The Jesus Prayer
anonymous
I. THE WAY OF A PILGRIM
His name is lost to us.
All we know of the anonymous writer, who chronicled a spiritual quest through Russia's forests and steppes some time in the 1850s, is that he was a literate peasant, 33 years old, widowed and physically disabled. He tells us of his unending ascetic pilgrimage across open country and wilderness, a journey that's difficult to imagine – let alone replicate – in our world of interstate highways and all-night motels.
On his wanderings, he meets other refusniks on the road to nowhere and anywhere -- convict gangs, women fleeing forced marriages, men who abandoned lives of military command and aristocratic privilege, and fellow seekers of Truth. One of the latter, a Russian starets monk, gives him the means to confront his own spirit by ruthlessly, totally committing his consciousness to God.
The record he left us is titled The Way of a Pilgrim. First translated into English in 1930 by R.M. French, it is considered the most penetratingly personal look into the soul of Eastern Christianity, and has been a perennial religious-titles bestseller for decades.
At the very heart of the narrative, our Pilgrim contemplates I Thessalonians 5:17's admonition, "Pray without ceasing," to distraction. How, he asks, can he focus voice, mind and heart on one action so singularly in the way of Christ, and still survive in the body and in the world?
Fortunately for this nameless wanderer, his friend the starets knows a powerful secret. Simply repeat the words "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me" a few hundred times a day, the monk tells the Pilgrim, and you shall be well on the way to achieving this seemingly-impossible task, with inner peace and unconditional love for all as added benefits. Work up your repetitions until you're at 12,000 prayers from sun to sun, he insists, and the Kingdom of Heaven will truly be within you.
A true old-church ascetic, our pilgrim accepts the challenge. He prays unceasingly as he subsists on a bread-and-water diet, wanders the Russian back country the year around, sleeps in open huts, and works whatever odd jobs he can do with one functional arm. And sure enough, when he begins to reach the upper thousands of prayers a day, the Christian Godhead descends upon him, and his bare-bones worldly existence seems as nothing against the explosion of consciousness and love he experiences.
II. HESYCHAST
With Eastern Europe so much in the world's view in this last decade of the Second Millennium, it seems fitting that this Slavic technique, known in its homelands as the hesychast prayer, has gained new attention. What is the power of this "Jesus Prayer" -- the legacy of a deeply-spiritual, long-suffering land -- when inserted into the electrochemical rhythms of Shakespeare's "enchanted loom"?
When first reading The Way of a Pilgrim, one is struck by how much more the narrator seems like a Tibetan lama or Indian guru than a Christian pilgrim. "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me" repeated ad illuminatem probably has the power of any Zen koan or Hindic mantra yet devised. But there's an added force in it as well: it speaks to something immediately comprehensible in Western culture; and while placing us outside the consensus-reality of "worldly" things, still involves us utterly with Humanity and Earth life alike, and prods us towards the constant betterment of the same.
Your author has said his share of the Prayer in researching this piece, and thinks part of "getting it" comes from attention to rhythm and sound. In English, "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me" has a slightly off-kilter meter that propels itself into the conscious mind surprisingly quickly. And the verbal tones easily echo in the stream of consciousness, like a melody that seems permanently but pleasantly stuck in one's head. Since the Jesus Prayer originated in Greek monasteries, and was intoned by the Pilgrim in either Russian or Old Church Slavonic, it's probable that those tongues may even more euphoniously massage the words into one's voice and thoughts. (One also wonders whether there might be some unexplored psycho-linguistic territory in sound as spiritual self-regeneration. Current interest in non-traditional healing methods might make this study a fruitful quest.)
Yet, as the Pilgrim realizes, the real point is in the words' focus. "Lord Jesus Christ," invokes He who absorbed all the pain the Flesh could take and all the Ecstasy the Spirit could give, yet uniquely One With Father and Holy Spirit among humanity. For whatever the hideous deeds done in His name over the centuries, enough men and women in the Christ's wake still drank deeply of His Spirit, opening to humanity an immense reservoir of power and love to be drawn on when honoring His role in the species' evolution. Agapè still flows sweet and clear from the wellsprings along the Way of Christ, massacres and Monkey Trials notwithstanding.
The Jesus Prayer's second clause directs this power inward, towards the fallible Human her/himself. "Have mercy on me" not because I am evil, but because I, befuddled biped straddling the worlds of Ape and Angel, really don't ultimately know what my heart and soul needs to know, and can only grope about with the Way flashing distorted before me like a lightning-lit landscape. It is the cry of all human want and hurt. It is the plea that makes brothers of a St. John of the Cross and an Iggy Pop. It is the hunger of flesh and spirit shared by a St. Teresa and a Patti Smith. And please, it seems to echo as an afterthought, let me find the strength to have mercy on my fellow Homo sapiens caught in the same bind: a tiny strand of an immense Web of Life, yet the only one we can really know and live.
The Prayer recalls the East most strongly when its recommended use is given: with each breath, inhale "Lord Jesus Christ," and exhale "Have mercy on me." Repeat as necessary; like exercise, more reps = more power. As with a Yoga session or a round of bodywork, the technique makes one immediately aware of how the lungs serve as the muscles of consciousness. The deep, even drawing of breath, coupled with the mind focused to Christ's love and power, can lead into places inaccessible and unimaginable from "normal" reality's attention-stealing storm of distraction. Sometimes it seems as if one is breathing with the very pulse of Life itself, following the steady rhythm of the Universe and surfing effortlessly on God's boundless waves of energy.
III. AN ANCIENT PRAYER FOR A POST-MODERN WORLD
In The Way of a Pilgrim, one might see both a specific Slavic consciousness and a universal human perspective alive in the narrator. His passionate drive to transcend the pain and oppression historically meted out to Russian commoners recalls Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn alike. Yet he is recognizably one with men and women of all places and ages, as he tries to confront the hardships and tragedies of pure human existence while pursuing truth and love in the footsteps of God. Robbed of livelihood, home and wife by a series of disasters, and wandering the margins of an utterly medieval society as steamships and telegraph lines across the globe herald the earliest stirrings of a future Information Society, his faith nevertheless holds as steadily as Job's.
For he has learned that Life itself is transitory, and best experienced both simply, and while deeply in love with one's Creator and all of one's fellow prisoners of flesh. The repetition of the Jesus Prayer, focusing the center of one's consciousness on the Passion and Mystery that has enraptured over a billion human beings for twenty centuries, initiates a mental and spiritual alchemy that transforms leaden language into a golden flame of gnosis. The Christ rises in the core of one's consciousness as his Name is called upon for tender mercy in the face of the world's overarching pain, confusion and doubt.
Yet for both the Way's narrator, and for the reader absorbing his words fifteen decades and half a planet away, the hesychast seems not to lead so much towards monkish withdrawal, as towards compassion, involvement and service towards the world. The roundabout path the Pilgrim treads between the Black Sea's warm shores and Irktusk's Siberian permafrost, and the variety of characters he meets along the way, might serve as a metaphor for human life itself. The way of the world is the classic African-American spiritual's "lonesome valley" that must be walked alone: largely undirected, wholly unpredictable, and filled with unceasing hard calls and setbacks. In its face, a simple calm-center of reciprocal love to the Logos can be the simple ingredient that makes bad times bearable, good times wonderful, and the spark of the Divine within us all flicker strong and bright. .
After all, from the beginning the Christian Path has been a social one, with the deepest prayers calling us to fellowship with others -- equals before God. "Gather together in My name" is as appropriate for the modern city-dweller searching for human warmth in a world seemingly infected with semi-permanent mass sociopathy, as it is for the monk or nun cloistered with fellow Religious in a remote retreat.
On the brink of the Third Millennium, the West --and by extension, the global community -- stands at a foreboding place. It seems that the poet Robinson Jeffers' "Diagram" metaphor has made itself manifest: the path of God now arcs well past noon in human consciousness, while the "yet vaster curve" of Technology rockets to a glorious mid-morning with no peak in sight. While acknowledging the wonderful tools granted to us by human ingenuity -- this is being written on a Dell PC -- we see that the dizzying floods of raw information, the ever-accelerating rates of change and the hyper-productive treadmill of the postmodern workplace are robbing human consciousness of one of its greatest strengths: the ability to turn off the noise of the World and focus one's mind, heart and soul upon the Divine.
Can the Jesus Prayer help here? In this author's opinion, it is invaluable as a grounding for the overamped electric charge of modern life. Merely by praying with each breath, many repetitions can be performed in a relatively short space of time, and in virtually any setting. Soon it becomes part of the metabolic beat itself, not so much eliminating as muffling the distractions of waking life which have been expanding exponentially in the Information Age. Thessalonians' prescription is sound: for true spiritual uplift, invoke it without ceasing, if possible. (Among other things, the Prayer helps counter the negative psychic effects of such deliberately-overloaded stimuli as advertising, whose creators know only too well the Power of Frequent Invocation.)
Paradoxically, the very simplicity of the words and action lends it perfectly to busy modern society. When coordinated with breathing, the Prayer can easily engage one's consciousness in the midst of the rhythmic activities that seem to occupy most of our time. Walking, driving, physical labor, exercise and lovemaking -- to name a few things -- all take on the focus of the Divine when coupled with the Prayer. Like musical accompaniment, the Prayer seems to take the edge off work, and add an extra intensity to pleasure.
Perhaps our nameless Pilgrim said it best: "[W]hen we concentrate within ourselves, when we draw away from everything around us and become more subtle and refined in mind, then the soul comes into its own and works to its fullest power." We need to work that power more than ever now, as our worldly ambition and the high-tech tools at its service have driven the "sound and fury, signifying nothing" into a deafening roar unprecedented in human consciousness, and woefully untempered by the discipline and love needed to keep the entire planet from turning into a combined carnival-sideshow and abattoir. The peace of the Kingdom of Heaven still lives within all of us, and the path of the hesychast -- a repeated seven-word Christian mantra petitioning God for that which even the wealthiest and most powerful among us must beg from Him -- could very well be the Royal Road that can lead a spiritually-impoverished society towards a true New Jerusalem of peace and love.
"Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me". Pray without ceasing.
Such may be our best and brightest hope for a consciousness revolution long overdue. Only our own efforts here, and the will of God, shall make it so.