reciting the Jesus prayer

Orthodoxy & reciting the Jesus prayer

Posted on 05/11/2012 by lucas

Children talking to their Father
Do not become led lost by external methods when committed in the inner Jesus Prayer.
For some people they are necessary,
but not for you.
In your case, the time for such methods has already passed.
You must already know by experience the place of the heart which about I speak:
do not bother about the rest.
The work of God is simple:
it’s prayer – children talking to their Father, without any quality of being.
May the Lord give you wisdom for your Salvation.
For someone who has not yet found the way to enter within himself, pilgrimages to Holy places are a help.
But for him, who has found it
they are a dissipation of energy,
for they force him to come out from
the innermost part of himself.
It is time for you now to learn more perfectly
how to remain within.
You should abandon your external plans.
Theophan the recluse
We repeat the Jesus prayer with our lips
while trying at the same time to focus
our attention on the words of the prayer.
The nous takes the Jesus prayer and says it noëtically.
Our whole attention is centered again in the words,
but is concentrated on the nous.
After the nous has rested,
we start again to concentrate our attention there.
Saint Neilos advises:
“Always remember God and your nous will become heaven“.
The Jesus prayer then descends into the heart.
Nous and heart are united.
The attention now is centered in the heart
and is immersed again into the words of the Jesus prayer,
and primarily into the name of Jesus which has an imperceptible depth.
The prayer now becomes automatic.
It is done while the ascetic is working, eating, discussing
or while he is in church or even while he is sleeping.
“I sleep but by heart wakes“[Song of Songs 5: 2],
is said in the Holy Scripture.
from “A Night in the Desert of the Holy Mountain“.
Keep away from methods
Saint Simeon and other writers in the Philokalia
suggest physical methods to be used in
conjunction with the Jesus Prayer.
Some people are much absorbed in these external methods
that they forget about proper work of prayer;
in others, prayer itself is distorted because of using these methods.
Since then, for lack of instructors
these physical techniques may be accompanied by harmful effects,
we don’t describe them.
In any case they are nothing but an external aid to the inner work and are in no way essential.
What essential is this;
to acquire the habit of standing with the mind in the heart
– of being within this physical heart of ours,
although not physically.
It is necessary to bring the mind down from the head into the heart
and to establish it there, as one of the Fathers put it,
to join the mind in the heart.
But how is this achieved? Seek and you will find.
The easiest way to achieve it is by walking before God,
and by the work of prayer, especially by going to church.
But we must remember that ours is only the labor;
the object itself, that is the union of mind and heart, is a gift of Grace,
which the Lord grants to us and when He chooses.
The best example is Maximos of Kapsokalyvia*.
[* Monk of mount Athos in the middle of the 14^th cnt, contemporary and friend of Saint Gregory of Sinaï.
For a long time he prayer to the Theotokos that
he might be granted with the gift of unceasing prayer:
then one day, as he stood in fervent prayer before her Icon,
he suddenly felt a particular warmth in his heart
– what Theophan elsewhere terms the ‘spark’of Grace
– and from that moment unceasing prayer never left him]
What Hesychast prayer actually signified to Maximos is revealed most fully in the long conversation
between him and Gregory of Sinaï…
Gregory, so we are told, having learnt about Maximos’ fame and wishing to meet him,
sent his disciples to seek out the hermit.
But Maximos was still in his nomadic phase; he had recently burnt his cell,
and no one knew where he had gone.
The disciples searched in vain for two days, suffering severely from the winter cold.
Eventually Maximos came out from hiding of his own accord,
and agreed to meet Gregory.
The Sinaïte pressed Maximos to tell him about his spiritual life.
Initially he refused, claiming that his wits were deranged: πεπλανημένος ειμί.
As ever, folly serves as a mask behind which to shelter, as a way of avoiding praise.
Under pressure he then consented to give a full answer.
He began by telling Gregory about his youthful experiences,
about his “feigned madness and folly“, his vision of the Mother of God,
and the Divine Light that encircled him then and on other occasions.
“Tell me“, asked Gregory, “do you possess inner prayer (νοερά προσευχή)?”
“Yes“, Maximos answered with a smile, “Ι have possessed it from my youth“.
And, stressing once more his special love for the Mother of God,
he went on to describe an experience
that had happened to him before he became a hermit.
He told his experience about the day he was praying
to the Virgin with tears for the Grace of inner prayer.
Growth in prayer has no end
You read the Philokalia?
Good. Do not let yourself be confused by the writings of Ignatios and Kalistos Xanthopoulos, Gregory of Sinaï, and Nikephoros.
Try to find whether someone has ‘the life of staretz Païssy Velichkovsky’.
It contains prefaces to certain texts in the Philokalia, composed by staretz Basil, and these prefaces explain about the place of mechanical techniques when reciting the Jesus Prayer. They will help you, too, to understand everything correctly. I have already told you that in your case these mechanical techniques are not necessary. What they would produce you already possessed from the moment you felt the call to practice the Prayer.
But do not come to the wrong conclusion that your journey on the path of prayer is already completed.
Growth in prayer has no end. If this growth ceases it means that life ceases.
May the Lord save you and have mercy on you!
It is possible to lose the right state, and to accept the mere memory of it as being the state itself. God forbid that this should happen to you!
You feel you suffer from wandering thoughts. Take care: that is very dangerous.
The enemy wants to drive you into some thicket and kill you there.
thoughts begin to wander when the fear of God decreases and the heart grows cool. The cooling down of the heart is caused by many things – chiefly by smugness and conceit. There are very close to your nature.
Beware of them and make haste to restore the fear of God and a feeling of warmth to your soul.
Theophan the recluse
“Remember, O my soul, the terrible and frightful wonder:
that your Creator for your sake became Man,
and deigned to suffer for the sake of your Salvation.
His angels tremble, the Cherubim are terrified, the Seraphim are in fear,
and all the Heavenly Powers ceaselessly give praise;
and you, unfortunate soul, remain in laziness.
At least from this time forth arise and do not put off,
my beloved soul, holy repentance,
contrition of heart and penance for your sins“.
“The enemy likes to hide the truth and to mix good with evil.
But how can one find out the truth?
God’s goodwill and all our intentions are
meek, full of good hope, and undoubting.
Not only in our good deeds, but also in our lawlessness,
God endures long with meekness and awaits our repentance.
And how can one distinguish the impulse of the enemy?
The enemy usually hinders us and turns us away from good.
However, if in anything which apparently is good,
the mind is disturbed and causes us disturbance,
banishes the fear of God, deprives us of calmness,
so that without any reason the heart aches and the mind wavers,
then know that this is an impulse from the enemy and cut it off”.
Saint Paisius Velichkovsky [feastday, November 15^th]
It’s not the words that matter, but
your love for GodIf your heart grows warm
through reading ordinary prayers,
than kindle its inner warmth towards God in this way.
The Jesus Prayer, if said mechanically, is valueless:
it is no more help
than any other prayer spoken by the tongue and lips.
As you recite the Jesus Prayer, try at the same time to quicken your realization that our Lord Himself is near,
that He stands in your soul and listens to
what is happening within it.
Awaken in your soul the thirst for Salvation, and
the assurance that our Lord alone can bring it.
And then cry out to Him whom in your thoughts you see before you:
“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy upon me“, or:
“O, merciful Lord, save me in the way You knows“, or simply “Lord, have mercy“.
It is not the words that matter, but your feelings towards the Lord, our Savior.
The spiritual burning of the heart for God springs from our Love for Him.
It kindles from the Lord’s touch on the heart. Because He is entirely Love, His touch on the heart immediately kindles love for Him; and from love comes burning of the heart towards Him. It’s this which must be the object of your search.
Let the Jesus Prayer be on your tongue; let God’s presence be before your mind; and in your heart let there be the thirst for God, for communion with the Lord. When all this becomes permanent, then the Lord, seeing how you exert yourself, will give you what you ask.
Theophan the recluse
God’s sparkWhat do we seek through the Jesus Prayer?
We seek for the fire of Grace to appear in our hart, and
we seek for the beginning of unceasing prayer which manifests a state of Grace.
When God’s spark falls into the hart,
the Jesus Prayer fans it into flame.
The prayer doesn’t of itself produce the spark, but helps us to receive it.
How does it help? By collecting our thoughts, by enabling the soul to stand before the Lord and to walk in His presence.
This is the most important part – to stand and walk before God, to
call on Him out of your heart.
This was what Maximos of Kapsokalyvia did: and
those who seek the fire of Grace should do the same.
They should not worry about words and positions of the body,
for God looks upon the heart.
If anyone should ask me how to carry out the task of prayer,
I would say to him:
Accustom yourself to walk in the presence of God,
keep remembrance of Him, and be reverent.
To preserve this remembrance, choose a few short prayers and repeat them often with appropriate thoughts and feelings.
As you accustom yourself to this, remembrance of God will bring Light in your mind and warmth to your heart.
And when you attain this state, God’s spark, the rate of Grace,
will fall at last into your heart.
There is no way in which you yourself can produce it: it comes direct from God. When it comes, dwell in the Jesus Prayer alone, and with this prayer blow the spark of Grace into flame. This is the most direct way.
Theophan the recluse
“My child, . . . . . I’ll see you in My Kingdom!”
From our Baptism and our Chrismation, we receive Priesthood,
we are priests of God, but not with the same way as the ordained priests of the Church. When we use the prayer of the heart deeply,
we do a kind of continued Divine Liturgy in our heart.
MP3: “My Lord Jesus Christ, help me!” – [Coptic Monk's in the Californian desert]
tekst Pdf: Lord Jesus, help me
“Lord, have mercy, upon me, a sinner“.
source