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| Saint Sophrony the Athonite. |
I propose to devote this chapter to setting
out as briefly as possible the more important aspects of the Jesus Prayer and
the commonsense views regarding this great culture of the heart that I met with
on the Holy Mountain.
Year
after year monks repeat the prayer with their lips, without trying by any
artificial means to join mind and heart. Their attention is concentrated on
harmonizing their life with the commandments of Christ. According to ancient
tradition mind unites with heart through Divine action when the monk continues
in the ascetic feat of obedience and abstinence; when the mind, the heart and
the very body of the ‘old man’ to a sufficient degree are freed from the
dominion over them of sin; when the body becomes worthy to be ‘the temple of the
Holy Ghost’ (cf. Rom. 6. 11-14). However, both early and present day teachers
occasionally permit recourse to a technical method of bringing the mind down
into the heart. To do this, the monk, having suitably settled his body,
pronounces the prayer with his head inclined on his chest, breathing in at the
words ‘Lord Jesus Christ, (Son of God)’ and breathing out to the words ‘have
mercy upon me (a sinner)’. During inhalation the attention at first
follows the movement of the air breathed in as far as the upper part of the
heart. In this manner concentration can soon be preserved without wandering,
and the mind stands side by side with the heart, or even enters within it. This
method eventually enables the mind to see, not the physical heart but that
which is happening within it-the feelings that creep in and the mental images
that approach from without. With this experience, the monk acquires the ability
to feel his heart, and to continue with his attention centered in the heart
without further recourse to any psychosomatic technique.
True
Prayer Comes Through Faith and Repentanc
This
procedure can assist the beginner to understand where his inner attention
should be stayed during prayer and, as a rule, at all other times, too.
Nevertheless, true prayer is not to be achieved thus. True prayer comes
exclusively through faith and repentance accepted as the only foundation. The
danger of psychotechnics is that not a few attribute too great significance to
method qua method. In order to avoid such deformation the beginner should
follow another practice which, though considerably slower, is incomparably
better and more wholesome to fix the attention on the Name of Christ and on the
words of the prayer. When contrition for sin reaches a certain level the mind
naturally heeds the heart.
The
Complete Formula
The
complete formula of the Jesus Prayer runs like this: Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of
God, have mercy upon me, a sinner, and it is this set form that is recommended.
In the first half of the prayer we profess Christ-God made flesh for our
salvation. In the second we affirm our fallen state, our sinfulness, our
redemption. The conjunction of dogmatic confession with repentance makes the
content of the prayer more comprehensive.
Stages
of Development
It
is possible to establish a certain sequence in the development of this prayer.
…First,
it is a verbal matter: we say the prayer with our lips while trying to
concentrate our attention on the Name and the words.
…Next, we no longer move our lips but
pronounce the Name of Jesus Christ, and what follows after, in our minds,
mentally
…In
the third stage mind and heart combine to act together: the attention of the
mind is centered in the heart and the prayer said there.
…Fourthly, the prayer becomes self-propelling.
This happens when the prayer is confirmed in the heart and, with no especial
effort on our part, continues there, where the mind is concentrated.
…Finally, the prayer, so full of blessing,
starts to act like a gentle flame within us, as inspiration from on High, rejoicing
the heart with a sensation of divine love and delighting the mind in spiritual
contemplation. This last state is sometimes accompanied by a vision of Light.
Go
step by step
A
gradual ascent into prayer is the most trustworthy. The beginner who would
embark on the struggle is usually recommended to start with the first step,
verbal prayer, until body, tongue, brain and heart assimilate it. The time that
this takes varies. The more earnest the repentance, the shorter the road.
The
practice of mental prayer may for a while be associated with the hesychastic
method-in other words, it may take the form of rhythmic or a-rhythmic
articulation of the prayer as described above, by breathing in during the first
half and breathing out during the second part. This can be genuinely helpful if
one does not lose sight of the fact that every invocation of the Name of Christ
must be inseparably coupled with a consciousness of Christ Himself. The Name
must not be detached from the Person of God, lest prayer be reduced to a
technical exercise and so contravene the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not take the
name of the Lord thy God in vain’ (EX. 20.7; Deut. 5.11).
Attention
of Mind gained
When
the attention of the mind is fixed in the heart it is possible to control what
happens in the heart, and the battle against the passions assumes a rational
character. The enemy is recognized and can be driven off by the power of the
Name of Christ. With this ascetic feat the heart becomes so highly sensitive,
so discerning, that eventually when praying for anyone the heart can tell
almost at once the state of the person prayed for. Thus the transition
takes place from mental prayer to prayer of the mind and heart, which may be
followed by the gift of prayer that proceeds of itself.
Do
Not Hurry
We
try to stand before God with the whole of our being. Invocation of the Name of
God the Saviour, uttered in the fear of God, together with a constant effort to
live in accordance with the commandments, little by little leads to a blessed
fusion of all our powers. We must never seek to hurry in our ascetic
striving. It. is essential to discard any idea of achieving the maximum in the
shortest possible time. God does not force us but neither can we compel Him to
anything whatsoever. Results obtained by artificial means do not last long and,
more importantly, do not unite our spirit with the Spirit of the Living God.
It’s
a Long Path
In
the atmosphere of the world today prayer requires super human courage. The
whole ensemble of natural energies is in opposition. To hold on to prayer
without distraction signals victory on every level of existence. The way is
long and thorny but there comes a moment when a heavenly ray pierces the dark
obscurity, to make an opening through which can be glimpsed the source of the
eternal Divine Light. The Jesus Prayer assumes a meta-cosmic dimension. St John
the Divine asserts that in the world to come our deification will achieve
plenitude since ‘we shall see Him as He is’. ‘And every man that hath this hope
in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure … Whosoever abideth in him sinneth
not: whosoever sinneth hath not seen him, neither known him’ (cf. 1John
3.2,3,6). In order in Christ’s Name to receive forgiveness of sins and the
promise of the Father we must strive to dwell on His Name ‘until we be endued
with power from on high’ (cf. Luke24-49).
In
advising against being carried away by artificial practices such as
transcendental meditation I am but repeating the age-old message of the Church,
as expressed by St Paul: ‘Exercise thyself rather unto godliness. For bodily
exercise profiteth little: but godliness is profitable unto all things, having
promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come. This is a
faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation. For therefore we both labour and
suffer reproach, because we trust in the living God, who is the Saviour of all
men’ (1Tim. 4.7-10)
It’s
Not Like Transcendental Meditation
The
way of the fathers requires firm faith and long patience”, whereas our
contemporaries want to seize every spiritual gift, including even direct
contemplation of the Absolute God, by force and speedily, and will often draw a
parallel between prayer in the Name of Jesus and yoga or transcendental
meditation and the like. I must stress the danger of such errors-the danger of
looking upon prayer as one of the simplest and easiest ‘technical’ means
leading to immediate unity with God. It is imperative to draw a very definite
line between the Jesus Prayer and every other ascetic theory. He is deluded who
endeavors to divest himself mentally of all that is transitory and relative in
order to cross some invisible threshold, to realize his eternal origin, his
identity with the Source of all that exists; in order to return and merge with
Him, the Nameless transpersonal Absolute. Such exercises have enabled
many to rise to supra-rational contemplation of being; to experience a certain
mystical trepidation; to know the state of silence of the mind, when mind goes
beyond the boundaries of time and space. In such-like states man may feel the
peacefulness of being withdrawn from the continually changing phenomena of the
visible world; may even have a certain experience of eternity. But the God of
Truth, the Living God, is not in all this. It is man’s own beauty, created in
the image of God, that is contemplated and seen as Divinity, whereas he himself
still continues within the confines of his creatureliness. This is a vastly
important concern. The tragedy of the matter lies in the fact that man sees a
mirage which, in his longing for eternal life, he mistakes for a genuine oasis.
This impersonal form of ascetics leads finally to an assertion of divine
principle in the very nature of man. Man is then drawn to the idea of
self-deification- the cause of the original fall. The man who is blinded by the
imaginary majesty of what he contemplates has in fact set his foot on the path
to self-destruction. He has discarded the revelation of a Personal God. He
finds the principle of the Person-Hypostasis a limiting one, unworthy of the
Absolute. He tries to strip himself of like limitations and return to the state
which he imagines has belonged to him since before his coming into this world.
This movement into the depths of his own being is nothing else but attraction
towards the non-being from which we were called by the will of the Creator.
Reference:
His
Life is Mine by Archimandrite Sophrony, trans. Rosemary Edmonds, St.
Valdimir Seminary Press, pp112-120
