days or weeks of this, he no longer needs to articulate the prayer—he repeats it silently as he walks, and eventually, he will discover that the prayer has become, quite literally, the “Prayer of the Heart” since it is being repeated automatically night and day, awake or asleep, in his heart. I found through experience, that for myself at any rate, this is absolutely true. During a pilgrimage I would awaken in the middle of the night, for example, in strange surroundings and experience the subtle comfort of the repeating prayer rather than the fear of the unknown. The prayer thus seems to help sustain equilibrium of the pilgrim’s psychic condition.
From The Way to Altotting by Thomas Wold
No comments:
Post a Comment