The Scriptorium

Book One: The Way of a Pilgrim

Hello readers, and welcome to a new series here at the Abbey: The Scriptorium. This is an experiment, and you are all invited to be guinea pigs.

The Scriptorium is a book club, and the way it works is simple. I choose a book to review, I set a date on which I will review it here, and I publish my review on that date. Between announcement and review, anyone who wants to join in has the chance to read the book. I’m currently planning to give us all around six weeks to read each chosen text, but I can fiddle with this if it seems too much or too little.

When I publish my review here, I hope that readers will chime in in the comments with their own thoughts, or their own short reviews. If you feel like writing something more substantial, I’d encourage you to publish your own review on the same date, on your own Substack or blog, and tell people about it here. I have also started a thread on the chat facility today to discuss the first book. Feel free to use this to talk about it together as you read.

The aim of all this is to solicit honest responses to the books in question. If you want to publish a long negative review, feel free. If you want to argue that the book is a work of genius, feel free too. Don’t be afraid to say what you think, and certainly don’t be afraid to entirely disagree with my own take. Argue with each other, offer different perspectives: make it interesting.

What kind of books will I review? Well, you probably know my tics and obsessions by now. At present I am strongly drawn towards spiritual texts, but I am open also to cultural critiques, great novels, poetry, history and maybe the occasional left-field offering. I want to keep things interesting.

I have my own developing list of books for review, but I welcome suggestions from readers, especially surprising ones. If you have any, please do leave them in the comments below. Ideas to improve or develop the model of the Scriptorium are welcome too. At the moment, it’s a prototype.

I plan to make all my Scriptorium reviews free to read for all. Only paid subscribers will be able to comment or leave their own reviews, though.

What all that out of the way, let’s move on to our first text.

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For our first book, I’ve chosen one of my own personal favourites of recent years. The Way of a Pilgrim is a nineteenth-century Russian story about a peasant who wanders through Russia seeking the secret of the Jesus Prayer, which opens the door to the mystical heart of Eastern Christianity. Its author is unknown: the manuscript turned up at a monastery in Mount Athos in the 1800s, and was later published to wide acclaim. Whether it is the account of a real journey, or more than one journey, or a fictionalised version of a pilgrimage, and who exactly compiled or wrote it, we don’t know. If you read it, you will understand why these questions don’t really matter in the end.

This classic of Russian Orthodox spirituality will be useful and meaningful for the Christian seeker, of course, but if you have any interest in spiritual practice more broadly, in Russian history, or just in charming stories which at the same time have depth to them, this is worth your time. It’s a short book, it’s easy to read and it will take you out of this present world and into quite another place.

The version I will be reviewing is translated by Helen Bacovcin and introduced by Walter J. Ciszek, and is widely available. I will be publishing my review here on Monday 20th May.

Over to you.