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The Jesus Prayer The Master, our Lord Jesus, taught his followers about "the necessity to pray always without becoming weary" (Luke 18:1). His advice was repeated by the apostle Paul, who wrote: "Pray without ceasing" a Thessalonians 5:17). The Lord's words and the apostolic counsel were observed by early Christians with short prayers which they recited frequently. The desert fathers and mothers of the Thebeid often used the prayer "Lord, have mercy. " Using a creed: "Jesus Christ is Lord and Son of God" and augmented by the prayer of the Publican, "0 God, have mercy on me a sinner" (Luke 18:13), the Kyrie eleison was expanded. The resultant prayer is known as the Jesus Prayer:
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
The Jesus Prayer is the foundation of the form of eastern spirituality called Hesychasm (quiet). The advocates of this form of prayer call the practitioner to move from oral prayer, through the prayer of the mind to prayer of the heart. The believer begins, according to the advice of Theophan, as if he or she had never prayed properly before. Reciting the Jesus prayer slowly, gently, quietly, the believer inhales while saying: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God," deeply breathing in God's name. Then, the believer rests slightly at "Son of God" before breathing out and saying: "have mercy on me, a sinner." Next, the believer is directed to stand or sit still and to confine his or her thoughts to the one word being uttered at that moment. The mind is to be emptied of all images, for this is not to be a meditation on Christ; instead, the believer is to become aware of the presence of Jesus. By remaining imageless, the experience of Jesus' presence is not one of the imagination. The believer works to bring scattered thoughts back to the words of the prayer, recalling the advice of Saint John Climacus: "Confine your mind within the words of prayer. " After recollection leads to proper breathing and then to the control of the mind, the believer must become aware of the presence of the Lord, not in the mind, but in the heart. Theophan says: "At present your thoughts of God are in your head. And God Himself; as it were, outside of you. " The mind must come to concord with the heart, the inner center of each person, a place as mysterious and unknown to others as God is. By using the bodily organ, the heart, the believer pays attention to the heart beat and draws the mind to the heart, the center of one's being. It is within the heart of each person, that mysterious center, that God and only God comes and meets us. By meeting God in the heart, the believer comes to enter the invisible world and comes to God, as Gregory of Nyssa writes, in the midst of divine darkness which is the unknowability of God. The ideal is to achieve a state in which the believer prays day and night awake and asleep with the beat of the heart and thereby fulfilling the command to "pray without ceasing. " The spiritual direction of the hesychasts is contained in a book called the Philokalia. An introduction to this prayer is found in the charming anonymous account of a Russian pilgrim of the 19th century, The Way of the Pilgrim and the Pilgrim Continues His Way. The typical edition of the CasosJov (Slavonic: Book of Hours), published in Rome in 1950 for the Ruthenian Church gives a rule of monastics using the Jesus Prayer which, when adapted, can be of use to us as well.
Make the sign of the cross upon yourself. Then say each of the following prayers accompanied by a prostration to the ground:
O God, be merciful to me, a sinner! without number.
And then:
O Virgin
Lady, Mother of God, save me! Holy (your patron saint), pray to God for me.
Now we pray the Jesus Prayer:
Some believers use
a rope rosary of one hundred knots with larger knots dividing them.
O most holy Mother of God, save us!
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