The Forgotten Dimension of the Jesus Prayer

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There was this group that was speaking about the Jesus Prayer and this one person got up in this group and said I just don’t understand this. The “Our Father” is a much superior prayer. It’s the prayer that Jesus taught us, not the Jesus prayer, shouldn’t we be praying that. Surprisingly, no one could give a good response. What they said was something like, “that is just our tradition”. There was also another event that triggered a question from that person. This one priest was saying that when you do the Jesus prayer we do it with our breath and the same person asked why and the response was similar “It’s our tradition and also it helps with concertation”. 

This all happened many, many years ago, and that person who asked those questions left that group never really knowing anything about the tradition of the Jesus prayer, they keep saying its our tradition, but the answers did not really spark up interest in the person and I know this because I was the person. Eventually, I was reintroduced to the tradition by priest known as Fr. Charbel Abernathy. He encouraged a study of the main texts that speak about the prayer called the Philokalia and that’s what I did for about five years and eventually I got the answers I was looking for and a realization that with the vast majority of Byzantine Christians that I met, I say byzantine because not all eastern churches have a foundation in this tradition, not one of them could give me answers to those questions I asked and the reason is that the spirituality rooted in the Jesus prayer has been separated from it and there are many reasons for that. 

The answer to my first question should have been that Jesus Prayer is not superior to the our father, nor is it in competition  to it, but it is a symbol that represents a whole spiritual tradition, and the tradition is called Hesychasm. About a thousand years ago on Mt. Athos, a spirituality prevailed that would go on to be the foundation for the Byzantine rite, this is hesychasm. The whole development of the liturgy is based on this tradition. For instance, in the tone 8 Troparion we sing, “You descend from on high, O merciful One. You accepted burial for three days to free us from our passions”.  

Now if I were to go back in time and ask what that means in that group I was in, how Christ’s bodily death free us from what it’s called passions” they would be drawing blanks. The kind of terminology used in that troparion are key words found in hesychasm and speaking of Christ's bodily death I want to go back to my other question. Why do you do this breathing, this strange thing that you do with the body. They said tradition but they did not know the tradition. They should have told me what St. Gregory of Sinai said in the Philokalia, he said, “True prayer requires the stillness of both mind and body” and this brings me to what you read in the title, the “forgotten dimension”, the forgotten dimension in the Jesus Prayer is praying with the body. 

You will find throughout the Philokalia various forms of bodily asceticism. St. John of Damaskos said that “virtues and vices of the soul and body are interconnected, and understanding this relationship is crucial for spiritual growth”. For example, you might read a spiritual remedy in the Philokalia that might tell you that if you wake up in the night struggling with lust to sleep on the ground with the window open. Sounds strange but the fathers believed in this interconnectedness and that we can use our body to fix our minds, and they also believed that the body prays.  This is why you will find, if you go to a traditional Byzantine liturgy, its like going to a gym. You stand the whole time, you are singing through the whole liturgy, bowing down prostrating and this is ultimately why we are taught to control our breath in saying the Jesus Prayer. You are making your body do the prayer, that’s also why you will find instructions on posture.

 Once in our history, we were accused of being navel gazers by people in the Western church, but what we were really doing was following instructions on how to get the body is the temple of God, not just the mind, that’s the body’s destiny and we can experience some of that now. Ultimately, God is going to finish what we started but he wants us to experience him in our bodies now. That’s something that we need to start teaching when we speak about the Jesus prayer. We need to teach people to pray with the body.