The Jesus Prayer and Intercession

Since this last weekend, when all the things I was talking about in my post for Holy Cross Day came together, I've been thinking long and hard about the Jesus Prayer, and how the way that I've been drawn to it for nearly 30 years now fits with the longing I have to pray for our heartbroken and wounded world, and all who live in it with me.

You will recall that the classical form of the Jesus Prayer is: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." I'm coming to realise that what is happening is that in the acknowledgement of myself as a sinner, so I am acknowledging not only my own sins, but also my utter identity with a fallen, broken Creation. There is nothing else I can do: there is no way that I can step outside of Creation, no way that I can regard myself as essentially different from every other created thing and being. What affects them affects me, and vice versa.

Increasingly, I am coming to realise that no one else's suffering is just theirs, and no one else's action is carried out in vacuo. I am hurt by that which hurts my sister, and I am implicated all that my brother does.

There is, of course, a flip-side to all this. In the Prayer I ask for mercy. I know that, as I ask it from, and in the name of, Jesus, I receive it in the very act of asking. But it's not just me that receives it. What affects me affects Creation. The mercy that is poured out on me overflows to all Creation. In some extraordinary way that I can take no credit for, the Creation is being loved through me.

Surely this is what Paul talks about in Romans 8.19-21:

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

So somehow, if I can remain faithful to the practice of the Prayer, I remain faithful to both callings, to intercession and to the Prayer itself. I know of nothing, truly, that is for me more beautiful or more necessary than this.