The Jesus Prayer

April 5th marks the official release date for Norris Chumley, Mysteries of the Jesus Prayer: Experiencing the Presence of God and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of an Ancient Spirituality (HarperOne, 2011).

This book goes along with a movie about the Jesus Prayer, details of which are available on the movie's official website: 

About this book, HarperOne tells us:

Norris Chumley presents a lavishly illustrated companion to the PBS documentary Mysteries of the Jesus Prayer. Readers can follow Chumley on a pilgrimage through the holiest sites of the early Christian world as he searches for modern-day practitioners of the ancient Eastern mystical tradition and its most sacred prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." This beautifully illustrated volume includes black-and-white and full-color images of the author's travels through Eastern Europe, including rare pictures from visits to holy sites where photographers are only rarely granted access.

For nearly two millennia, the holy men and women of Eastern Christianity have built lives of reflection, humility, and constant connection to God around a simple sentence, the Jesus Prayer. Now, Norris J. Chumley—a documentarian and professor—reveals the history, practices, and abiding wisdom of this mystical tradition to the rest of the world.
Chumley traveled to some of the early Church’s holiest sites with the Very Reverend Dr. John A. McGuckin, a priest and professor—to St. Anthony’s Monastery in the Egyptian desert and St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai, to convents in Transylvania and to monasteries in Russia, the Ukraine, and Greece—in search of Christianity’s first mystical tradition and its modern-day practitioners. The monks and nuns he met taught him how to move through the stages of the Jesus Prayer, and how it can foster an unceasing, and everdeepening, conversation with God.

Enriched with stunning color photographs of these holy sites, where photography is rarely allowed, Mysteries of the Jesus Prayer reveals the powerful theology packed into this prayer’s few words.

I greatly look forward to reading this, to seeing the movie, and to discussing them on here. Spread the word among those who are interested. It is not often that Eastern Christian spirituality gets this kind of media attention.