![Book: His Life is Mine, by Elder Sophrony](/account/images/heading.img?color=770013&text=000000&accent=9966cc&compliment=2d2d2d&navigation=000000&heading=282828&title=000000&logo=ffffff&location.state=center&link=970000&title.text=Book%3A+His+Life+is+Mine%2C+by+Elder+Sophrony&font=Garamond&fontsize=24&stage.width.max=350&stagecolor=d38f9a&width=350&cache=1720117768411)
Book: His Life is Mine, by Elder Sophrony
![Book: His Life is Mine, by Elder Sophrony Book: His Life is Mine, by Elder Sophrony](/woodland/image.img?color=770013&text=000000&accent=9966cc&compliment=2d2d2d&navigation=000000&heading=282828&title=000000&logo=ffffff&link=970000&picture.image.url=%2Ffiles%2F3373487%2Fuploaded%2Fhis+life+is+mine.jpeg&picture.width.max=140&picture.image.mask.apply=false&stage.width.max=350&cache=1720117768411) |
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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."