Small and quiet...

The longer I keep on with the way of prayer, and especially since returning to it as I have, the more convinced I am of the necessity of remaining small and quiet. John Gill writes of Sophrony Sakharov that, "[h]e taught that humility and repentance are paramount and through experiencing the ebb and flow of God’s grace we learn the need to be poor in spirit."

The only way to approach the Jesus Prayer - and this is all the more urgent if, like most of us in the West, we lack the help of an experienced guide in person - is as a beginner. Oddly, this seems to have little to do with experience. Many years of practice don't make one an expert; rather they just make one more aware of one's littleness and emptiness (Psalm 131; Luke 18:13-14).

It is as impossible to turn off the mind as it is to still the heartbeat and remain alive, and so the practitioner of a lifetime is in just the same position as the practitioner of a few weeks, subject to distractions and fantasies with every breath. Gill (ibid.) quotes John Climacus:

Do not lose heart when your thoughts are stolen away. Just remain calm, and constantly call your mind back... Let the remembrance of Jesus be present with your every breath. Then indeed you will appreciate the value of stillness... Make the effort to raise up, or rather, to enclose your mind within the words of your prayer; and if like a child, it gets tired and falters, raise it up again.

Laurence Freeman:

[O]f course we get distracted many, many, many times. That doesn't matter. We're not perfect. We don't have to be perfect meditators because we're not perfect disciples yet, so we don't expect to be perfect meditators. That doesn't matter. You don’t have to be perfect. The best meditators will say, 'I meditate. It's very, very important to me. I miss it so much if I don't do it, but I'm a very bad meditator.' That's OK. What matters is not being successful, it's about being faithful.

These distractions, whether mental, physical, emotional or whatever, shouldn't discourage us. Looked at in the right way, they can be a great help, like Paul's thorn (2 Corinthians 12:7), to keep us from thinking we are becoming good at this prayer business. But in order to see this, we shall have to remember the smallness and quietness; like the child in John Climacus' example, it doesn't take much to tire us out.