Introducing Lent with Anthony Bloom

Introduction and Daily Reading #1

This year’s daily Lent postings for my subscribers will taken from the short anthology of writings on prayer taken from the corpus of Metropolitan Anthony Bloom.

Anthony Bloom, commonly known as Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, was a prominent writer and broadcaster on prayer and the Christian life. He was the founder and leader of the Russian Orthodox Diocese of Sourozh, which is the Patriarchate of Moscow's diocese for Great Britain and Ireland. He was born on June 19, 1914, in Switzerland, and died on August 4, 2003.

Bloom was consecrated as Bishop in 1957 and Archbishop in 1962, and in 1963 he was appointed Exarch of the Moscow Patriarchate in Western Europe. In 1966, he was raised to the rank of Metropolitan.

He was known for his extensive work in broadcasting and writing, with several of his books on prayer and the Christian life being published in both English and Russian. He received honorary doctorates from the University of Aberdeen, the Moscow Theological Academy, Cambridge University, and the Kiev Theological Academy.

The anthology is called Creative Prayer, and its contents are taken from his books Courage to Pray, God and Man, Living Prayer, Meditations on a Theme, and School for Prayer. This anthology was published in 1987, and was compiled by Hugh Wybrew, who was the Vicar of St Mary Magdalen, Oxford (I have worshiped there!) and in his retirement is a Visiting Lecturer at St Stephen’s House, Oxford (I have lodged there!).

The choice to share Metropolitan Anthony’s teaching on prayer coincides with the teaching I am offering my parish on Friday evenings during lent, a series called “The Wonder of Prayer.”

I will post the audio from those teachings, as well. My hope is that the teachings along with Metropolitan Anthony’s teaching will make for rich and wholesome fare to support your prayer life this Lent.

Again, I will be posting daily throughout Lent, and these postings will be available for paid subscribers. If you are not a paid subscriber, now is the time to consider becoming one!

Here is the first installment, which is free to all to read:

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REAL WORSHIP

Worship to me means a relationship. I used not to be a believer, then one day I discovered God and immediately He appeared to me to be the supreme value and total meaning of life, but at the same time a person. I think that worship can mean nothing at all to someone for whom there is no object of worship. You cannot teach worship to someone who has not got a sense of the living God; you can teach him to act as if he believed, but it will not be the spontaneous attitude which is real worship.

Therefore, as a foreword to this book on prayer, what I would like to convey is my certitude in the personal reality of a God with Whom a relationship can be established. Then I would ask my read to treat God as a neighbour, as someone, and value this knowledge in the same terms in which he values a relationship with a brother or a friend. This, I think, is essential.

One of the reasons why communal worship or private prayer seems to be so dead or so conventional is that the act of worship, which takes place in the heart communing with God, is too often missing. Every expression, either verbal or in action, may help, but they are only expressions of what is essential, namely, a deep silence of communion.