Is “The Jesus Prayer” Vain Repetition?
Frederica Mathewes-Green
From the February 2025 Ex Fonte, Gordon-Conwell’s Print Magazine
About fifteen years ago I started to use the Jesus Prayer. . . : “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.” This very simple prayer was developed in the deserts of Egypt and Palestine during the early centuries of Christian faith, and has been practiced in the Eastern Orthodox Church ever since. It is a prayer inspired by St. Paul’s exhortation to “pray constantly” (1 Thess. 5:17) and its purpose is to tune one’s inner attention to the presence of the Lord.
But what is that nameless thing, the “inner attention”? When we talk about feeling God’s presence, we’re accustomed to speak as if such experiences arose from our emotions. Yet when I had my rather dramatic conversion experience, decades ago, it sure seemed more objective than that. At the time, the best way I could describe it was to say that “a little radio switched on inside me,” and I became aware of Christ speaking to me. (It wasn’t something I heard with my ears, but by an inner voice, filling my awareness.)
I never knew what to make of that “little radio”; it didn’t fit our familiar division of “head” and “heart” people. But as I began to read the literature of Eastern Christianity, I found that [these writers] were familiar with this “little radio.” They even had a word for it: the nous. It’s a word that recurs through the Greek New Testament, but we don’t have a good equivalent in English. It gets translated “mind,” but it doesn’t mean the talkative mind, the one that cogitates and constructs theories. It is a receptive capacity of the intellect; we could call it “the understanding” or “the comprehension.” The Eastern Church has always known that the nous can be trained to register, or perceive, the voice of God.
That is where the Jesus Prayer comes in. The idea is to spend some time every day practicing the Prayer. You pray it fifty to a hundred times, or more, or less; not robotically but sincerely, speaking to Christ while pulling together your attention to the best of your ability. You get the Prayer going other times, too, whenever you think of it, while waiting at a stoplight or brushing your teeth. This brief, all-purpose, very portable prayer takes root and spreads.
In the process, you hone your ability to discern God’s presence. He is already there, of course; we just aren’t very good a perceiving it. Practicing the Jesus Prayer helps you sharpen your ability to “tune in” to his presence, just as you would practice scales to hone your ability to identify musical pitch. . . .
This practice of saying the Jesus Prayer is accurately termed a spiritual discipline; it’s a disciplined learning process, like learning to the play the cello. It takes perseverance and focused attention. For a cellist, the tedium of practicing scales must appear so distant from the final goal, when that beautiful dark music will spill forth fluidly. Yet, one day, the cellist will pick up her bow, and she and the instrument will have become one.
So I keep asking Christ for mercy, working the Prayer deep into my awareness. I say it a hundred times at night, and throughout the day I set it going in my mind as often as I remember it. . . And gradually I am coming to see that it is true. It really is possible to sense the presence of God—continuously. . . .
This prayer is not designed to generate fancy mystical experiences or soppy emotions. Yet it works away steadily inside, gradually building a sure connection with the Lord. Where the Lord enters in, there is light: I can see many ways that he changed me over the years, illuminating and dispelling reflexive lying thoughts and fears. My part was just to keep showing up, day after day, for these quiet sessions with him.
Other iterations of the prayer include, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me,” and “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
Frederica Mathewes-Green is a much loved and well-known speaker and writer. She is author of several books, including Welcome to the Orthodox Church (Paraclete Press, 2013) and The Jesus Prayer (Paraclete Press, 2009). This excerpt is used with permission.