The Jesus Prayer

Dear Friends,

I pray in the office each morning. Not the prayers that require words and thoughts and lists and names of those who are sick or hurting or joyful. Those prayers matter. Those prayers happen earlier in the morning. This prayer is a silent prayer. A simple prayer. A prayer that is just the air I'm breathing.

I breathe in. "Lord Jesus Christ, son of God." I breathe out. "Have mercy on me, a sinner.”

There's nothing complex about the prayer. Christians—from the great saints to the forgotten faithful—have prayed it for hundreds and hundreds of years. It is, like all true prayer, a simple rebellion. A rebellion against the priorities the world sets for us. The ways we define ourselves or find ourselves defined against our will. The frustrations and pains and fears, which seek to undo us.

It's not easy. My mind wanders constantly away from the one needful thing to the many pressing concerns of the moment. Did I send that email? What was that phrase I needed for my sermon? Why did I say that? What did he mean by that remark? Where will the money come from? What thing will make me really happy?

That's just a sampler. There are far more ridiculous corners my mind can turn down. Darker ones, too. But this prayer is a prayer of return. A way to remind myself that none of the painful conversations—or absurd, or pointless, or sinful ones—that rattle around my mind are who I am. I'm not the cruel comment the person made to me or the ways I plan to retaliate. I'm not the way I flew off the handle at my son because he spilled something while we cooked last night. I'm not my productivity. I am not, thank God, the winner or loser of some pointless argument on social media.

I am one who is longing to find my center, my everything in Jesus Christ, the son of God. I breathe in. At my most focused, I find in that breath a spaciousness where I know that it's in the God made known through Jesus Christ that I live and move and have my being. That first phrase of the prayer is easy, though.

Because this prayer calls me also to reckon with the second phrase. "Have mercy on me, a sinner." We don't like that. I don't like that. I'm more than that, right? Yes, of course I am. Of course you are. But there's a gift in letting it start there, in returning to that understanding. I am a sinner. I'm more than that, but I am that. I am a creature. I am, through things done and left undone, incomplete, longing to know wholeness. Holiness. So I breathe out. Only sinners know salvation. And only the saved can be flung back to the reality of that God we cry out to in the first place, "Jesus Christ, Son of God.”

I've been on a kick lately, reminding folks that the contemplative life is for all Christians. It doesn't need to look just the same for everyone, but we must find ways of forgetting the way we're defined by the world. Successful or not. Wealthy or not. Smart or not. Beautiful or not. A to-do list. A project. A lovely facade. It's in the silent prayers that we can do that most fully, know ourselves most honestly, and—even more importantly—know the wideness and goodness of God's love for us and for all creation.

I breathe in. "Lord Jesus Christ, son of God." I breathe out. "Have mercy on me, a sinner."

God bless,

Fr. Quinn+