Self-repeating pattern

 The Jesus Prayer is not so much a prayer as a self-repeating pattern of prayer. The words Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner become an intention, a movement of the heart, rather than an invocation or a petition. Steadily, over the months and years of saying the Prayer daily, it becomes self-acting, as it were: something that has a life of its own, a small sparkling stream running sometimes out in the sunlight of the attention, and sometimes hidden beneath the roots and moss of the unconscious, purling softly within the shadows of the vacant or the preoccupied mind. And then, as Simon Barrington-Ward wrote,

After all, the whole prayer becomes an intercession. Soon I find that I am on longer praying just for myself, but when I say “on me, a sinner” all the situations of grief and terror, of pain and suffering begin to be drawn into me and I into them. I begin to pray as a fragment of this wounded creation longing for its release into fulfillment… I am in those for whom I would pray and they are in me, as is the whole universe. Every petition of the prayer becomes a bringing of all into the presence and love of God…

 

But the emphasis must lie on words like, "Soon I find that I..." It happens to one; it isn't done as an act of will. All the will can do is to initiate the process. After that - perhaps it is action at a level deeper than thought it emotion, perhaps it is simpler simply to ascribe it to grace - the Prayer takes over, lives its own life, changes. The Jesus Prayer has its own seasons, and they are not at our behest.

All we can do is to sit still, and put ourselves in the way of prayer. The rest is down to something far more profound - in every sense of the word - than anything that could be described as "saying" the Prayer. Somehow the Prayer itself touches the very ground of being, the bright expanse itself that never was not and is no thing and never fails. It is there we are held, and find our rest.