His Life is Mine (New Edition)

This is a new edition of His Life Is Mine revised with a new cover to reflect the canonization of the author to sainthood.

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 person-hood.

As remarkable as the book is the life of its author, Saint Sophrony. Like a good plot, his life proceeded from possibility to probability to necessity — from marked success as a painter exhibiting in the great Paris salons after the Russian Revolution then to a brief period of study at the Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris to Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain of Eastern monasticism. On Mount Athos 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.”