First Fruits of Prayer: A 40 Day Journey through the Ancient Great Canon

Join Frederica Mathewes-Green on a guided retreat - ideal for the Lenten Season - through the classic Great Canon, a wise, ancient, Orthodox text that will enrich your experience of spirituality and prayer.

First Fruits of Prayer will bring readers of all denominational backgrounds into the prayer experience of first millennium Christianity through immersion in this fascinating text, a poetic hymn written in the eighth century. This extraordinarily beautiful work, still chanted by Eastern Christians every Lent, weaves together Old and New Testament Scriptures with prayers of hope and repentance. It offers ancient ways of seeing Christ that will nevertheless feel new to most readers today.

This insightful book offers readers an opportunity to walk through a classic text from the Christian East in a series of forty prayerful readings with accompanying commentary and questions for further reflection.

We asked Frederica Mathewes-Green why she wrote this Lenten study and this was her response:

"Researching this book immersed me in the Scriptures as no other Christian prayer-text has. I was in awe of the profundity of St. Andrew of Crete's meditation on the biblical text, and the resonances he uncovered in it from one end to the other. It's further astounding that he wrote this around 720 A.D., when there were no study helps available like today's concordances, indexes, and marginal references. Through frequent daily worship, he really had consumed the Bible, and assimilated it. Yet the Canon does not come off as a dry, theological tour-de-force. It breathes with his yearning to be wholly transformed by the light of Jesus Christ, and his courageous desire to root out whatever in him resists that light. St. Andrew's knowledge of the Scriptures, his unflinching examination of himself, and above all his radiant love for Jesus Christ make this a perfect book for study during Lent."