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Praying the way of a pilgrim~

5/14/2016

I’ve been praying the Jesus Prayer with more intention lately. Maybe it has to do with delightful spring walks. Maybe because I am a member of ‘St. Symeon the New Theologian - Prayer of the Heart Monastery’ (an affiliate of www.monasteriesoftheheart.org) committed to studying and praying the Jesus Prayer. Here is my recent post.

The Pilgrim taught me the Jesus Prayer. My fascination with Paul’s comment in 1 Thessalonians to pray without ceasing lead me to The Way of A Pilgrim. The moment I began reading, I started saying the prayer in my mind as I walked about leading my life. My intention continues: to pray this prayer into my very being, my mental, spiritual and muscle memory, so that it becomes an involuntary attribute of who I am.
I forget and remember, forget and remember, but with commitment and practice I notice the prayer is with me more and more frequently as I carry out household chores, drive in the car or take a walk.

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Pray without ceasing~

12/20/2014

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I get discourage every time I realize that I have forgotten God. I go along seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling and reacting and responding to everything through my Bobbi lens, and then, every so often, I become aware of God floating around in my presence. What bothers me is that I feel guilty about this pattern because the forgetting God segment is so huge.

Why the guilt? Because somewhere I have settled onto the idea that I should be perfect, which would mean that I would think about God all the time. Today on my walk I realized the absurdity of it all, and for that I am very grateful. On the other hand, I continue to believe that by following the Way of the Pilgrim and praying without ceasing the Jesus Prayer, I will remember God and carry on with my life at the same time. It will be a different kind of completeness, not made up of parts. It will be a mystery, not described in words, but felt in my heart.

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'Pray without ceasing' revisited~

6/17/2013

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If you’ve been following this blog for a while you are well aware that Paul’s command to the Thessalonians (5:17) to ‘pray without ceasing’ is one of my favorites; favorite in that it draws me into the heart of what faith is. The most popular unceasing prayer, Jesus Christ Son of the Living God have mercy on me, a sinner, is at the core of the prayer of Eastern Orthodox monks and was made popular in the book A Way of the Pilgrim.

     Using this phrase is a challenge for someone like me who was brought up in a liberal Protestant tradition--we weren’t sinners, we just made occasional mistakes! But these days I’m okay with admitting I’m a sinner. Try as I might, I act wrong, I think wrong, I sin. I need God’s mercy.

    On the other hand, I don’t like repeating over and over again that I am a sinner because it fills my unconscious with the negative, which doesn’t resonate with my positive disposition. My inclination is to dwell on God’s grace, on the Good News, not on my sins. And thus I have other ‘pray without ceasing’ phrases that I repeat.

Come, Holy Spirit, come.
Come, Lord Jesus.
Open my heart.
Breathe in God’s love, breathe out God’s love.

     I don’t say these words out loud, I think them. In fact, even the phrase, pray without ceasing suffices. According to Russian monastic author Theophan the Recluse (1815-94), “Inner prayer means standing with the mind in the heart before God, either simply living in His presence, or expressing supplication, thanksgiving, and glorification.”

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Pray without ceasing~

3/20/2013

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Like the nineteenth century Russian pilgrim in Way of A Pilgrim, I, too, have been intrigued with St. Paul’s instruction to pray without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 4:17). And thanks to that pilgrim, I’ve been saying the Jesus prayer now for a couple of years as a way to do just that.

     Jesus Christ have mercy on me, a sinner.

     Until recently I omitted the sinner part. After all, being brought up Protestant, sinner was hardly a part of our vocabulary, much less our theology. But lately, due in part to reading The Mountain of Silence: A Search for Orthodox Spirituality, I am now including it, having surrendered to the idea and belief that I indeed am a sinner.

    What follows are quotes attributed to Father Maximos, an Anthonite monk and friend of the author Kyriacos C. Markides. I’ve repeated a few from a previous blog and included many more, which I will also add in the ‘Books’ section.

    It (the Jesus Prayer) is the practical way of mobilizing the mechanism of the heart to open up to Grace….embedded in the name of Jesus is the very power of God. By invoking, therefore, the sacred name repeatedly we invite the Grace of God to take possession of hour hearts and mind, protecting us from harmful effects.

    {The Prayer} opens the road for Grace to visit the heart. And when that happens, then the heart works by itself independently of whatever else you do. It enters into an ongoing relationship with God.

When you practice the Jesus Prayer systematically, it is as if you move about within a polluted city wearing an oxygen mask over your face. Nothing can touch you.”

When the spirit of the Jesus Prayer takes over the heart, only then do people get healed within the depths of their being. The flame of God has now been ignited in the heart.

Do the Prayer and God will take care of the rest. He will lead you to Him through the Prayer.

The first thing you need to do is to be convinced of the power of the prayer, that it is real and that it can affect not only you personally, but also those for whom you pray.

All sense of isolation, of being unloved, of being disliked, of being envied, disappears with the power of ceaseless prayer.

Through the Prayer you begin to commune with the living Christ, who is at the very depths of your being…The name of Christ itself has power. It brings tranquility to the soul.

When we get into the habit of continuous prayer, we can then get involved with several other activities simultaneously….Prayer goes on ceaselessly in the heart.

With the habitual recitation of the Jesus Prayer, the Holy Spirit takes up residence in the heart and gets activated there. It is beyond works and meanings.

It is metanoia (repentance) that will bring humility and it is humility that will pave the way for the acquisition of spiritual gifts, by necessity. That’s how the Holy Spirit works.

Only humility has the power to attract God’s Grace to the human soul…Humility renders the person immune to anger and incapable of making anyone else angry.

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Way of the pilgrim again~

12/2/2012

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The weekend was a whirl of activity, held together, most of the time, by prayer. I have to believe that praying the way of the pilgrim, “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy upon me,” paid off. Now I’m at the cottage, too tired to write more, other than to say that I’m ‘very grateful’. That’s enough anyway.

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Forgiving our trespasses~

7/24/2012

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“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” You know that one; we say it all the time and I admit that it’s quite the norm for me to repeat the words without thinking about them at all. Like The Jesus Prayer they go right to my subconscious, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The repetition sink in, which is all for the good.

     Good also happens when we consciously ponder the words, which I did this morning. It occurred to me that as far as forgiving others their trespasses, that not a big issue for me. I don’t hold many grudges; I usually don’t feel attacked by what others do; I don’t take much personally. It just isn’t where my energy needs to go.

     Instead, my forgiving focuses on forgiving myself. Perhaps that’s where vanity comes in, taking the sinful form of wanting to be perfect. If I could treat myself like I treat others, if I could forgive myself as easily as I forgive others, God’s will would “be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

      The little boy with terminal cancer is now with God. He is no longer suffering. Please pray for his family.

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Assisi, where St. Francis talked with God~

6/5/2012

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After a few days in Rome, I sometimes found it a challenge to be prayerful--traffic, people, Baroque churches, Roman/male statuary….Rome became a little too Roman Catholic for me. God seemed to be so immersed in the dogma of the church that my God was hard to find. I experienced a final example of this yesterday when I paid 5 Euro to take an audio guide tour of St. Peter’s. The commentary was more about church dogma than about the pieces of art that I was seeing. I gave up listening.

I understand that if it weren’t for the church throughout history, how would we know about Christ? But my God is a God who is still speaking, and so it is right that I am on my way to Assisi, where St. Francis literally spoke with a God, and where I can speak with God, too.
I arrived this morning and have been out and about. How beautiful is this? Very grateful. I feel like I'm walking the way of the pilgrim.

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Listening with the ear of my heart~

3/31/2012

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     My blogging days go by so fast. I think I’ve just posted and then realize that that three days have gone by. Chronos and kairos time, all mixed together. The days go by, I lead my life, God is always there. Well, I say “always’ but sometimes I forget God, and then when I remember I am grateful. Of course God is always there, even when I forget God.

    For over a year now, I’ve been saying the Jesus prayer, that prayer of the Way of the Pilgrim, “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me.” It’s become a wonderful habit so that often I find myself saying it unconsciously in my mind. Sometimes I repeat it when I pray for others, saying a particular name in place of “me”.

    The other day I was offered another benefit. I was at the cottage in the recliner on the deck beginning my prayer time. It takes me a while to settle into it, to empty my mind of chatter, so I say the Jesus Prayer. I started, and repeated, “Jesus Christ have mercy on me.” Then I heard, not with my ears, but as Benedict said in his Rule, “Listen with the ear of your heart.” I heard Jesus say, “Here I am.”

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Remembering to pray

2/23/2011

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        Yesterday was a strange prayer day. I did fine with my morning routine but then a friend and her two children came to visit. We had a wonderful time walking the beach and having lunch, but I got caught up in the moment and so prayer and God disappeared from my consciousness. Now, that’s not a bad thing (it actually happens a lot), but I am trying to pray without ceasing, which is mighty hard to remember to do. It’s the remembering that’s the problem, not the desire.
      I’m reading (for the second time) “The Way of a Pilgrim” written in Russia in the nineteenth century by an anonymous pilgrim who wanders about the country side saying and studying the prayer of the heart, also know as the ‘Jesus prayer’: “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy upon me.” The idea is to say/think the prayer continually so that it becomes part of you--going from something you repeat in words to something you say in your heart.
     The idea intrigues me, actually appeals to me, and so I say it whenever I remember. It helps me become calm and remember God and my purpose. It also gets me out of all that right brain thinking, or as I say, it gets me out of my head. Again, the challenge is to remember. One of my best remembering times is when I wake up in the middle of the night. Saying the ‘Jesus prayer’ helps me stop thinking about all that’s going on in my life and thus I fall back to sleep more easily.

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Praying the way of a pilgrim~

Pray without ceasing~

'Pray without ceasing' revisited~

Pray without ceasing~

Way of the pilgrim again~

Forgiving our trespasses~

Assisi, where St. Francis talked with God~

Listening with the ear of my heart~

Remembering to pray

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