I have practiced the Jesus Prayer as a pillar of my personal spirituality for over 40 years. This prayer has become so ingrained in me that occasionally I will notice that it has started itself up in my consciousness on its own. I have repeated the prayer countless times in every kind of circumstance: walking and running, driving, going to sleep, praying, and of course in meditation. It has become a constant companion.
The prayer itself is very simple. The basic form is: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God: have mercy on me, a sinner.”
How does the Jesus Prayer make me a better disciple? That is basically the only question I use to assess the value of anything.
The invocation of the Name of Jesus is intended to accomplish two things. First, it is an appeal to the Christ within me, my Essence. And second, it is a way of identifying and releasing my own ego, which is what prevents the full realization of Christ within me. These two hopes constitute the two parts of the prayer.
Authentic spirituality is a movement from ego to Essence, from “old self” or “the flesh,” to our “new self” or “spirit.” We move from a false, invented, projected, and highly defended ego-centric sense of ourselves as separate, at-risk, alienated, and deluded about its own independence, to a realization of our true self, which is connected to everything and everyone. The true self is Christ within us, through and in whom we realize our integration and participation in all creation, and even the Creator.
Calling on the Name of Jesus awakens us to the Presence of Christ, our true self, within us. It is a desire to see emerging at our very core this original identity, which is Jesus Christ. This Jesus Christ, the Word of God, is the spiritual Presence and Wisdom that flavors and permeates everything that God has breathed into existence. He is the shape and pattern, the wavelength and voiceprint, of the living God. He is the Creator encoded in everything. Therefore, he is the Way to communion with and in everything.
But I admit this is too verbal and abstract. The Jesus Prayer is words… but the words are like an icon, a window to something far deeper. If we just analyze the words, we have done almost nothing.
Usually, when I say the prayer, I connect it with my breath. I inhale on the first phrase: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God,” and exhale on the second: “Have mercy on me, a sinner.” This wedding of the prayer to my breath is supposed to get the words out of my mind and into my body. It physicalizes the prayer, connecting it to sensation. I feel the breath — and also the beating of my heart, and indeed other physical sensations, like the air on my skin, the weight of my body, even the sounds of my environment — and the prayer becomes grounded in the moment. I become present to the moment and the matter of my own body and immediate location.
Just as Jesus Christ is a single, mortal, historical human being for a specific time and in a specific place, and through him we see God and all creation… so also do we need to ground ourselves in a specific time and place by means of physicality and sensation — breath — which becomes the place of our realization of our union with all. But unless we can get down to this Real Presence in an experience and consciousness of our own temporal materiality in this breath, we continue to be lost in the fog of abstract mental processes and interpretations which only separate us from life and reality, and continue to bind us to the old, ego self.
So the Jesus Prayer is about nothing less than becoming Christ. It is a way of fulfilling the saying of Sts. Irenaeus, Athanasius, and other early Christians: “God became human so that humans might become God.”
Robert E. Kennedy put it this way: “Christians are not taught to imitate Christ at all, but to be transformed into Christ. Christians are not urged to copy or repeat the words or gestures of Christ, but to have his mind and be one with his spirit.”
To me, that is what the Jesus Prayer does. It is therefore the foundation and taproot of discipleship.
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