by Fr. Steven Peter Tsichlis
Prayer is the basis of our Christian life, the source of our experience
of Jesus as the Risen Lord. Yet how few Christians know how to pray with
any depth! For most of us, prayer means little more than standing in the
pews for an hour or so on Sunday morning or perhaps reciting, in a
mechanical fashion, prayers once learned by rote during childhood. Our
prayer life-and thus our life as Christians-remains, for the most part,
at this superficial level.
THE CHALLENGE OF ST. PAUL
But this approach to the life of prayer has nothing to do with the
Christianity of St. Paul, who urges the Christians of first century
Thessalonica to "pray without ceasing" (I Thess. 5:1~). And in his
letter to Rome, the Apostle instructs the Christian community there to
"be constant in prayer" (Rom. 12:12). He not only demands unceasing
prayer of the Christians in his care, but practices it himself. "We
constantly thank God for you" (I Thess. 2:13) he writes in his letter to
the Thessalonian community; and he comforts Timothy, his "true child in
the faith" (I Tim. 1:2) with the words: "Always I remember you in my
prayers" (II Tim. 1:3). In fact, whenever St. Paul speaks of prayer in
his letters, two Greek words repeatedly appear: PANTOTE (pantote), which
means always; and ADIALEPTOS (adialeptos), meaning without interruption
or unceasingly. Prayer is then not merely a part of life which we can
conveniently lay aside if something we deem more important comes up;
prayer is all of life. Prayer is as essential to our life as breathing.
This raises some important questions. How can we be expected to pray all
the time? We are, after all, very busy people. Our work, our spouse, our
children, school-all place heavy demands upon our time. How can we fit
more time for prayer into our already overcrowded lives? These questions
and the many others like them which could be asked set up a false
dichotomy in our lives as Christians. To pray does not mean to think
about God in contrast to thinking about other things or to spend time
with God in contrast to spending time with our family and friends.
Rather, to pray means to think and live our entire life in the Presence
of God. As Paul Evdokimov has remarked: "Our whole life, every act and
gesture, even a smile must become a hymn or adoration, an offering, a
prayer. We must become prayer-prayer incarnate." This is what St. Paul
means when he writes to the Corinthians that "whatever you do, do it for
the glory of God" (I Cor. 10:31).
THE JESUS PRAYER
In order to enter more deeply into the life of prayer and to come to
grips with St. Paul's challenge to pray unceasingly, the Orthodox
Tradition offers the Jesus Prayer, which is sometimes called the prayer
of the heart. The Jesus Prayer is offered as a means of concentration,
as a focal point for our inner life. Though there are both longer and
shorter versions, the most frequently used form of the Jesus Prayer is:
"Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." This
prayer, in its simplicity and clarity, is rooted in the Scriptures and
the new life granted by the Holy Spirit. It is first and foremost a
prayer of the Spirit because of the fact that the prayer addresses Jesus
as Lord, Christ and Son of God; and as St. Paul tells us, "no one can
say 'Jesus is Lord' except by the Holy Spirit" (I Cor. 12:3).
THE SCRIPTURAL ROOTS OF THE JESUS PRAYER
The Scriptures give the Jesus Prayer both its concrete form and its
theological content. It is rooted in the Scriptures in four ways:
1) In its brevity and simplicity, it is the fulfillment of Jesus'
command that "in praying" we are "not to heap up empty phrases as the
heathen do; for they think that they will be heard for their many words.
Do not be like them . . .(Matt. 6:7-8).
2) The Jesus Prayer is rooted in the Name of the Lord. In the
Scriptures, the power and glory of God are present in his Name. In the
Old Testament to deliberately and attentively invoke God's Name was to
place oneself in his Presence. Jesus, whose name in Hebrew means God
saves, is the living Word addressed to humanity. Jesus is the final Name
of God. Jesus is "the Name which is above all other names" and it is
written that "all beings should bend the knee at the Name of Jesus"
(Phil. 2:9-10). In this Name devils are cast out (Luke 10:17), prayers
are answered (John 14:13 14) and the lame are healed (Acts 3:6-7). The
Name of Jesus is unbridled spiritual power.
3) The words of the Jesus Prayer are themselves based on Scriptural
texts: the cry of the blind \ man \ sitting at the side of the road near
Jericho, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me" (Luke 18:38); the ten
lepers who "called to him, 'Jesus, Master, take pity on us' " (Luke
17:13); and the cry for mercy of the publican, "God, be merciful to me,
a sinner" (Luke 18:14).
4) It is a prayer in which the first step of the spiritual journey is
taken: the recognition of our own sinfulness, our essential estrangement
from God and the people around us. The Jesus Prayer is a prayer in which
we admit our desperate need of a Saviour. For "if we say we have no sin
in us, we are deceiving ourselves and refusing to admit the truth" (I
John 1:8).
THE THREE LEVELS OF PRAYER
Because prayer is a living reality, a deeply personal encounter with the
living God, it is not to be confined to any given classification or
rigid analysis. However, in order to offer some broad, general
guidelines for those interested in using the Jesus Prayer to develop
their inner life, Theophan the Recluse, a 1 9th century Russian
spiritual writer, distinguishes three levels in the saying of the
Prayer:
1) It begins as oral prayer or prayer of the lips, a simple recitation
which Theophan defines as prayers"'verbal expression and shape."
Although very important, this level of prayer is still external to us
and thus only the first step, for "the essence or soul of prayer is
within a man's mind and heart."
2) As we enter more deeply into prayer, we reach a level at which we
begin to pray without distraction. Theophan remarks that at this point,
"the mind is focused upon the words" of the Prayer, "speaking them as if
they were our own."
3) The third and final level is prayer of the heart. At this stage
prayer is no longer something we do but who we are. Such prayer, which
is a gift of the Spirit, is to return to the Father as did the prodigal
son (Luke 15~ 32). The prayer of the heart is the prayer of adoption,
when "God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit
that cries 'Abba, Father!' " (Gal. 4:6).
THE FRUITS OF THE JESUS PRAYER
This return to the Father through Christ in the Holy Spirit is the goal
of all Christian spirituality. It is to be open to the presence of the
Kingdom in our midst. The anonymous author of The Way of the Pilgrim
reports that the Jesus Prayer has two very concrete effects upon his
vision of the world.
First, it transfigures his relation ship with the material creation around
him; the world becomes transparent, a sign, a means of communicating
God's presence. He writes: "When I prayed in my heart, everything around
me seemed delightful and marvelous. The trees, the grass, the birds, the
air, the light seemed to be telling me that they existed for man's sake,
that they witnessed to the love of God for man, that all things prayed
to God and sang his praise."
Second, the Prayer transfigures his relationship to his fellow human
beings. His relationships are given form within their proper context:
the forgiveness and compassion of the crucified and risen Lord. "Again I
started off on my wanderings. But now I did not walk along as before,
filled with care. The invocation of the Name of Jesus gladdened my way.
Everybody was kind to me. If anyone harms me I have only to think, 'How
sweet is the Prayer of Jesus!' and the injury and the anger alike pass
away and I forget it all." |
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