This was a great read. Follows a woman discovering Orthodoxy, and finding her place in her conversion as she travels to a number of monasteries in the Republic of Georgia. ( )

This books represents Georgia (Republic of) for my Around the World for a Book project. I’m not sure if this is biography or a novel. The author’s note mentions the author has visited monasteries in various parts of the world, but the narrator’s name is different from the authors. The story is about a woman and her teenage son visiting a remote monastery in Georgia and the monks they interact with there. The tension of the story arises from the monks having to deal with the feminist behavior of the woman pilgrim in their midst, while the narrator attempts to understand real devotion to God as opposed to a trendy spiritualism. While the monasteries are Christians there is a certain exotic element to them that I find fascinating. The second part of the book is less even, the narrator on her own now several years later visits a monastery in another part of Georgia (not Dzhvari, even though it takes up nearly half the book) and I’m not really certain where this fits in regardless of whether its biography or fiction.

“How much of the day can you spend with your eyes shut? And if you open them, don’t you get distracted? Learn to pray so that nobody else notices, and you won’t require any special posture. Our great saints achieved a constant, uninterrupted Jesus Prayer. The person of prayer works and prays, eats and prays, talks and is still praying. The prayer has been formed by itself, even in sleep.” (p. 32)

“How greedily I had once tried to absorb the beauty of land and sea, to take it away with me, and yet my eye had never had its fill of seeing, nor my ear of hearing. It seemed to me that these heightened impressions had changed my idea of happiness, and if I were to look long enough something would open beyond the play of shapes, the hues of light, because none of this could be in vain. But that same unsatisfied longing still niggled away. Beauty promised and beckoned, but it still seemed to exist independently of any connection with my life, not taking it into account.

A deserted, perfect, and idle world endlessly poured out its colors and lines, but I was rooted neither in its eternity nor in its perfection.” ( p. 37)

“The only problem, as the abbot said, there’s nothing a person can’t take pride in: If you’re not beautiful you are proud of your intelligence; if you’re not intelligent you take pride in your job and your wealth; if you’re not wealthy you take pride in poverty and you can take pride in joy and even sorrows.” (p. 142)

“There is life without faith, a secular life that drags us in its wake and constantly builds and destroys Towers of Babel, exposing their inability to reach up to heaven. It promises instant happiness. You just stretch out your hand and your past and your present become of no account as you try to achieve this beautiful, imaginary thing. This life seduces, excites, attracts you, swallows your soul and heart but never fulfills them, though it promises endless satisfaction – tomorrow.” (p. 180) ( )