Showing posts with label Jesus Prayer. Show all posts

Frederica Mathewes-Green is a member of the Antiochian Orthodox Church.  A convert from Anglicanism, she is in a good position to explain Orthodox spiritual practices to Western Christians.  In The Jesus Prayer:  the ancient desert prayer that tunes the heart to God (Paraclete Press 2009), she gives a wealth of advice on how we may incorporate this prayer into our own spiritual practice.  Pp 80-82 deal with the objections some beginners--or even more experienced folks--might have with the notion of beseeching Jesus for mercy ("Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me").  As the excerpt below demonstrates, it all depends on how we interpret the word "mercy".

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People newly introduced to the Jesus Prayer often think:  Why should we continually beg God for mercy?  Can't we be certain that he has already forgiven us?  What, do we have to grovel?

The problem, I think, is that we are imagining a prisoner in court, begging the judge for mercy.  It is up to the judge whether to kill this man or free him, and she is justifiably angry.  His only hope is to squirm and plead, and beg her to be lenient.

Picture instead the man in Jesus' parable (Lk 10:  30-37) who was robbed and beaten on the road to Jericho, then left for dead.  His helplessness was so extreme that he was not even able to ask passersby for mercy, and the priest and scribe passed by on the other side of the road.  Yet, the Samaritan saw him and had compassion, and rescued him from death.

That's the kind of "mercy" the Jesus Prayer asks for.  We are not trying to get off the hook for a crime, but recognizing how the infection of sin has damaged us.  Revealing all the extent of our illness to the heavenly physician, we seek his compassionate healing.

The word in Hebrew is hesed, which has the sense of long-suffering love.  The prophet Hosea married a woman who was a prostitute.  Though she betrayed him many times, he kept seeking her and drawing her back again to himself.  This is hesed love, long-suffering love, a love that is valiant and breaks through the walls of self-love and pride.

In Greek, the word is eleos, and many of the Western liturgical churches still pray in Greek, "Kyrie, eleison," that is, "Lord, have mercy."

A listener in the ancient church would have heard a resonance between eleos and elaion, the word for olive oil.  Your experience with olive oil might be limited to salads, but in the ancient Mediterranean world, olive oil was used in a wide variety of ways, and filled essential roles.  A wick placed in a clay lamp filled with olive oil could burn and illuminate the darkness.  Medicinal herbs were combined with olive oil for healing; the Good Samaritan "bound up [the beaten man's] wounds, pouring on oil and wine" (the latter for the antiseptic quality of alcohol).  Olive oil would also be a medium for fragrant herbs in the making of perfume.  And of course it would be eaten; in a region where there were few sources of fat, olive oil provided essential nutrition.  Sufficient fat in the diet conferred a health glow, and the psalmist thanks God for giving "wine to gladden the heart of man, and oil to make his face shine" (Ps 104:  15).  This poetic echo between eleos and elaion contributed to a richer sense of "mercy" than we perceive in English.

I would guess that the majority of Christians I talk to don't particularly feel a need for mercy.  They might think of repentance as an initial step toward salvation, but that once you have become a follower of Jesus Christ, once you're baptized and going regularly to church, you're set for life.  There's still plenty of work to do, of course--work for the poor, for justice, for the church, for your family--but as far as you go, personally, you're pretty much done.

In the contemporary West, repentance is now considered an introductory activity to life in Christ (if it's considered at all); in the East, repentance lasts for a lifetime.  Salvation means healing from the sickness of sin, and we are always seeking to confront the sin that infects us, and to be healed at ever deeper levels.

Tito Colliander (1904-1989) was an ethnic Swede who was born in czarist St Petersburg and spent most of his life in Finland. He and his wife converted to the Finnish Orthodox Church as adults. He was primarily a novelist who wrote in Swedish but also left behind a body of spiritual writings. Probably the most significant of these is Way of the Ascetics (St Vladimir Seminary Press 2003). Chapter 25 (the book is available here online) deals with the Jesus Prayer.

I can resonate with what Colliander says about the Jesus Prayer because my own use of it, while regular (most of the time), is hardly effortless. The "monkey mind" is still an uninvited guest during prayer time, and the whole practice is not in the least glamorous. Colliander gives us a much-needed reminder that prayer is not an end in itself, but a means of preparing the ground of our souls for the raining down of God's grace.

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...Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Repeat it aloud, or only in thought, slowly, lingeringly, but with attention, and from a heart freed as much as possible from all that is inappropriate to it. Not only worldly thoughts are inappropriate, but also such things as every kind of expectation or thought of answer, or inner visions, testings, all kinds of romantic dreams, curious questionings and imaginings. Simplicity is as inescapable a condition as humility, abstemiousness of body and soul, and in general everything that pertains to the invisible warfare.

Especially should the beginner beware of everything that has the slightest tendency to mysticism. The Jesus Prayer is an activity, a practical work and a means by which you enable yourself to receive and use the power called God's grace--constantly present, however hidden within the baptized person--in order that it may bear fruit. Prayer fructifies this power in our soul, it has no other purpose. It is a hammer that crushes a shell: a hammer is hard and its strike hurts. Abandon every thought of pleasantness, rapture, heavenly voices: there is only one way to the kingdom of God, and that is the way of the cross...

If you hammer a nutshell too hard, you may crush the kernel as well. Lay on with caution. Do not pass over suddenly to the Jesus Prayer. Hold back to begin with, and even afterward, use your other prayer practices as well. Do not be overanxious. And do not suppose that you can pray proper attention to a single Lord, have mercy. Your prayer is bound to be divided and scattered; you are, indeed, human...Do not shriek to high heaven in amazement if at the beginning you completely forget your prayer practice for many hours at a time, perhaps for a whole day or longer. Take it naturally and simply: you are an inexperienced sailor who has been so anxiously occupied with other things that he forgot to keep watch on the breezes. Thus, expect nothing of yourself. But do not demand anything of others, either.

Thomas Merton (1915-1968) died 40 years ago today, which I observe as a feast-day in my own customized liturgical calendar. He entered the Trappist monastery of Gethsemani on this date in 1941, which was precisely the mid-point of his life. One scarcely knows where to look in his huge literary output (mostly written during a two-hour period in the course of his monastic day) for a suitable quote, but I was lucky to come across something in a very fine book, Merton and Hesychasm (Bernadette Dieker and Jonathan Montaldo, eds., Fons Vitae, Louisville, 2003), which is an anthology of articles by Merton and others dealing with his fruitful engagement with Eastern Christianity. This is from a transcript of a lecture given to the novices during the early '60's and illustrates his ability to combine deep comittment to traditional spirituality with a certain breezy irreverence. The quotes are found on pp 455 and 464 of the book.

But it is important to get some form of prayer that really just expresses everything. Obviously the classic example of this kind of prayer is what is called the Prayer of Jesus, which the Oriental monks use a great deal. Which is very, simply--what's the formula they repeat in the Prayer of Jesus, quite a long one?

"Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner."

Kyrie Jesu Christe, Elaison...

Learn it in Russian, learn it in Greek. Say it. Pep up your spiritual life with the Jesus prayer in the various languages. It's a fine prayer. It's a bit long though. You don't have to say [one] that long. You can just say "Lord Jesus Christ have mercy." You can say "My Jesus, mercy" if you want. That is a Western form. Anything like that....

Sinai is the starting point of a tradition in contemplative prayer. Who knows the name of this tradition in contemplative prayer?

The hesychast tradition. Let's write "hesychast" on the board.

What's hesychast--who's a Greek scholar? You haven't had that much Greek yet--anybody knows what a hesychast is? He's a man who likes "hesychia"--he likes "sweetness", sweetness and rest and quiet and so forth. He loves the rest of contemplation, the sweetness and rest of contemplation. A hesychast is one who likes sweetness and rest, preferably off some place in a cave or something like that.

So the story of the Oriental mystical tradition as the hesychast tradition--it's a little more than just sweetness and rest. It's built around the Prayer of Jesus....

You can say it in Greek, you can say it in Russian, and you can say it in all sorts of things. And this is repeated over and over again in a special technique--this is very good, you ought to know this. You breathe in a certain way--you say it when you're breathing and so forth. You could do this during the morning meditation. It's the easiest possible way to spend the half hour fruitfully in church, I assure you. Don't go too far with the breathing. The idea is to concentrate on this prayer, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner," until you follow your breath down to your heart and then BOOM, a big light comes. That's Hesychasm. You see, you get the light of Tabor and it shines and so forth. That's getting a little risque, but that's this tradition.