So many wonderful articles have been written about the Jesus Prayer that I hesitate to add another contribution to this subject. But, as always, I write because I feel I should, and from within my own background and experience, which are sometimes not at all those of the majority.

One of the experiences which will be familiar to us all is that of the fragrance of different kinds of incense. I have handled a great deal of it during my life. Among the Orthodox it tends to be floral – rose, jasmine and the rest. Occasionally they are compared with expensive perfume or even with washing powders. That is not as inappropriate as we may think: at the risk of shocking the pious, I would remind us all that when the sinful woman anointed the feet of the Lord, she probably gave him what she had previously sued for the profession from which she now intended to take 'early retirement'!

However, there are other kinds of incense. I remember some powerful red objects which looked like chopped vermicelli, and which I had to ask people to use only on certain occasions because the fumes caused asthma. Then there was what looked like pieces of marble or candy. I liked its ascetic aroma very much, but recommended its use only in Lent or for memorial services, because evidently Greek people associate its smell with funerals.

For some years now I have thought of the Jesus Prayer as the charcoal on which the incense of life, the bitter and the sweet, may be sent up to God. As one goes about, each thought, each circumstance, each event or experience may be dealt with in this way. This is particularly useful when one does not know what to say, or whether one should be praying about the matter at all, for example whether one is being obsessional about it or one's attitude towards it is not right. All is taken up on the charcoal of the Prayer.

Curiously enough, the same principle applies even when we are reciting the Prayer more formally, sitting with closed eyes or walking along, possibly using a prayer rope. Of course we are supposed to concentrate on the words, to turn away from other thoughts - of course we are - but so often we find that we are not doing so, and we cannot, whether because we are ill or upset, for no specific reason, or for a reason which is unworthy. Whatever the reason, we are still continuing with the Prayer, we stand or sit before God as we are, not necessarily as we would like to be, and our weaknesses, our illness, our wandering thoughts and feelings, our very selves indeed, are taken up (burnt but not necessarily consumed like the Burning Bush) on this charcoal.

Some time ago I stood before a shrine of St Seraphim in a church. I was unwell, and I had personal worries. I kissed the relics and pressed my head on the glass which covered them. I was like someone coming to St Seraphim a century or more ago.

Father Seraphim was silent.

Then the words of a curate I had known when I was at school came to my mind: 'These things have a funny way of working themselves out.' When we dream, we do not have to 'understand' or 'interpret' the events; our wandering mind is 'working things out' better than anyone through these therapeutic symbols.

Similarly, when we recite the Prayer formally, is our distracted failure a prayer or no prayer at all? Is it a waste both of our chronos (time as measured by clocks, calendars, birthdays) and of our kairos (personal moment of development in time)?

I don't think so….

A chapter from Confession: Doorway to Forgiveness by Jim Forest, recently published by Orbis Books (in the UK: Alban Books. ISBN 1-57075-386-5)

No writer has explored more carefully than Dostoevsky the way a sin is justified in the doer's mind before it is committed, the innate human urge to confess afterward, the struggle not to confess, and the healing made possible by confession - all lessons Dostoevsky learned in the crucible of life. A writer whose later work always had a religious core, he came to faith the hard way.

In 1849, the twenty-eight-year-old Dostoevsky had been sentenced to death for his radical associations and activities in St Petersburg. He was standing at the place of execution, in view of the firing squad, when his death sentence was commuted by the tsar. Days later, the hair shaven off one side of his head and wearing a convict's black-and-white-striped uniform, he was sent in chains to Siberia. While he was on his way the wife of another convict managed to give him a copy of the New Testament along with a ten-rouble note hidden in the cover. He kept the book with him for the rest of his life.

He spent the first four years 'packed like a sardine' inside a vermin-infested prison barrack, a rotting building that was stuffy in summer and freezing in winter, a world without any privacy or safety. He wasn't permitted to write a single letter. Yet there was a certain blessing in his sojourn in the 'lower depths', a term often used by radical Russian intellectuals who contemplated the ordinary people - the narod - from a safe distance. Tolstoy might occasionally labor with his peasants and wear similar clothing, but at night he slept on silk sheets. Dostoevsky lived and slept day and night for years among some of Russia's poorest. Among the 'unfortunate ones', as Russians often called those in prison, he rethought the foundations of his life

A religious awakening occurred. He began to consider that the Gospel might be true and that the Church - the guardian of the Gospel - might be something more than a social institution whose main task was blessing the tsar and the activities of the state. Finally allowed to engage in correspondence in 1854, he related to a friend how he had come to thirst for faith 'as withered grass thirsts for water':

I'm a child of the age, a child of doubt and unbelief, and even, I'm certain, till the day they close the lid of my coffin. What terrible torment this thirst to believe has cost me and is still costing me, the stronger it becomes in my soul, the stronger are the arguments against it. And despite all this God sends me moments of great tranquility, moments during which I love and find I am loved by others. It was during such a moment that I formed within myself a symbol of faith in which all is clear and sacred for me. The symbol [creed] is very simple, and here is what it is: to believe that there is nothing more beautiful, more profound, more sympathetic, more reasonable, more courageous, and more perfect than Christ; and there not only isn't, but I tell myself with a jealous love, there cannot be. More than that - if someone succeeded in proving to me that Christ was outside the truth, and if, indeed, the truth was outside Christ, I would sooner remain with Christ than with the truth.

It is in Dostoevsky's Siberian years that the novels of his later life have their roots.

In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky's central figure is Raskolnikov, a sullen student living in a shabby rented room in St. Petersburg. He regards himself as modern, belonging to a new age in which God and compassion have been banished by science. Penniless, he is obsessed with loathing for a moneylender to whom he is in debt and slowly becomes a murderer in his imagination. It occurs to him that murder is not always regarded as a crime - those who commit crime on a huge scale, people like Napoleon, are regarded as national heroes, benefactors of humanity and giants of history despite the desolation and carnage they instigate. Such supermen, refusing to be shackled by mere morality, 'make a new law by transgressing an old one'. Raskolnikov decides that by killing the moneylender, a selfish old woman whom no one will mourn, he would be saving many families 'from destitution from decay, from ruin, from depravity' while at the same time relieving his own poverty. He imagines that afterwards, liberated from destitution with the money he has obtained from the chest in her bedroom, he will be free to 'devote himself to the service of humanity and the common good'. In such a case, he reasons, murder, far from being a sin, would be just and good. 'One death for hundreds of lives - it's simple arithmetic!'

Yet when he commits his carefully planned and philosophically justified murder, things do not go entirely as intended. He kills the moneylender but discovers that a simple-minded young woman, Lizaveta, has witnessed his deed and so murders her as well so that she cannot testify against him. The hatchet Raskolnikov had hidden in his jacket is now reddened not only with a miser's blood but also with that of a saintly innocent who never harmed or hated anyone.

He has been clever in committing his crime. No trail of clues connects him to the two dead women. Even so an intuitive policeman, Porfiry Petrovich, finds more and more reasons to regard Raskolnikov as the guilty one. Petrovich sees Raskolnikov's nearly dead soul - his heart 'chafed by theories' - and understands that this young man's only hope is confession and repentance. He plays a part in rescuing Raskolnikov from the hell into which he has locked himself.

Porfiry Petrovich is able to say to Raskolnikov that 'God is waiting for you' and to tell him that the suffering he will have to endure as a prisoner can be, after all, a good thing. He points out to Raskolnikov that his crime, terrible as it was, might have been worse: 'If you'd come up with a different theory, you might have done something a hundred million times more hideous!' He delays arresting Raskolnikov in the hope that he will 'become like a sun' and confess. But Raskolnikov's principal rescuer is Sonya, a young woman of deep Christian faith who has become a prostitute for the sake of her impoverished family's survival. When at last Raskolnikov admits to her his terrible secret, it is Sonya who tells him that his only hope is confession - confession to God, to the police, to a priest, to everyone:

Sonya has a copy of the New Testament from which she used to read aloud to Lizaveta. Raskolnikov asks her to read to him from the same book. She turns to the eleventh chapter of John's Gospel but at first has difficulty making any sound, she is so overcome with emotion. Finally she starts reading: 'Now a certain man was sick, named Lazarus, of Bethany....' It is the story of Jesus' friend who died and four days later, from within his tomb, was called back to life. Jesus asks Martha if she believes in the resurrection of the dead. She says she believes her brother will be raised back to life at the end of time. Jesus responds, 'I am the resurrection and the life'. Sonya by now is reading with strength in her voice, as if she herself were Martha: "Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God...."

Sonya assures Raskolnikov that his only hope is to confess, accept suffering, and thus redeem himself. Otherwise, though outwardly free and part of normal society, his unspeakable secret will cut him off from everyone around him, even his mother and sister.

Raskolnikov realizes that in confessing the truth to Sonya, a door has opened at least a crack. They sit

She offers Raskolnikov a small cross that had belonged to the murdered Lizaveta and promises him to share in his suffering and to help him bear his cross. Lizaveta's cross is a gift he cannot yet accept, nor is he yet capable of surrendering to Sonya's counsel. In the days that follow he considers escaping to America. At other moments he contemplates suicide. But finally he goes to the police station and confesses the double murder.

The punishment for murder in late-nineteenth-century Russia was not execution but imprisonment and hard labor in Siberia. Raskolnikov gets a relatively short sentence - eight years, the length of Dostoevsky's own period of imprisonment and exile. The judge explains that it would have been a longer sentence, but he has taken note of the fact that Raskolnikov made no effort during his trial to excuse himself on the basis of illness or temporary insanity nor ever used any of the stolen money for his own benefit. There was also the fact that several persons testified on his behalf about ways he had helped them.

Sonya eventually follows him to Siberia, living not far from the prison and doing all she can to help not only Raskolnikov but also other 'unfortunate ones'. It is while in prison, a year after his conviction, that the full horror of his two murders dawns on Raskolnikov. Real repentance begins and with it floods of tears.

In the last paragraph of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov holds in his hands the New Testament, a book he has been keeping under his pillow but not yet opened:

While compressing a large and complex novel into a few pages oversimplifies the spiritual struggle at the heart of the book, even through a brief retelling one can understand how Sonya's wisdom and love are enough to bring about Raskolnikov's conversion. More than any other person, she helps him understand that there is no alternative to confession and repentance. With these, the doors of the kingdom of God can open even for a man in prison who has committed one of the worst of sins. For the first time since childhood, Raskolnikov experiences inner freedom even though he has seven more years to serve.

The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's last novel, provides the author with another opportunity to explore the themes of sin and repentance, doing so on an even larger canvas than Crime and Punishment. Again the pivotal event is murder - an act of patricide by one of the sons of Fyodor Karamazov, a jeering, cynical man of unbridled lust and greed.

What we are starkly confronted with in the Karamazov brothers are very different human types. There is Alyosha, the youngest, who has miraculously emerged from the moral squalor of his father's home with a purity of heart and compelling directness most people relinquish in adol-escence. This is due in great measure to vivid memories of his mother, who before her early death held him in her arms before her icon of the Mother of God and the Christ Child, praying with tears for Alyosha's protection.

In the period described in the novel, Alyosha has become a novice at the local monastery, assigned to care for Fr Zosima, a saintly monk who hears the confessions of countless pilgrims. The Christ-like Alyosha is able to visit his father and listen to him ridicule Christianity in general and monastic life in particular without rising to the bait. He is one of the rarities in the human race who has no need to defend himself or his faith.

Then there is Ivan Karamazov with his diamond-hard intellect, a scholar with acute but abstracted analytical powers, who seems to be seeing the earth and its people not from where he stands but as if he were watching by telescope from the moon. He is an expert on religion, especially Orthodox Christianity, and his widely read essays are even admired by the monks at the local monastery. They assume he is a believer, yet in fact Ivan is an atheist, rejecting God so long as there is a single child suffering from incurable illness. He is the sort of atheist who is so obsessed with the God to whom he objects and against whom he revolts that he is as God-haunted as the devout Alyosha. God is for Ivan a problem of the mind, for Alyosha a presence in the heart. Alienated Ivan is among those laying the foundations for the terrifying revolution to come only a few decades later - one of those idealists who hope, as Fr Zosima says, 'to make a just order for them-selves but, having rejected Christ, will end by drenching the earth with blood'.

In the eldest brother, Dimitri, we meet a poetic, impulsive young man who has inherited his father's sensuality but not his greed or cunning. He is passionately in love with Grushenka, a capricious and manipulative local beauty - a woman who has also caught the eye of the elder Karamazov, so that we find father and son competing with each other for her attention, with the father having the advantage of wealth, the son the advantage of youth. Dimitri is an image of the tragic sinner Christ loves and readily forgives in response to the tiniest gesture of repentance. He is someone who might bathe Christ's feet with his tears. 'Lord, I am loathsome,' Dimitri cries out, 'but I love you! If you send me to hell, even there will I love you'.

Finally there is a fourth son, Smerdyakov, son of a simple- minded girl who hardly knew her name, fathered by Fyodor Karamazov when he happened upon Lizaveta one night and raped her. He never confessed his deed and thus never acknowledged Smerdyakov as his son, but following Lizaveta's death in childbirth, he allowed his servant Grigory and his wife to care for the boy, who grew up to become another of his father's servants. The bitter and withdrawn Smerdyakov has known even less love than the legitimate sons of Karamazov.

By the time the elder Karamazov is murdered, we know the brothers well enough to understand that each of them except Alyosha had a homicidal motive, and understand why it is that even Alyosha feels implicated in his father's murder, for he has learned from Fr Zosima that 'each is guilty of everything before everyone, and I most of all'.

Finally Dimitri is accused and arrested on the basis of circumstantial evidence. 'I am not guilty of my father's blood,' declares Dimitri when charged, yet he concedes that his arrest is just spiritually. 'I accept punishment not because I killed him, but because I wanted to kill him, and might well have killed him...'. Only later does it become clear who really committed the act and how cunningly it was planned.

The reader also comes to understand that Ivan, though he did not commit the murder, is the crime's intellectual author. It was Ivan who convinced the murderer that, as there is no God, there is no sin. Now he discovers that ideology can be as deadly as an axe.

In one of the pivotal moments in the book, we find Alyosha talking with Ivan, now on the verge of madness, about the huge guilt Alyosha senses has taken hold of his brother. Alyosha suddenly turns to Ivan and says: 'It was not you who killed father. ...You've accused yourself and confessed to yourself that you and you alone are the murderer. But it was not you who killed him, you are mistaken, the murderer was not you, do you hear, it was not you! God has sent me to tell you that'.

Alyosha does not mean that Ivan is blameless in their father's death. In assuring Ivan that it was 'not you', Alyosha wants his brother to understand that what he has done was the result of a demonic spirit at work within him rather than an action of his essential self. Should Ivan confuse the evil he has done with his deepest self, he will have damned himself and may never find his way out of the despair that results. Alyosha's message is a desperate effort to save Ivan's sanity and soul.

Demonic possession is a theme that Dostoevsky explored in Demons (a title sometimes translated as The Possessed), yet in this novel we meet no demons as such - only people possessed by radical ideas and ideologies. Demons become visible, writes Dostoevsky translator Richard Pevear, 'only in distortions of the human image, the human countenance, and their force is measurable only by the degree of the distortion'.

The demons in Dostoevsky's novels operate via all the 'isms' that flooded across Russia in the nineteenth century: idealism, rationalism, empiricism, materialism, utilitarianism, positivism, anarchism, social-ism, and, common to them all, nihilism and atheism. Demons - invisible spirits serving Satan, the father of lies - discovered that many nineteenth-century intellectuals were more vulnerable to idealistic theories and slogans than to wealth or other traditional temptations that had worked so well with their parents. Evil ideologies invade a person, pervert him, gradually driving him to crime, insanity, or both. 'It was not you who ate the idea,' says one of the novel's principal figures, Pyotr Verkhovensky, 'but the idea ate you'.

'If we call Satan the father of lies, I think we begin to understand that evil is rooted in untruth, denial of the Truth, in deception', writes my friend Alice Carter:

Dostoevsky was no Manichean envisioning God and Satan as equally matched warring twins. His experiences while a prisoner had shown him that evil was not on an equal footing with good, that demons are capable only of destruction, not creation. Since we are made in God's image, evil can never be the essence of any person, even the most damaged, the most sinful, the most possessed. However weakened by habitual sin, each person retains to the last breath the freedom to turn from evil, to confess and repent.

'Never confuse the person, formed in the image of God, with the evil that is in him, because evil is but a chance misfortune, illness, a devilish reverie', said Dostoevsky's contemporary, St John of Kronstadt. 'But the very essence of the person is the image of God, and this remains in him despite every disfigurement'.

Coping with disaster in his own life, Dostoevsky came to realize that God is both our private salvation and the only source of social cohesion. We live a different life if we know we are made by God, bear the Divine image, and that each of us is - and all of us are - accountable to God. To deny God is a form of suicide and at the same time the cause of social disintegration and mass murder.

In place of demonic ideas and ideologies, there is the reality of God's creation and of the person. There is the saving mystery of beauty. Thus we find Dostoevsky's heroes in sacramental moments kissing the earth and watering it with their tears. This is what Sonya proposed that Raskolnikov do at the four crossroads and what Alyosha did after the death of his saintly mentor, Fr Zosima:

Of John Wesley, it was once said, 'he read Macarius, and he sang'; he had with him during his trip to North America a copy of the first translation into English, made in 1721.

In the Macarian Homilies we encounter an early collection of fundamental Patristic writings which has continued to exercise an influence throughout Christianity, both East and West.

The Homilies emerged out of the spiritual and political ferment of the Syriac Christian world of the late fourth century. Originally written in Greek, they were translated into Arabic and Georgian prior to the eleventh century, and into Latin in the fourteenth century (this being done by a Spiritual Franciscan). In the Orthodox world the Homilies are a fundamental building-block, being the writings of a great number of the Fathers, such as Diadochus of Photike, Symeon the New Theologian, Maximos the Confessor and Gregory Palamas. Their influence and importance cannot be underestimated.

The actual author of the Homilies is quite unknown; indeed in the Arabic traditions they are ascribed to one 'Symeon'. In all probability they were a collection circulated anonymously, relating to the teachings of a spiritual father known as 'the Blessed One' (του μακάρου) of an ascetical community, probably in the region of Syrian Antioch. The ascetical life at that period did not necessarily involve monastic vows and was open to married couples (known as 'sons and daughters of the Covenant'). The Homilies, then, were not intended just for a restricted group within the Church, but for all Christians – as if the master theme were 'the reality of Christianity is this, to taste the truth, to eat, we need to have determination to strive towards perfection'. So the Homilies have a refreshing absence of excessively technical monastic terminology, a light and free style which carries a certain attractiveness for contemporary readers.

If we wish to look at the master themes in the Homilies, an obvious starting point is that the body participates in the spiritual life, allied to a very striking sense of the possibility of a direct experience of God, on the clear understanding (often ignored in contemporary versions of the Homilies used by Pentecostals) that there is an active participation in the sacramental life of the Church. The Syriac tradition is revealed by the extensive use of metaphors of clothing oneself, and in nuptial imagery. There is a refreshing use of metaphors drawn from farming:

The balance and imagery of the writings should easily dispel any suspicion that the Homilies were written within heretical Messalian groups, which denied value of the human body and practised sometimes extreme forms of asceticism. Macarius has a very fine grasp of the theology of the tragedy of the Fall: Adam 'lost the robe of glory', 'Satan has covered the wills of men with darkness as with smoke', all humanity is crippled by the Fall and we forgot our former glory which we shared in Adam. Christ came to call us back from 'the forgetfulness of delusion'. Salvation is not automatic, we have to actively remember that ancient glory and enter into a living co-operation with God in a true and lifelong spiritual warfare.

The Homilies emphasise especially the Trinitarian dynamic of salvation and of all the early texts which have come down to us, the Macarian corpus is particularly focussed on the Divinity of the Holy Spirit. Macarius even refers to the Holy Spirit in metaphors like 'heavenly mother' but this is balanced by references to the Spirit as 'bridegroom of the soul'. Whilst the life in the Spirit brings inexpressible joy and 'spiritual drunkenness' there is also weeping and lamenting.

Macarius possesses a deep understanding of the mutual indwelling of humanity and God coupled with a profound realisation of the 'ontological gap' between us and the Creator. He says, in effect, that 'as a stone cast into the sea, so we are surrounded by the infinity of the love of God'.

We have, here, a concise and beautiful and engaging presentation of the riches of the Orthodox Faith and how to live it. The most readily accessible English translation is that of Saint Symeon Metaphrastis' Paraphrase in volume III of the Philokalia (ed. Palmer Sherrard and Ware, London 1994). The Paraphrase removes the repetitions of the original collections within the corpus and presents a neat and readable version. There is also an excellent but partial translation into French in Sources Chrétiennes no 275 (where unhappily the author is referred to as 'Pseudo-Macarius', a description which it is better to avoid).

We are deeply grateful to Dr Marcus Plested for giving this Study Day. Sadly not many members of our Fellowship were able to come; the night before had been one of violent storms, fallen trees were blocking roads and railways could not function. But even if the wild forces of nature prevented travel, the Homilies are wonderful reading for the quiet of the evening. They are a greatly refreshing feast for the soul.

1 Philokalia vol. III, ed. Palmer Sherrard and Ware, page 338 (para 121)