I discovered the Jesus Prayer at a time in my life when I desperately needed something to deepen my life in Christ.
After reading about the various major world religions, I rediscovered Jesus Christ while reading the Revised Standard Bible that my dear Methodist grandmother had given me for the confirmation I did not receive. I had wandered away from Christianity into rock ’n’ roll, but had come back after seeing firsthand that most of the stars who had everything I thought I wanted were really still very empty and unhappy. This led me to the Jesus at the height of the Jesus Movement. Eventually I ended up recording Jesus music with Sparrow Records, a company that has since become the largest Christian recording company in the world.
But I was empty. I had memorized much of the Bible and had becoming a proverbial “Bible thumper,” but I had lost some of the simple Jesus I briefly experienced in the first days of my return to Christ. My Christian life began to bottom out. Then I discovered the early church fathers, or patristics, and began to study them. This led me to the monastic and Franciscan doorway to the Orthodox tradition and on to the Catholic faith. But this did not cut me off from my evangelical past. Rather, it enlivened it! Ironically, my Methodist grandmother once told me, “Johnny, now that you are Catholic I think you are better Methodist than ever!”
I encountered the Jesus Prayer early on in a book called The Way of the Pilgrim.The Way of a Pilgrim, Helen Bacovcin, trans. (Colorado Springs, CO: Image Books, 1978). I was also reading Thomas Merton’s books and others like The Imitation of Christ and The Cloud of Unknowing. I was reading monastic sources like The Sayings of the Desert Fathers and various Franciscan books. I was then led to the Philokalia, or “the study of the beautiful,” which is a collection of sources from the Christian East.
The Jesus Prayer is a big part of Eastern spirituality. I must admit that I related more to the Western tradition, which came from a culture that more recently and directly gave birth to mine. It used a language that seemed more approachable. And I found that the Franciscan tradition went back to the gospel with a gentle but fierce directness that I liked.
Not long after I became the founder of a new integrated monastic community, the Brothers and Sisters of Charity, a child of our Franciscan mother in the Catholic Church. I immersed myself in the Christian East and the West. After a period of some dryness and disappointment, I entered into an extend period of more intense solitude in my monastic cell, and began to restudy interfaith sources on monasticism and meditation. I also reinstituted an intensive daily practice of meditation. After ten or so years, and really allowing that stream to find its place in my Catholic Christian faith, I began to use and teach the Jesus Prayer with a whole new confidence.
Specifically, I encountered a deepening of my faith from the understandable things of faith and morality to a more habitual experience of God in contemplative grace beyond understanding, names, forms, and description. Using traditional disciplines of asceticism and meditation, I found myself breaking through to contemplation with my spirit, which is part of the Catholic Christian heritage.
In the monastic and Franciscan Catholic and Orthodox streams I discovered the contemplative and mystical traditions of which the Jesus Prayer is a vital expression. This enlivened my faith in a way I had hungered for but had not found very often in my experience. After that, new richness and vast horizons began to open up.
Many evangelical Protestants, and those of all expressions, have experienced something similar. We learn the Scriptures almost by heart. We learn much with our heads, but somehow the heart remains empty. Our salvation experience remains only an idea or an emotional high at best. Catholics and Orthodox can do the same through the study of patristics, liturgy, sacraments, ecclesiology, or canon law.
I have found that my head-oriented and dry Christian faith is not limited to me. I often hear of a hunger for something more within my own tradition. Pastors, ministers, and students find that once they are in active ministry, they begin to burn out because mere intellectual training and emotional experiences are not enough to sustain them. The very best expression of that “something more”—the Jesus Prayer—is from the monastic Christian East. But it has something for us all, East or West, secular or monastic.
Different traditions have tried to explain the mystical experience using various paradigms. After rather extensive experience of the meditation described in the Christian West, East and Far Eastern religions from a Christian perspective, I found the Pauline paradigm of spirit, soul, and body worked best for me as a follower of Jesus. The body is the senses, emotions, and thoughts of the brain. The soul is the spiritual mind or reason. The spirit is the place of passive contemplation.
The problem is that through sin we often get stuck in a self-identity that is limited to our senses, emotions, and thoughts. The spirit remains asleep. We are forgiven and empowered to holiness in Christ through the cross and resurrection. When the old self dies with Christ, then the spirit is reborn in his Spirit through the cross and resurrection of Christ, and we become an entirely new person. This is a breakthrough, liberation and rebirth in the fullest sense in Jesus!
But it does not stop there. This breakthrough in the Spirit then permeates our entire being, enlivening the reason of the soul and the senses, emotions, and thoughts of the body so they fulfill their original purpose. Now the thoughts facilitate the spirit with good doctrine, emotions empower us with enthusiasm, and the body becomes the vehicle where the wonder of this new life in Christ unfolds. We are truly “born again.”
The Way of the Pilgrim says, “Now if you will listen, I will read how you can learn ceaseless interior prayer.” The elder opened the Philokalia to the account of St. Simeon the New Theologian and began reading:
Sit alone and in silence; bow your head and close your eyes; relax your breathing and with your imagination look into your heart; direct your thoughts from your head into your heart. And while inhaling say, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me,” either softly with your lips or in your mind. Endeavor to fight distractions but be patient and peaceful and repeat this process frequently.The Way of a Pilgrim, 9–10.
The actual words of the Jesus Prayer are simple. The traditional prayer is, “Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” These words come mainly from Scripture and are rich in meaning, but for now let’s just get used to praying them.
The Jesus Prayer is united with the breath in two motions: the in breath and the out breath. Breathing in we say, “Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God.” Breathing out we say, “Have mercy on me, a sinner.”
Originally, the Prayer concluded with “Son of God.” The words “have mercy on me, a sinner” were added later for the novices (new monks). The young of ancient tradition were not that different from young converts today who sometimes think they have the answers that their elders have missed. The Eastern monastic elders added these words to keep the young novices in their place!
Breathing this prayer for a few minutes we will begin to notice an almost natural motion. Breathing in fills us up, and breathing out empties us. Breathing in causes us to hold on, and breathing out causes us to let go.
This works well with the actual meaning of the words. The first words fill us with all that is beautiful: the personal lordship of Jesus, personal salvation, the anointing of the Spirit, the Trinity, the incarnation, the church and the sacraments. The second group of words causes us to let go of anything standing between us and full communion with God through Jesus and with all people.
This letting go is most powerful. We are often filled with all kinds of rationalizations and justifications about why we are not in full communion with God and the church. While these might make sense or may be largely correct, they will never free us from our ego attachments to our opinions and agendas regarding God, the church, others and ourselves. Breathing out is a powerful tool for letting go.
Take a few minutes and practice this. Sit straight but comfortably. Breathe deeply through your nose, but not artificially. Allow yourself to fill up with God, and then let go of anything standing between you and full communion with God through Christ (or the church as a body or as individuals).
John Michael Talbot is founder and Minister General of Brothers and Sisters of Charity at Little Portion Hermitage, a monastic community in Berryville, Arkansas. He is a popular recording artist with over four million albums sold worldwide. This article is taken from his book, The Jesus Prayer (InterVarsity Press).