Being Still

For more than fifteen hundred years Christianity has cultivated a rich and varied teaching on the practice of stillness and inner calm. Here we can find answers to the contemporary psychological struggle for inner peace. In a fresh and engaging reading of this contemplative path, Jean-Yves Leloup explores the writings of many spiritual masters from across the centuries, in particular the Desert Fathers, the fourth-century monk Evagrius, St John Cassian, and the anonymous nineteenth-century author of The Way of the Pilgrim. Drawn from the experience of the monasteries of Sinai and Mount Athos, here is a clear and practical presentation of the spiritual art of arts: stillness in the face of interior pain and confusion. These spiritual riches, refined and developed by the Orthodox tradition in Christianity, can also be recognized in the teaching and practice of Buddhism, Hinduism and Islamic Sufism. The fundamental truth of one tradition is to be found under its own proper forms and nuances in others. Far from diminishing the unique value of this hesychastic way of prayer, the most developed spiritual traditions of humanity affirm it as one of the great forms through which humanity reaches out to embrace Infinite Reality.