By Fr. Maximos (Constas)
What is the Jesus Prayer and how old is it? Who is the Jesus Prayer for? Where can the Jesus Prayer be found in Scriptures, and how does it differ from the mantras of eastern traditions? How ought we to practice the Jesus Prayer, and what do we find when we do?
This talk is about the Jesus Prayer, something that we all know about and hopefully something we all practice, but as I said earlier it’s good to go back to the roots of things and to refresh, and there might be some who know little about this.
It’s been said that prayer is our true life. Prayer is our highest task and communion with God. Without prayer we become disconnected from our inner depth and we lose something of our basic humanity. Without prayer we become dead inside. One early Christian writer said, “When I stopped praying I became old and when I prayed I became young again.” Youthfulness and old age are not just physiological conditions but also spiritual. Even a young person can feel old. St. Ephraim the Syrian said that when a person is terminally ill and he stops eating, his friends know that death is near. And when the angels see us refraining from the nourishment of prayer and the Eucharist they begin to grieve because our souls are dying. It’s a very powerful image and it says a lot about what prayer is, and the cosmic consequences that a life of prayer, or not, have in the spiritual world.
To pray is to open oneself up to the source of Divine life. The ascetical writers talk about closed and open hearts, and the person who has not received God or been aware of Him in some way is someone whose heart is closed, but a person who has been transformed to a certain extent is one whose heart has begun to open. St. John Chrysostom talks about larger and smaller hearts. Some people’s hearts are so small they have no room for anybody else. Other people have larger hearts and there’s room for their family members, and St. John says that St. Paul’s heart was so big that it contained the whole world. Imagine having such a heart that can embrace everyone and everything. Most of us have ever-shrinking hearts. Its’s not because we’re evil, but it’s because we’ve been hurt and we put up defenses and so it’s hard for the heart to be what it’s meant to be naturally. But to pray is to open the heart to the source of Divine life. To pray is to cast off the unreality of our troubled thoughts, which is a fantasy world, and enter into reality. The distractions are also the fragmentation of the self—double and triple lives, with lies covering up lies. Prayer restores our lost unity and where there is unity, whether in an individual, family, or parish, we can be sure that people are praying. Where there is no unity but only quarreling we can be sure there is no prayer. There are many forms of prayer—written prayers, spontaneous prayers, but we’re focusing on here one of the most beloved and powerful prayers.
What is the Jesus Prayer? It is the ceaseless repetition of the words “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” There are shorter versions of the prayer such as “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me,” or even just “Lord Jesus have mercy on me.” Different people find different versions that better express themselves, but what’s common to all of these is the Divine name of Jesus.
Who is this prayer for? The Jesus Prayer is for everyone, not simply for monks and nuns. I told you that St. Nikodemos says in his introduction to the Philokalia that the Jesus Prayer is for everyone.
How old is the Jesus Prayer? If you ask historians this question the earliest written evidence for the practice of the Jesus Prayer is found in a text called A Discourse on Abba Philimon which is the only narrative text in the Philokalia. This text tells the story of Abba Philimon who was an early Egyptian desert father. It’s probably from the fifth or sixth century, but it describes the Jesus Prayer as already well-established. In Tradition the Jesus Prayer is much older. One of the fathers reminded me the other day that the prayer of the Blind Man is like this: Lord Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me, and of course the book of Acts places heavy emphasis on the name of Jesus, so there are Biblical forms of the Jesus Prayer. 1 Thess. 5:17 says pray without ceasing, which from Christian antiquity has been taken as a charge to ceaseless prayer and especially the Jesus Prayer. St. Anthony entered the church and heard If thou wilt be perfect go thy way and sell all that thou hast and come and follow Me and those words became a spur or goad for him. In the nineteenth century classic, The Way of a Pilgrim, the pilgrim goes into church and hears 1 Thess. 5:17, and that is what stirred something inside him and put him on the search for the Jesus Prayer. That book is such a tremendous text.
New Testament scholars would never accept this, but the Church has accepted that 1 Cor. 14:19, where St. Paul says I would rather speak five words in or by means of my mind (in the Greek he uses “nous”) rather than thousands by means of the tongue, refers to the five words of the Jesus Prayer in Greek: “Kyrie Eleison Iesou, eleison me.” Scholars would scoff and say this is forced, but it fits, and many great saints of the Church such as St. Gregory cite this. So I think it’s incumbent upon us to accept it at least as a pious tradition. We don’t need this verse to be our proof-text, but it’s a pious tradition, and an intriguing one at that.
~ “Prayer of the Heart in an Age of Technology and Distraction” delivered by Fr. Maximos (Constas) on Feb. 2014 to the clergy of diocese of LA and the West of Antiochian of N. America at the invitation of His Eminence Metropolitan Joseph. The audio version of this lecture first appeared on Patristic Nectar Publications, and is published here by permission.
Fr. Maximos is the presidential research scholar at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of theology in Brookline, MA. He is an Athonite monk, one-time professor at Harvard Divinity School, accomplished author and translator and lectures internationally in both academic and parochial venues.
