I don't remember now how I first came by it, but for something like 25 years, I have had a copy of a small pamphlet, published by the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, called 'On the Invocation of the Name of Jesus'. The author wrote under the title 'A Monk of the Eastern Church' and it took me a couple of years to discover that this monk was a certain Fr Lev Gillet. Fr Lev was a French convert to Orthodoxy, having been brought up in the Roman Catholic Church and he was priest of the first French-speaking Orthodox parish in Paris. Laterally, he became involved in the work of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, an organisation committed to the ecumenical rapprochement of Orthodox and Anglican Christians.
The pamphlet was, and continues to be, a source of great inspiration to me and Fr Lev's approach to the Jesus Prayer has been the heart of my spiritual practice since I was an ordinand. Amidst the many inconsistencies, trials, wrongs turns and phases of spiritual life - not a matter of linear development! - this has been a constant for me. Fr Lev's gentle, evangelical and intimate approach to the spiritual way continues to draw me. Here are some words from his book of meditations, In Thy Presence, which give some idea of his approach. The meditations are addressed from God to the reader:
Become visibly what thou art in my thought. Be the fulfilled reality of thyself. Allow the powers that I have put in thee to become active. In no man or woman is there the possibility of interior beauty or goodness that does not also exist in thee.
For an active ecumenist, Lev Gillet did not write much about church structures or ecumenical activity as if this were distinct from the ordinary life of faith. Instead, his was a spiritual ecumenism, an offer to enter the life of faith more deeply - together - in order that we may draw closer to the Source of our unity.
It seems to me that we need more ecumenists like him today; faithful to tradition but not clinging to it, concerned above all for the things of the Spirit, humble, humane and courageous, focussed more on The One than on 'unity' as a thing in itself. With such a starting place, who knows where we might all end up!
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