Book Review

The Jesus Prayer
By Bishop Kallistos Ware
Publisher: London: Incorporated Catholic Truth Society, 2014.
ISBN: 9781-86082-893-5

“How can we make prayer not merely something that we do, but something that we are?” This simple but profound question is at the core of this booklet on the Jesus Prayer. This tradition of prayer calls upon the practitioner to pray without ceasing, from the spiritual heart. Ceaseless prayer has the power to transform us simply because we tend to become what we do. Ware writes, “The effect of the Jesus Prayer has been rightly described as homecoming. It enables us to return home, becoming our own true self, the person whom God calls us to be.”

The Jesus Prayer is the most popular method of prayer in the Christian Orthodox Church. The prayer itself is ten words in English: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.” It is a simple, direct appeal repeated continuously in a spirit of obedience, stillness, and surrender to the will of God. It is described as an “arrow prayer,” one that is, in the words of St. Augustine, “very brief and shot forth” from the heart of the devotee. The force behind that “arrow” is the devotee’s need for the divine Presence. It is a cry of the soul that Fr. John Main described as maranatha, an Aramaic phrase from the Bible meaning “Our Lord, come.”

Bishop Kallistos Ware, an English convert to Eastern Orthodoxy who became one of its best-known contemporary theologians, was introduced to this prayer at a young age. He describes an event from his youth that lit the fire of his yearning to know God. A preacher in his church recounted this story in his sermon:

Once there was an old man who spent several hours each day in church. “What are you doing there?” his friends enquired. “I’m praying,” he replied. “Praying!” they exclaimed. “There must be a great many things that you want to ask from God.” With some indignation the old man responded, “I’m not asking God for anything.” “What are you doing, then?” they said. And the old man replied, “I just sit and look at God, and God sits and looks at me.”

This was a pivotal moment for Ware, shattering and reforming his concept of prayer and devotion.

Throughout this little book Ware speaks directly to the longing within every spiritual aspirant to know God, and he outlines a simple and clear practice enabling them to fulfill it. Ware is practical, kind, and empathetic to the reader. He is aware of the difficulties of continuous prayer, acknowledging the struggle while offering positive and wise counsel.

As Ware explains, the Jesus Prayer originated with the Desert Fathers of Egypt in the 4th and 5th centuries, monks who sought the solitude of the desert to divest themselves of everything that was not for God and of God. They advocated the prayer as a way of simplifying and unifying the mind by focusing on the single purpose of meeting the Divine. Recited with intensity, the prayer creates recollection and continuous contemplation of the One. The simplicity of the practice also ensures that anyone can do it.

Although the Jesus Prayer meant to be repeated throughout the day, it is most intensely practiced and experienced in times of stillness and silence, “when our whole attention is concentrated on the act of praying.”

The quest for stillness (hesychia) is at the heart of the prayer. Ware explains that silence leads to listening: the hesychast, or silent one, “is par excellence the one who listens, who waits expectantly upon the Spirit.” But one who seeks silence and listening is often assailed with distracting thoughts, “aimless and futile, irrelevant to the work of prayer.” While we cannot simply stop thinking, we can assign our “ever-active mind … a simple and unifying task: the repeated invocation of the Holy Name of Jesus.” Here the simplicity of the Jesus Prayer helps: “Because the words … are few and straightforward, and because they are regularly repeated, it is a prayer that leads us through words into silence.”

The stilling of the mind is aided by the elimination of all images at the time of prayer. Evagrius of Pontus (346-399) advised, “Do not shape within yourself any image of the Deity, and do not let your intellect be stamped with the impress of any form.” Other Christian texts such as The Cloud of Unknowing (an anonymous text of the 14th century) and The Dark Night of the Soul (by Saint John of the Cross in the 16th century) also call for dwelling upon God’s “total and immediate presence,” not any image. Thus, not only thoughts but also icons, imagination and projections are set aside; there is simply a waiting, watching, and listening. As Ware states, “We think solely of Jesus himself.”

Instead of emphasizing what we want to get rid of, let us rather concentrate on what we hope to acquire. Instead of saying to ourselves, “Drive out all distracting thoughts,” let us say rather, “Think with loving tenderness of the Saviour Jesus.” What we are seeking is not so much a mind stripped of images as a heart full of love. Images and thoughts will constantly rise up within us. Let them recede into the background. In the foreground, put Jesus.

By using words that invoke the presence of God, the Prayer creates “an integral connection between the name and the one who is named.” For “to call upon a person by name is to render that person dynamically present.” Ware quotes the 20th-century French author George Bernanos: “Silence is a presence at the heart of God.” With practice, that presence pervades every thought and activity. As Ware says, “We begin to see all things in Christ and Christ in all things.” The immanence of this presence is such that, as Ware says, “Even when we are not reciting the Prayer, yet at a profound level of our being an awareness of God’s love has not ceased to be present within us, like an afterglow following the sunset.”

Ware distinguishes three levels of the Jesus Prayer: of the lips, of the mind, and of the heart. Besides reciting the words, John Climacus (6th–7th-century Christian monk at the monastery on Mount Sinai) urged us to “contain our mind within the words.” Especially at the beginning, the words may be spoken aloud, but with practice and increased attention they become internalized. The final stage is when the prayer comes from the heart – “heart” meaning primarily not the emotions and feelings but “the spiritual centre of the total human being … the focal point of our personhood as created in the image and likeness of God.” The heart comprises emotions, will, and reason, but also “the higher visionary faculty known in Greek as the nous, whereby we apprehend the glory of God.”

Containing the attention within the silence and stillness opens up our relationship with God, for then his voice can be heard. As it says in the Bible, “Speak, Lord, for Your servant hears.” Ware concludes, “Silence, then, properly understood, implies not isolation but relationship … a losing and finding of oneself in the Other.” This Other is Jesus Christ, the one who is “fully and entirely God and at the same time fully and entirely human, one single person in two complete natures.” With the deepening of the prayer it is not we who pray but Christ who prays within us. As Saint. Paul says in the Bible, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.”

The mystical tradition within Orthodox Christianity also teaches that the faithful use of this prayer can lead to the gift of the light of transfiguration. “This light that is beheld during prayer is not a physical and created light, but spiritual and uncreated.” St. Gregory Palamas (1296-1359) taught that this divine light is nothing less than the “eternal energies of God.”

The practice of the Jesus Prayer and its foundation on stillness and inner contemplation is becoming more prevalent within modern Christian theology. It has a universal appeal, and its foundation of simplicity, consistency, and discipline can be adapted to almost any religious or spiritual endeavor. Ware concludes:

Yet we should not claim concerning the Jesus Prayer “It is the only way.” Nor should we assert, “It is the best way.” But this at least we may say: “It has helped many; it has helped me; perhaps it will also help you.”