Customer Reviews

Pilgrimage To Dzhvari: A Woman's Journey of Spiritual Awakening

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Sometimes people have a hard time with spiritual reading, feeling like every Orthodox book they try to read is too removed from their life to really connect with. On that note I have a recommendation.

I am just finishing "Pilgrimage to Dzhvari" by Valeria Alfeyeva. The author is the mother of Bp Hilarion (Alfeyev) of the Russian Orthodox Church. The book is a loosely autobiographical account of a Russian woman's coming to faith in the waning days of the Soviet Union and particularly of her pilgrimage to two Orthodox monasteries in Georgia. It contains a lot of wisdom from the Orthodox tradition but is written more like a memoir or a narrative than most books you might consider spiritual reading.

If you are looking for a book that reveals details about Russian Orthodoxy OR one which is spiritually inspiring, you can skip this particular work. The writer is of that brand of faith in which how she feels is the determining element, and hence the narrative is mostly boring. She doesn't feel much interesting.