Lord Jesus

Kallis­tos (Ware) Bishop of Diok­leia

It is not, of course, the only way. No au­then­tic re­la­tion­ship be­tween per­sons can exist with­out mu­tual free­dom and spon­tane­ity, and this is true in par­tic­u­lar of inner prayer. There are no fixed and un­vary­ing rules, nec­es­sar­ily im­posed on all who seek to pray; and equally there is no me­chan­i­cal tech­nique, whether phys­i­cal or men­tal, which can com­pel God to man­i­fest his pres­ence. His grace is con­ferred al­ways as a free gift, and can­not be gained au­to­mat­i­cally by any method or tech­nique. The en­counter be­tween God and man in the king­dom of the heart is there­fore marked by an in­ex­haustible va­ri­ety of pat­terns. There are spir­i­tual mas­ters in the Or­tho­dox Church who say lit­tle or noth­ing about the Jesus Prayer. But, even if it en­joys no ex­clu­sive mo­nop­oly in the field of inner prayer, the Jesus Prayer has be­come for in­nu­mer­able East­ern Chris­tians over the cen­turies the stan­dard path, the royal high­way. And not for East­ern Chris­tians only: in the meet­ing be­tween Or­tho­doxy and the West which has oc­curred over the past sev­enty years, prob­a­bly no el­e­ment in the Or­tho­dox her­itage has aroused such in­tense in­ter­est as the Jesus Prayer, and no sin­gle book has ex­er­cised a wider ap­peal than The Way of a Pil­grim. This enig­matic work, vir­tu­ally un­known in pre-rev­o­lu­tion­ary Rus­sia, has had a star­tling suc­cess in the non-Or­tho­dox world and since the 1920s has ap­peared in a wide range of lan­guages. Read­ers of J. D. Salinger will re­call the im­pact of the "small pea-green cloth-bound book" on Franny.

Wherein, we ask, lies the dis­tinc­tive ap­peal and ef­fec­tive­ness of the Jesus Prayer? Per­haps in four things above all: first, in its sim­plic­ity and flex­i­bil­ity; sec­ondly, in its com­plete­ness; thirdly, in the power of the Name; and fourthly, in the spir­i­tual dis­ci­pline of per­sis­tent rep­e­ti­tion. Let us take these points in order.