How This Road Was Found

To the Reader

I want you to know two things at the outset, because they explain both the confidence and the hesitation you will find in these pages. Confidence, because I have walked this road long enough to know where it leads. Hesitation, because I am handing you words that were never written for you, and I am aware of the presumption in that.

This book was not composed for publication, not at first. It began as an attempt to work something out for a young man who was, at the time, in a great deal of trouble.

That young man was me.

The Trouble

I will not burden you with the details of my own collapse. Every generation invents new names for the same condition. Mine had to do with a life that looked ordered from the outside and had gone hollow at the center — a marriage I was neglecting, work I performed competently and without meaning, a church I attended without belief, and a private life I would not have wanted spoken aloud.

What troubled me most was not the failure. It was that I could not locate a method. I knew perfectly well what I ought to become. I had read the Sermon on the Mount many times. I could recite the fruits of the Spirit. What I could not find was the road from where I stood to where I was told I should be. Every book I opened either described the destination in glowing terms or scolded me for not being there yet. None of them told me how a man walks.

So I went looking — not for someone to write to, but for something to read that had actually been tested, not by a scholar's argument but by a life.

The Search

I had no guide, in the sense most people mean the word — no scholar assigning a syllabus, no spiritual director handing me texts in the right order. What I had was a library, most of it neglected, most of it never rendered into anything a modern reader would pick up casually: Aphrahat, the Book of Steps, the Macarian Homilies, Isaac of Nineveh, Cassian, Ephrem, the Didache. I found my way into it the way most people find their way into anything that matters — badly, slowly, following one footnote to the next for longer than I want to admit.

I have kept my own name off this material for the same reason I ask you to accept as itself a lesson of the Way: a name attached to a teaching gives people something to argue about instead of something to practice. I did not assemble anything that was not already there. Throughout this volume I am simply the Pilgrim — which is, in the end, the only title any of us can honestly claim.

What I Found

I did not receive a reading list. I built one, and rebuilt it more times than I can count, discarding entire seasons of reading that led nowhere and returning, years later, to sources I had dismissed too early because I was not yet ready to hear them.

It took a long time before I understood that what I was assembling was not a pile of disconnected antiquities. It was a sequence. Read closely enough and long enough, the ancient library orders itself — not by chronology, not by tradition, not by theological importance, but according to the actual order in which a human being changes.

I began where I did not want to begin — with the moral seriousness of the Torah, with the plain demand that reality has a shape and that my choices had weight. I complained, though there was no one to complain to but myself, and eventually God. I wanted grace. I wanted the mountaintop. What years with these sources taught me instead was this: grace is not withheld from the man who has not yet built an altar, but fire falls on altars, and I had not yet built one.

Only later did I see the architecture:

Foundations — How should one live? Perception — How should one see? Abiding — How does one remain? Community — How should people live together? Healing — How is the heart healed? Transformation — How does the heart change? Mature Mercy — What does the transformed person become?

Seven stages. And through all seven, three pillars I could never manage to set down: Truth, Humility, and Mercy. Truth without mercy turns harsh. Mercy without truth turns sentimental. Humility keeps them both honest. I have tested that formula against my own life and against a good many other people's, and I have not yet found where it fails.

Why I Speak in One Voice

You may wonder, reading what follows, how much of this is scholarship and how much is confession.

I have not tried to separate them, and I want to explain why.

Everything in this book was tested against my own life before I asked it of yours. I did not read about the Vine and then, separately, fail to abide in it; the failing usually came first, and sent me back to the text to ask what I had missed. By the time a teaching had actually done its work in me, I could no longer cleanly say which part was the ancient witness speaking and which part was years of my own dragging a cart I was never meant to pull. The two had grown together.

So there is one voice in this book, and it belongs to a man who is both student and, now, something closer to an elder. When I instruct you, I am telling you what these witnesses, tested against Scripture, actually teach. When I confess to you — and I do, often, because you would not otherwise believe me — I am reporting what it has cost me to receive it.

I have kept my own failures in for three reasons, and I want to be honest about all three.

The first is scriptural. This road draws on sources unfamiliar to many readers — Aphrahat, the Book of Steps, the Macarian Homilies, Isaac of Nineveh. A cautious reader is right to ask where such material stands in relation to the Bible. So each chapter sets down the biblical witness in plain sight, and the Scriptural Appendix at the back maps the whole of it. I do not ask you to trust me. I ask you to check me.

And here is the rule I have tried to keep, which I would ask you to hold me to. These ancient writers are witnesses, not authorities. Where they illuminate Scripture, receive what they offer gratefully. Where they strain past what the text will bear, set that part down — and you are the one who must judge which is which.

You should also know that I have not always kept the two apart as cleanly as I would like. Sometimes I tell you what an ancient author said; sometimes I tell you what I have made of it myself, which is a different thing and not always signposted. Where a reading is mine rather than theirs, I have tried to say so. Where I have failed to, assume the reading is mine and weigh it accordingly. Nothing here is improved by your accepting it on my word.

The second is companionship. A book written entirely in the voice of a man who has arrived is of very little use to anyone still on the road. I resisted nearly everything in these pages before I accepted it. I have recorded some of that resistance, and my eventual surrender, because I suspect you will travel the same ground.

The third is evangelical, and I will not disguise it. This Way can be walked, and walked profitably, by someone who does not yet believe. Its psychology is sound whether or not its theology is accepted. But I did not remain where I began. Somewhere between the Torah and Isaac of Nineveh, the figure of Jesus stopped being an ethical archetype to me and became a Person to whom I owed my life. I would be dishonest to conceal that this is what I hope for you.

Faith, Works, and the Fire

Before you begin, one clarification, because everything downstream depends on it.

This book asks a great deal of you. There are practices, disciplines, daily anchors, examinations. A certain kind of reader will conclude within twenty pages that this is a system for earning God's favor.

It is not. Hear the formula I eventually arrived at, after all these years, which I have never improved upon:

Grace provides the fire. Faith prepares the altar. Works are the fruit that preserves the walk.

You are not building a ladder. You are building an altar. The distinction is everything. A ladder is an attempt to climb toward God by your own strength, and it always collapses. An altar is a place prepared for a fire you cannot light. The labor is real, the labor is required, and the labor earns nothing.

The death of Christ, in these pages, is not a legal transaction concluded at a distance. It is the emptying of an ocean of mercy over a life that could not save itself. Everything you will be asked to do is a response to that, never a payment for it.

One more thing, and it is the thing I would most hate to be misunderstood about.

You could read this book as the recovery of an unusually good ancient technology for building character. It would not be an absurd reading. The psychology in it is sound, the practices work, and a person of any conviction or none could take them up and be measurably improved.

But that is not what is happening here, and I will not pretend otherwise to make the book easier to recommend. You do not become merciful by mastering a method. You become merciful by being conformed to a Person. The teachers in this book are witnesses to Him and nothing more; every one of them would be appalled to be read as an alternative to Him. The Torah points toward Him. The vine and the branch are His image, and it is His life in the branch that produces the fruit. The summit of this road is not a technique perfected but a face you begin, slowly and unevenly, to resemble.

If you take up the practices and leave the Person, you will get a better-behaved version of yourself, and you will find in about a decade that it was not enough. I know, because I tried it that way first.

What This Book Is Not

One more boundary, and I want it stated plainly rather than left to be inferred.

This is not a church, and it is not a substitute for one.

I have no authority over you. I cannot absolve you, baptize you, feed you at any table, marry or bury you, or stand between you and God in any capacity whatsoever. This book is a curriculum. It is a course of training in three virtues, assembled from Scripture and from Christians who walked before us. That is all it is, and a curriculum that began to imagine itself a communion would have gone badly wrong.

So let me say what I actually hope for you.

Belong to a real congregation. Not an ideal one — there are none — but an actual gathering of ordinary, irritating, faithful people who know your name and will notice if you stop coming. Nothing in these pages replaces that, and if this book ever becomes a reason to stay home on Sunday with a notebook, I have harmed you and you should put it down.

Sit under teaching that is not mine. Preaching, sacraments where your tradition offers them, corporate prayer and song, the ordinary means by which Christians have been fed for two thousand years. This book touches none of that. It was never meant to.

Be accountable to someone who can see your face. I cannot. A pastor, a priest, an elder, a spiritual director, a friend with permission to tell you hard things — these are worth more to your formation than any curriculum, including this one. The Moral Audit in Chapter Four is a poor substitute for a person who knows you and is willing to be honest.

And if what you find here conflicts with your tradition, your tradition is older than I am and has thought about these questions longer. I have written for Christians in a great many communions, and I have not attempted to settle the questions that divide them, because it is not my place and I would only do it badly.

This is a formation curriculum practiced inside Christian life, not alongside it and certainly not instead of it. If walking this road makes you a more useful member of your congregation and a more patient presence in your household, it is working. If it makes you feel you have found something finer than the ordinary church down the road, something has gone wrong, and I would rather you noticed it early.

How to Use This Book

I will say plainly what I wish someone had said to me.

Do not read this quickly. This teaching reached me across years. It will do you very little good consumed in a weekend. The rhythm I recommend is one chapter per week — read the chapter early in the week, sit with the scripture and the Psalm mid- week, and carry the assigned practice through to the end of it. Twenty-nine weeks. Rather more than half a year. That is not slow; that is the natural speed of a changing human being.

Do not skip the practices. You will be tempted. The teaching is interesting and the practices are dull. That inversion is precisely the problem this book exists to solve. A person who has read all twenty-nine chapters and performed none of the disciplines has learned nothing whatever. The Praxis Appendix at the back collects every practice in one place; keep a finger in it.

Do not read the stages out of order. You may be drawn to Mature Mercy and bored by Foundations. So was I. The order is not decorative. A man who attempts Isaac of Nineveh's boundless compassion without having first submitted to the Moral Audit will produce sentimentality and call it love.

Keep your Bible open. Every chapter carries a scriptural anchor and a Psalm. They are not ornaments. Read them.

If you fail, return the same day. This is the single most practical thing I can tell you. The Way is not preserved by never falling. It is preserved by the length of time between the fall and the return. Do not wait for Monday. Do not wait for a fresh start. Return that afternoon, at the next right action, and keep walking.

A Word to Those Reading Together

Much of this material was originally spoken between two people, and it takes readily to a second pair of hands. If you are reading in a group, I would offer only this: the reflection questions attached to each practice are more valuable than the discussion questions you will be tempted to invent. Discussion produces opinions. The reflection questions produce confession, and confession is what actually changes a room full of people.

Do not let the group become a seminar on the fourth century. Let it become a company of people who report honestly, each week, on what they attempted and how it went.

A Last Word

I am old enough now to have made most of my mistakes twice, which is one qualification, at least, for writing a book like this.

What follows is not my wisdom, and I want to be honest about that before you turn the page. I did not invent a single stage of it. I found a road that was there long before I went looking for it, worn smooth by centuries of ordinary people who wanted to become truthful without cruelty, humble without self-loathing, and merciful without pretending that evil is not evil. My part in it was smaller than it may look from where you are standing: I read for a long time, I failed for longer, and eventually I noticed the order in which the road had already been walked.

I am handing you the map now, the way it was never handed to me, and stepping back. The road does not need me any more than it needed the ordinary people who walked it before either of us was born.

It is still open. It is not difficult to understand. It is only difficult to walk.

Begin.

A. Pilgrim

I am now doing the same thing to you.

What follows is not my wisdom and it is not, finally, his. It is a road that was there long before either of us found it, worn smooth by centuries of ordinary people who wanted to become truthful without cruelty, humble without self-loathing, and merciful without pretending that evil is not evil.

The road is still open. It is not difficult to understand. It is only difficult to walk.

Begin.

A. Pilgrim