Kallis­tos (Ware) Bishop of Diok­leia

The aim of the Jesus Prayer, as of all Chris­t­ian prayer, is that our pray­ing should be­come in­creas­ingly iden­ti­fied with the prayer of­fered by Jesus the High Priest within us, that our life should be­come one with his life, our breath­ing with the Di­vine Breath that sus­tains the uni­verse. The final ob­jec­tive may aptly be de­scribed by the Pa­tris­tic term theo­sis, "de­ifi­ca­tion" or "di­viniza­tion". In the words of Arch­priest Sergei Bul­gakov, "The Name of Jesus, pre­sent in the human heart, con­fers upon it the power of de­ifi­ca­tion". "The Logos be­came man", says St. Athana­sius, "that we might be­come god". He who is God by na­ture took our hu­man­ity, that we hu­mans might share by grace in his di­vin­ity, be­com­ing "par­tak­ers of the di­vine na­ture" (2Пет. 1:4). The Jesus Prayer, ad­dressed to the Logos In­car­nate, is a means of re­al­iz­ing within our­selves this mys­tery of theo­sis, whereby human per­sons at­tain the true like­ness of God.

The Jesus Prayer, by unit­ing us to Christ, helps us to share in the mu­tual in­dwelling or peri­chore­sis of the three Per­sons of the Holy Trin­ity. The more the Prayer be­comes a part of our­selves, the more we enter into the move­ment of love which passes un­ceas­ingly be­tween Fa­ther, Son, and Holy Spirit. Of this love St. Isaac the Syr­ian has writ­ten with great beauty:

Love is the king­dom of which our Lord spoke sym­bol­i­cally when he promised his dis­ci­ples that they would eat In his king­dom: "You shall eat and drink at the table of my king­dom". What should they eat, if not love?... When we have reached love, we have reached God and our way is ended: we have passed over to the is­land that lies be­yond the world, where is the Fa­ther with the Son and the Holy Spirit: to whom be glory and do­min­ion.

In the Hesy­chast tra­di­tion, the mys­tery of theo­sis has most often taken the out­ward form of a vi­sion of light. This light which the saints be­hold in prayer is nei­ther a sym­bol­i­cal light of the in­tel­lect, nor yet a phys­i­cal and cre­ated light of the senses. It is noth­ing less than the di­vine and un­cre­ated Light of the God­head, which shone from Christ at his Trans­fig­u­ra­tion on Mount Tabor and which will il­lu­mine the whole world at his sec­ond com­ing on the Last Day. Here is a char­ac­ter­is­tic pas­sage on the Di­vine Light taken from St. Gre­gory Pala­mas. He is de­scrib­ing the Apos­tle’s vi­sion when he was caught up into the third heaven (2Кор. 12:2-4):

Paul saw a light with­out lim­its below or above or to the sides; he saw no limit what­ever to the light that ap­peared to him and shone around him, but it was like a sun in­fi­nitely brighter and vaster than the uni­verse; and in the midst of this sun he him­self stood, hav­ing be­come noth­ing but eye.

Such is the vi­sion of glory to which we may ap­proach through the In­vo­ca­tion of the Name.

The Jesus Prayer causes the bright­ness of the Trans­fig­u­ra­tion to pen­e­trate into every cor­ner of our life. Con­stant rep­e­ti­tion has two ef­fects upon the anony­mous au­thor of The Way of a Pil­grim. First, it trans­forms his re­la­tion­ship with the ma­te­r­ial cre­ation around him, mak­ing all things trans­par­ent, chang­ing them into a sacra­ment of God’s pres­ence. He writes:

When I prayed with my heart, every­thing around me seemed de­light­ful and mar­vel­lous. The trees, the grass, the birds, the earth, the air, the light seemed to be telling me that they ex­isted for man’s sake, that they wit­nessed to the love of God for man, that every­thing proved the love of God for man, that all things prayed to God and sang his praise. Thus it was that I came to un­der­stand what The Philokalia calls "the knowl­edge of the speech of all crea­tures"... I felt a burn­ing love for Jesus and for all God’s crea­tures.

In the words of Fa­ther Bul­gakov, "Shin­ing through the heart, the light of the Name of Jesus il­lu­mi­nates all the uni­verse".

In the sec­ond place, the Prayer trans­fig­ures the Pil­grim’s re­la­tion not only with the ma­te­r­ial cre­ation but with other hu­mans:

Again I started off on my wan­der­ings. But now I did not walk along as be­fore, filled with care. The In­vo­ca­tion of the Name of Jesus glad­dened my way. Every­body was kind to me, it was as though every­one loved me... If any­one harms me I have only to think, "How sweet is the Prayer of Jesus!" and the in­jury and the anger alike pass away and I for­get it all.

"Inas­much as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me" (Мф. 25:40). The Jesus Prayer helps us to see Christ in each one, and each one in Christ.

The In­vo­ca­tion of the Name is in this way joy­ful rather than pen­i­ten­tial, world-af­firm­ing rather than world-deny­ing. To some, hear­ing about the Jesus Prayer for the first time, it may ap­pear that to sit alone in the dark­ness with eyes closed, con­stantly re­peat­ing "...have mercy on me", is a gloomy and de­spon­dent way of pray­ing. And they may also be tempted to re­gard it as self-cen­tred and es­capist, in­tro­verted, an eva­sion of re­spon­si­bil­ity to the human com­mu­nity at large. But this would be a grave mis­un­der­stand­ing. For those who have ac­tu­ally made the Way of the Name their own, it turns out to be not som­bre and op­pres­sive but a source of lib­er­a­tion and heal­ing. The warmth and joy­ful­ness of the Jesus Prayer is par­tic­u­larly ev­i­dent in the writ­ings of St. Hesy­chius of Sinai (eighth-ninth cen­tury):

Through per­sis­tence in the Jesus Prayer the in­tel­lect at­tains a state of sweet­ness and peace... The more the rain falls on the earth, the softer it makes it; sim­i­larly, the more we call upon Christ’s Holy Name, the greater the re­joic­ing and ex­ul­ta­tion it brings to the earth of our heart... The sun ris­ing over the earth cre­ates the day­light; and the ven­er­a­ble and Holy Name of the Lord Jesus, shin­ing con­tin­u­ally in the mind, gives birth to count­less thoughts ra­di­ant as the sun.

More­over, so far from turn­ing our backs on oth­ers and re­pu­di­at­ing God’s cre­ation when we say the Jesus Prayer, we are in fact af­firm­ing our com­mit­ment to our neigh­bour and our sense of the value of every­one and every­thing in God. "Ac­quire inner peace", said St. Seraphim of Sarov (1759 - 1833), "and thou­sands around you will find their sal­va­tion". By stand­ing in Christ’s pres­ence even for no more than a few mo­ments of each day, in­vok­ing his Name, we deepen and trans­form all the re­main­ing mo­ments of the day, ren­der­ing our­selves avail­able to oth­ers, ef­fec­tive and cre­ative, in a way that we could not oth­er­wise be. And if we also use the Prayer in a "free" man­ner through­out the day, this en­ables us to "set the di­vine seal on the world", to adopt a phrase of Dr. Nade­jda Gorodet­zky (1901 - 1985):

We can apply this Name to peo­ple, books, flow­ers, to all things we meet, see or think. The Name of Jesus may be­come a mys­ti­cal key to the world, an in­stru­ment of the hid­den of­fer­ing of every­thing and every­one, set­ting the di­vine seal on the world. One might per­haps speak here of the priest­hood of all be­liev­ers. In union with our High Priest, we im­plore the Spirit: Make my prayer into a sacra­ment.

"We can apply this Name to peo­ple..." Here Dr. Gorodet­zky sug­gests a pos­si­ble an­swer to a ques­tion that is often raised: Can the Jesus Prayer be used as a form of in­ter­ces­sion? The reply must be that, in the strict sense, it is dis­tinct from in­ter­ces­sory prayer. As an ex­pres­sion of non-dis­cur­sive, non-iconic "wait­ing upon God", it does not in­volve the ex­plicit re­call­ing and men­tion of par­tic­u­lar names. We sim­ply turn to Jesus. It is true, of course, that in turn­ing to Jesus we do not thereby turn away from our fel­low hu­mans. All those whom we love are al­ready em­braced in his heart, loved by him in­fi­nitely more than by us, and so in the end through the Jesus Prayer we find them all again in him; in­vok­ing the Name, we enter more and more fully into Christ’s over­flow­ing love for the en­tire world. But if we are fol­low­ing the tra­di­tional Hesy­chast pat­tern of the Jesus Prayer, we do not bring oth­ers be­fore him specif­i­cally by name, or hold them de­lib­er­ately in our mind, as we re­cite the In­vo­ca­tion.

All this, how­ever, does not ex­clude the pos­si­bil­ity of also giv­ing to the Jesus Prayer an in­ter­ces­sory di­men­sion. On oc­ca­sion, alike in the "free" and the "for­mal" use, we may feel moved to "apply" the Name to one or more par­tic­u­lar per­sons, in­vok­ing Jesus upon them as we say "...have mercy on us", or even in­clud­ing the ac­tual name or names, "...have mercy on John". Even if this is not ex­actly what the Hesy­chast texts en­vis­age, it is surely a le­git­i­mate and help­ful ex­ten­sion to the prac­tice of the Jesus Prayer. The Way of the Name has a wide­ness, a gen­eros­ity, not to be con­fined within rigid and un­vary­ing rules.

"Prayer is ac­tion; to pray is to be highly ef­fec­tive". Of no prayer is this more true than of the Jesus Prayer. While it is sin­gled out for par­tic­u­lar men­tion in the of­fice of monas­tic pro­fes­sion as a prayer for monks and nuns, it is equally a prayer for lay­men, for mar­ried cou­ples, for doc­tors and psy­chi­a­trists, for so­cial work­ers and bus con­duc­tors. The In­vo­ca­tion of the Name, prac­tised aright, in­volves each one more deeply in his or her ap­pointed task, mak­ing each more ef­fi­cient in his ac­tions, not cut­ting him off from oth­ers but link­ing him to them, ren­der­ing him sen­si­tive to their fears and anx­i­eties in a way that he never was be­fore. The Jesus Prayer makes each into a "man for oth­ers", a liv­ing in­stru­ment of God’s peace, a dy­namic cen­tre of rec­on­cil­i­a­tion.