Beginning to pray
Anthony Bloom was the secular name of Metropolitan Anthony Sourozh, a Metropolitan bishop of the Russian Orthodox church who lived his later years in the U.K. He led a colorful, peripatetic, and surprisingly adventurous life before ending up in England. He was an acclaimed spiritual writer who wrote several books on prayer, including this one. Despite the title, Beginning to Pray, this short spiritual work would be of value to any Christian looking to reflect on and deepen one’s prayer. Bloom writes in an engaging manner, avoiding pieties, and rooting his ideas in stories and observations. Among his observations, Bloom notes that we are often concerned that God does not come to us when we pray, but that, frankly, most of the time we are not very attentive to God (p. 26). He advocates for a posture of true humility before the Lord in prayer. True humility, Bloom suggests, provides fertile ground for our relationship with God (p. 35). While advocating simple vocal prayer like the Jesus Prayer, Bloom also recommends that we just sit with the Lord silently: “If you speak all the time, you don’t give God a chance to place a word in” (p. 92). The latter part of the book speaks of making one’s relationship with God personal—a seemingly obvious aspect of relationship-building with God that I frankly hadn’t heretofore much reflected on.