The weak things of this world

God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things - and the things that are not - to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God - that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: 'Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.'

And so it was with me, brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. (1 Corinthians 1:27-2:3 NIV)

Then [Jesus] said to them all: 'Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it.' (Luke 9:23 NIV)

What is going on here? All this is as deeply counterintuitive to us as it was to the honour-bound Jews and the conquering Romans of the first century. But as Rowan Williams wrote: "Pretty well everything we read in the New Testament is shadowed by the cross. It is, first and foremost, the sign of how much has changed and how it has changed."

The longer we persevere with the contemplative life, though, the more this kind of language begins to make sense. Prayer - and especially contemplative prayer - is a matter of weakness, and unknowing. To walk within the cloud of unknowing with the brokenness of the world on one's heart can be a very particular form of suffering, especially considering the total absence of feedback, of knowing whether there is, humanly, any point to our activity whatever. 

Anyone taking the eremitic vocation seriously is bound to feel helpless, quite impotent, in fact. Hermits are determined to help, to make a positive difference, but how? What can one person do, hidden and alone? Sometimes, solitaries may feel blameworthy because they live lives which shelter them from much of the suffering that so harshly mars the existence of their brothers and sisters. Love and compassion well up in them … but is it enough? What should one do and how? This is where passionate intercessory prayer and supplication spontaneously arises. 

The challenge is to live a life given over to praying for others while accepting that one will seldom, if ever, see any results. No one will be able to ascertain how, or even if, their devoted prayers are efficacious for others. It is a terrible kind of poverty—to live dedicated to helping others, yet never know what good one may be doing. All that hermits can hope is that they are doing no harm. Believers leave all results to the mercy of their God. Others rely on their convictions about the interconnection of all humanity, trusting that what affects one, touches all. This is a form of intercession expressed less by words than by a way of life. 

A Camaldolese monk once wrote: “Prayer is not only speaking to God on behalf of humanity, it is also ‘paying’ for humanity.” Suffering is part of the hermit’s vocation. One of the most acute forms is to never know whether one’s chosen lifestyle is worthwhile or has any value for others. Hermits enter into the darkness, the dusky cloud of unknowing, and walk without any light beyond that which is in their own hearts. Often, unbeknownst even to themselves, they have become beacons for others. 

Karen Karper Fredette and Paul A. Fredette, Consider the Ravens: On Contemporary Hermit Life, pp.213-214

What the Fredettes write applies, of course, to the contemplative life however lived, whether in community or in physical solitude. We are, like anyone called to a life of prayer, cast up on the shore of a sea of troubles. The great 20th century Russian contemplative teacher Sophrony Sakharov wrote, with startling relevance for our present time,

The Jesus Prayer will incline us to find each human being unique, the one for whom Christ was crucified. Where there is great love the heart necessarily suffers and feels pity for every creature, in particular for man; but our inner peace remains secure, even when all is in confusion in the world outside… 

It has fallen to our lot to be born into the world in an appallingly disturbed period. We are not only passive spectators but to a certain extent participants in the mighty conflict between belief and unbelief, between hope and despair, between the dream of developing mankind into a single universal whole and the blind tendency towards dissolution into thousands of irreconcilable national, racial, class or political ideologies. Christ manifested to us the divine majesty of man, son of God, and we withal are stifled by the spectacle of the dignity of man being sadistically mocked and trampled underfoot. Our most effective contribution to the victory of good is to pray for our enemies, for the whole world. We do not only believe in – we know the power of true prayer…

 

The life of prayer is the way of the cross. It can't be any other way. To pray in the name of Jesus (John 14:14) is precisely to take up one's cross in prayer, to resolve to know nothing at all in prayer except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.

21 this month

The Mercy Blog is 21 years old this month. I made my first post here on 13 August 2005, though it was not until mid-October of that year that I began publishing regularly. I suppose by now I must be one of the elders of the blogosphere...

As anyone who has followed the blog all those years will know, the posts here have traced a long and sometimes winding road; but they have always, one way or another, led back to the Jesus Prayer, and to apophatic spirituality in general. After all, it was in 1978 that I was first introduced to the Jesus Prayer, and it has clung to me ever since, no matter where I have turned.

I had thought, five years ago, to move my blogging activities entirely to An Open Ground, but things didn't work out that way. An Open Ground seems to have been a deconstruction blog, if I can use that phrase; it has not really ever done the work I have sought to do over here. To underline the fact that that work is not finished, not by any means, The Mercy Blog seems to have retained a loyal readership even over the time when this site was lying fallow. 

I don't know yet what the next months will bring - "All our steps are ordered by the LORD; how then can we understand our own ways?" (Proverbs 20:24 NRSV) - but I will try to remain faithful to the original premise of The Mercy Blog, and record here some of my own adventures and misadventures in prayer, and more importantly, some of the words I discover from those further along the pathless path (Martin Laird) than I.

This rib cage of failure

It is simple enough to lose sight of the liberating nature of our failings. They often seem to lead us into some parched, lonely place—a place of dry bones. The problem is not our inadequacies, much less the freight of the failures we carry, but the loss of perspective on what we resent most in ourselves. Light forever shines from within the rib cage of failure. But reactive mind is too cluttered to realize that this is the nature of divine love: flowing waters of mercy for all who are parched—each of us… Nor is reactive mind capable of receiving this simple and simplifying fact: this rib cage of failure is the sanctuary of divine breath breathing us.

Martin Laird, An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation, and Liberation, pp.95-6

Just as death is the inescapable precondition for new life, so failure and error are the necessary spring of change and growth in the spiritual life. Only when we will let ourselves know that, only in the wreckage of our plans and pretensions, only in the defeat of our new beginnings and our fresh initiatives, can we be broken open to the current of grace that will wash us out into the open sea of becoming.

Behind all these metaphors there is a very simple fact, it seems to me: that only when we cease completely from self-justification, when we are prepared without reservation to let go of whatever role we imagined for ourselves in the economy of the inner life can we discover what the flow of change that is the leading of the Spirit is tending towards.

I think this applies both in our own inner lives and in the broader life of humankind. We can see it in the unceasing pattern of evolution (species don’t remain static, however attached we may have become to one or another expression of their diversity) and in the breakdown and reformation of institutions. Sarah Bessey (Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith) sees it in the breakdown of many of the established churches, and in the tentative shoots of a radical, open faith appearing through the rubble, like fireweed springing up through the rubble of bombed buildings following WW2. (Yes, I am old enough to remember seeing it for myself from the top decks of London buses, riding with my mother looking over the makeshift hoardings that tried to conceal the broken gaps in the terraces, and the little rows of shops beginning to struggle back to some sort of normality after the end of hostilities!)

“Everything passes/everything changes/just do what you think you should do,” sang Bob Dylan (‘To Ramona‘). But what Martin Laird calls “reactive mind” is too wrapped up in what it thinks it thinks to know; it is only when we keep still enough in prayer that we are “capable of receiving this simple and simplifying fact: this rib cage of failure is the sanctuary of divine breath breathing us.”

What we really are

We pay attention to our own true nature and by becoming fully conscious of the union of our nature with Christ, we become fully ourselves.

John Main, Word into Silence, p.18

 

The idea of time has many expressions, from chronological to biological, emotional to cosmic. We sometimes feel we have lived a lifetime in a moment. We can feel time as a crucifixion or as a resurrection. The vast figures measuring cosmic time in an expanding universe can seem overwhelming but the few years of a human life can seem more significant and precious. Time and mortality live out the drama of birth and death and the painful mystery of separation. In the light of faith we come by stages to see the all-pervading mystery of union…

This consummation of union, whether it is called nirvana, liberation from rebirth, enlightenment, moksha or heaven is part of the common ground of all religious wisdom when we understand religion in its mystical dimension. It refers to the experience of oneness, the transcendence of the ego’s centre of consciousness, the transformation of the dualistic mind, the movement from the mind’s self-mirroring complexities into the simplicity and pure vision of the heart, the non-duality of the spirit. With a silent passion deeper than their words and differences, all religions point to this. If they do indeed teach this way and not just pay lip service to it, religion offers our often sad and battered humanity a reasonable and empowering hope.

We both lose and find ourselves in the otherness of ultimate reality. This is easy to say but it is a hard paradox to wrestle with. It demands a deepening faith commitment. When the master class of life has taught us enough, commitment meets detachment and solitude, the recognition and acceptance of our uniqueness becomes more attractive and even easier. We gradually withdraw from unnecessary activity and distraction. We become freer from compulsions and addictions.

Laurence Freeman, First Sight: The Experience of Faith, p.76-77

What we really are is this. We are not what we think we are, frail isolated intelligences trapped in a zero-sum game of mere survival, creatures of allegiances and enmities, just barely hanging on. We belong. We are part of it all, wavelets on a limitless ocean of grace.

We must… make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity p.24

Faith is no more, perhaps, than this radical open-heartedness, this helpless surrender to what is, in David Jones’ words, “actually loved and known”. All our practice, all our patience and all our prayers come down to this simple oneness. What we used to be is dispersed, patched and rotted through with light. None of the old certainties can hold. They don’t need to: this trackless brightness beyond the memory of shorelines is the waking heart itself, nothing more.

Otium

 In A Simplified Life, her beautiful account of being a contemporary hermit, Verena Schiller writes:

…I eschew any attempt at repetitive words of prayer while walking or working out of doors, though some find this helpful. Even after years of praxis, learning to do just one thing at a time does not come easily. ‘When you are walking just walk; when you are digging just dig; whatever you are intent on give it your whole attention. Whatever you are doing, do it with the whole of your being and as though it were the only thing to do and as though there was all the time in the world’, a counsel of perfection given me by Bishop John V. Taylor at the very beginning of my solitary exploration, echoing the wisdom of countless others all down the centuries. Rarely can this be even a remote possibility in most women’s lives. For me it is and, in a sense, carries a double responsibility: to practise this single-pointedness not only to deepen my own attentiveness but also on behalf of others caught up in unrelenting multitasking. Life and the work in hand is the prayer or, put the other way about, the prayer is the work. We live in a world characterized by extreme activism, restlessness and rush, yet a hallmark of this solitary life needs to be otium. (pp.112-113)

Gradually the contemplative life seems to take over the “rest” of one’s life; the simplest of tasks become luminous – almost at times numinous – with presence. Even simple conversations can become exercises in something akin to receiving spiritual direction… in the midst of discussing vegetables, perhaps!

Of course, as Schiller points out herself, this is a counsel of perfection; with the best will in the world too many jobs are done thoughtlessly, too many conversations slip by in mere chatter. But even so – to look back in less time each time, and see the gaps in attention, becomes its own often humorous discipline. (The Pure Land Buddhists have a lovely word, bombu, for just this kind of spiritual hamfistedness!)

Otium. It’s not a common word in most people’s vocabulary; but it means, at least in a contemplative context, a kind of holy leisure. Schiller (op cit., p.36)

In early monasticism, leisure or otium was not only an essential mark of the life of a monk, it was integral to the life itself. Leisure, otium, is how the monastic life was described in the early Middle Ages (a life free from negotium, of busyness and business). Few of us would recognize this as a description of contemporary monasticism, and even St Bernard, that great reformer and founder of the Cistercian Order, who had hoped to reduce busyness and business to a minimum in the life of a monk, was soon to amend this adage wryly to that of a negotissimum otium, a very busy leisure indeed.

The retired life can be otium per excellentiam, if we will only let it be. Practice need not be confined to the daily spells alone in one’s room: it can be allowed to spill out, just like the hermit’s, into walking, cooking, housework, even being together. It becomes a portable grace, a lovely thing that brightens all that it touches, even pain and concern, even the most mundane or dreadful things. It has begun to become an open channel to the hidden boundless grace that holds all things in becoming.

Process and coinherence

Prehension is not perception in the ordinary sense, and it is not causation as traditionally imagined. It is the way an event takes account of the world it inherits. Without it, the past would be dead, the present spontaneous, and continuity impossible. To prehend something is to include it in one’s own becoming. This inclusion need not be conscious, deliberate, or even noticeable. It simply means that what has happened contributes to what is happening.

Every actual occasion prehends its predecessors. It does not choose whether to do so. Prehension is mandatory. What is optional is how it prehends…

The past does not act on the present by pushing, transmitting force, or occupying the same space. Instead, the present appropriates the past. Influence travels forward because it is taken up, not because it is imposed.

This replaces external causation with internal relation.

Robert Flix, [AN] Whitehead in Plain English, p.62

Contemplation is an entering, in profoundly open awareness, into the process of prehension. This isn’t a passive reception, an observation only; it is a deliberate participation in, a strengthening of, the relational web between occasions, between things, events and their relations.

This seems to me why contemplatives have so often, especially those practicing within the traditions of a religion, connected the idea of contemplation with intercession, whether in the developed theology of hesychasm, or in Buddhist conceptions of metta or tonglen. Looked at like this, contemplative prayer in its intercessory dimension is not superstition but metaphysics; the practitioner, through their inevitable coinherence with the suffering inherent in existence, prehends the brokenness of things, holding them in the light of unbroken awareness. In effect, the practitioner enters into the suffering as the suffering enters into them: acting as a lightning-rod between what merely is and the ground of being itself – God, in fact.

In A Little Book of Unknowing, Jennifer Kavanagh writes:

…Faith is not about certainty, but about trust…

We have seen that there is little about which we can be certain. Certainty may be undermined by limitations of the current state of knowledge; the subjective nature of experience; the fluid quality of the material world; or the intervention of unforeseen events. But beyond these aspects of the world about which we often assume knowledge, there is a dimension of life to which rational explanation simply doesn’t apply. Most people would admit that there is much that we cannot apprehend through reason or through the senses. We might know a fact with our brains, but not be able to understand what it means, to fully experience its reality – the age of a star or the trillions of connections within the human brain – some things are too big, too complex, for us to conceive. Einstein, who knew a thing or two about factual knowledge, felt that “imagination is more important than knowledge”. There is a dimension which co-exists with the material, rationally grounded world, is not in opposition to it or threatened by scientific development but happily stands alone in the context of everything else.

Reading Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphysics seems at last to be providing me with a framework within which I can begin to understand what has always been a deep instinct in my own practice: that it wasn’t merely a solipsistic exercise in self-improvement, but a real work of weight and consequence beyond my own narrow concerns. In a sense, it doesn’t matter of course whether I can explain it to my own or anyone else’s satisfaction; what matters is that it does work, is actual work, in some obscure corner of the healing of things.

Returning

We still seek wholeness. It is intrinsic to human identity that, however much we have achieved, we are never satisfied. We hunger and thirst for what lies beyond our grasp and even beyond the horizon of our desire. Religion and spirituality, which are less easy to divorce than we thought – are the elements of culture that deal with this desire beyond desire. Where are they taking us? Where do we have to redefine the old terms by which we try to understand ourselves in this longing for wholeness? …

When belief takes the place of faith in the religious mind the possible range of spiritual experience and growth is critically limited. When religion emphasizes belief rather than faith it may find it easier to organize and define its membership and those it excludes. It is easier to pass judgement. But it will produce, at the best, half-formed followers. The road to transcendence is cut off, blocked by landfalls of beliefs as immoveable as boulders, beliefs we are told to accept and do not dare to put to the test of experience. In such a rigid and enforced belief system what I believe also easily slides into what I say I believe, or what I am told to believe or what I feel I ought to believe, because the I that believes becomes so dependent on the identity generated by the structured belief system we inhabit.

Laurence Freeman, First Sight: The Experience of Faith, pp.3,9

We must… make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity p.24

The spiritual life looked at from within resembles not so much a ladder or an ordered progress as it does a rather tatty wheel. It does move, but it moves at least as much round and round as it does forward. It is a process of trial and error – trials and errors. It seems to be more like an organic thing, subject to odd diversions and random mutations, than a neat structure assembled according to a set of plans.

Coinherence is one of those luminous words whose meaning flickers at the edge of comprehension, as though it names something you already half-know in your bones. Charles Williams was fond of using it, but its roots extend far further back than that. If ultimate reality (God, the Way) is in fact process, relational union, rather than an object or a person, then relational living is intrinsic to life itself, and it has profound implications for human behaviour, ethics and purpose. Specifically, it speaks to the contemplative life in ways that make sense of much monastic teaching over the years, right from the Desert Fathers and Mothers to the present day.

Pain and difficulty – what used to be called “tribulation” – are intrinsic to life itself. “Change and decay in all around I see,” wrote Henry Francis Lyle, and an open heart risks breaking daily at the news from across the world, even in supposedly stable and civilised nations. But if we are aware that all that is – not only, if especially, conscious beings – rests in the ground of being just as we do ourselves, then our presence in contemplation becomes much more than a state of mind. We are not “praying for” those for whom our hearts are torn; we are recognising our shared being, recognising an existential bond that exists already. Love is not symbolic, but structural: a circulation of grace, strength and suffering.

The living current of grace that coinheres in all existence is the source of what is – the Tao as the mother of the ten thousand things – and yet it is the heart of our contemplation itself. Only if we sit still can we be present as aerials, signs, receiving stations for that grace. The mist covers the distances, and our vision is not good; but we don’t need to know or to believe: our unknowing is itself our practice and our compassion. Perhaps all we need is love.

Silence and language

Even in silence, the linguistic apparatus of our brain continues in the background wash of thought. Even when we avoid the incessant temptation to follow, to identify with thoughts as they arise, we know they are there, spinning their webs of language in the corners of our awareness like spiders in the corners of the window frame.

We can attend to our breathing, to our proprioception, to the sensations of our body resting where it rests; but the thoughts with their language continue as before. What if we were to use the linguistic yearnings of our mind in our contemplative practice itself?

Stephanie Paulsell: “Contemplation… [i]t’s not a capacity we possess; it’s a gift from outside of us—from God… There are these things… reading, meditation, prayer… you can do to make yourself vulnerable and available to the experience, but contemplation is a form of wordless prayer that’s a gift…”

And then there are the prayers of repetition, acting almost as a semantic container for presence, a way of using the mind’s own hunger for language as a route to silence.

True contemplative silence is no more than resting in the objectless awareness that lies at the end of words. And Stephanie Paulsell is right – it is a gift – one that no intention, no act of will can secure. But we can remain still; it seems that, for me at least, stillness is the central thing “you can do to make yourself vulnerable and available”.

All of practice comes down to stillness in the end; and it is only in stillness that words can finally settle out like sediment in the troubled pond of thought, to leave the steady light of what is in the unobscured clarity of awareness.

"The zero on which all other numbers depend"

Faith is not the same as belief. Faith is what Jay Matthews described as staying at the center with God. In my lexicon, God is simply another word for wholeness, awareness, presence, unconditional love, no-thing-ness, openness, totality, the heart of being. What Jay is saying points to an abidance in and as wholeness. Being unconditional love. Seeing as God sees.

In my experience, this means waking up here and now, returning again and again to the openness and the listening presence that is most intimate, the boundless awareness that is always accepting everything and clinging to nothing.

And although this wholeness is never really absent, paradoxically, the realization and embodiment of it generally takes faith and perseverance, falling down and getting up again and again, feeling lost and confused and then once again returning Home. It’s not about believing an ideology. It’s trusting in something that’s not a graspable thing of any kind, something that is not “out there” at a distance. It’s THIS here-now presence that we are and that everything is. It’s closer than close, most intimate, and at the same time, all-inclusive and boundless.

God and faith are religious words, and that’s probably part of why they both resonate here. I’ve always been a religious person. I wasn’t raised in any religion, but religion has always attracted me. I’ve never really fit into any organized religion, although throughout my life, I’ve wandered in and out of various churches and Zen centers, sometimes joining them but eventually always leaving. My path seems to be solitary, nontraditional and eclectic, but my life definitely seems to center on religion—a word I’ve tended to replace with spirituality, as many others have done, but maybe religion is not such a bad word...

God is pure potentiality, the germinal darkness out of which everything emerges, the zero on which all other numbers depend, the very core of our being, the timeless eternal unicity, the sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere, that which is subtlest and most intimate. God is a way of seeing, seeing the sacred everywhere, seeing the light in everything, beholding it all from love, from the perspective of wholeness—seeing and being the whole picture. God is unconditional love. Awakening is about opening to God, allowing God, abiding in God, dissolving into God. When I open to God, immediately there is no me and no God; there is only this vast openness. God is at once most intimate, closer than close, and at the same time, transcendent. God is not other than this presence here and now, and yet, God is also a relationship, a dialog of sorts, a way of listening to myself and the whole universe. God is impossible to define or pin down.

Joan Tollifson, Walking on Water

Tollifson quite uncannily puts her finger, here, on my own condition. I always find it quite difficult to write this kind of thing, since I know that I all too often come over as didactic when actually I am merely trying to find my way in the desert places.

I have found it increasingly difficult, despite my periodic protestations, to avoid this word "God". As Joan Tollifson points out, it encompasses so much "wholeness, awareness, presence, unconditional love, no-thing-ness, openness, totality…" even "the heart of being" itself. In other words, this one little word will stand in for whole stacks of other, quite possibly defensive or political, or merely pompous, assertions and jargon on my part.

Too often we would-be contemplatives find ourselves drawn away into argumentation, activism, restlessness, no matter whether we are caught up in the activities of some religious institution, or in some humanist or secular-spiritual one. A long time ago, Isaac of Nineveh (613-700 CE) had this to say,

And this is the definition of stillness: silence to all things.

If in stillness you are found full of turbulence, and you disturb your body by the work of your hands and your soul with cares, then judge for yourself what sort of stillness you are practising, being concerned over many things in order to please God!

For it is ridiculous for us to speak of achieving stillness

if we do not abandon all things and separate ourselves from every care.

Homily 21

For me of course, practice and prayer lie at the heart of it all. It is impossible to touch these realities - reality itself, perhaps - by any other means. And in fact it is not really a means; all we are doing is somehow getting ourselves out of the way of the light. Bishop Kallistos Ware:

The purpose of prayer can be summarized in the phrase, 'Become what you are'... Become what you are: more exactly, return into yourself; discover him who is yours already, listen to him who never ceases to speak within you; possess him who even now possesses you. Such is God’s message to anyone who wants to pray: 'You would not seek me unless you had already found me.'

The simple prayers of repetition, like the Jesus Prayer, John Main's Maranatha, or the Pure Land Buddhist Nembutsu (all of which lead in any case into the silence of objectless awareness) are by their very simplicity and accessibility not reserved for religious professionals, nor are they ones that require training or qualifications, nor do they ask of us any unusual feats of memory. Metropolitan Anthony Bloom wrote of the Jesus Prayer that,

More than any other prayer, the Jesus Prayer aims at bringing us to stand in God's presence with no other thought but the miracle of our standing there and God with us, because in the use of the Jesus Prayer there is nothing and no one except God and us.

The use of the prayer is dual, it is an act of worship as is every prayer, and on the ascetical level, it is a focus that allows us to keep our attention still in the presence of God.

It is a very companionable prayer, a friendly one, always at hand and very individual in spite of its monotonous repetitions. Whether in joy or in sorrow, it is, when it has become habitual, a quickening of the soul, a response to any call of God. The words of St Symeon, the New Theologian, apply to all its possible effects on us: 'Do not worry about what will come next, you will discover it when it comes'. 

Set and Setting

 Reply

I have recently come to realise that many of the problems so often encountered by lone contemplative practitioners – spiritual crises, phenomenological dislocations of one kind of another – may all too often simply be due a lack of understanding of the contemplative equivalent of what the the psychonauts of the psychedelic community refer to as "set and setting".

In their original context, set and setting were used to refer to a psychedelic drug user’s mindset and their physical and social setting at the time of their embarking on a trip. In the sense in which I am borrowing them, I mean the practitioner’s own personal beliefs, past experiences, unconscious biases and expectations (“set”) and their broader cultural, social and spiritual environment (“setting”). We in the West cannot escape our own culture – two thousand years of Christian spiritual tradition, and two hundred years of post-Enlightenment liberal thought – any more than we can escape what C.G, Jung called our "collective unconscious": the psychological weight of symbols, myths and practices we have all inherited by virtue of our birth and upbringing.

I’ve been wondering what all this might mean for a contemplative living and practicing outside of a religious – monastic or otherwise – community. Perhaps tradition tends to act like a homing beacon, helping the practitioner locate their inner experience within a context shaped by centuries, millennia, of practice and its inherited understanding; and without which, the contemplative life can come to be experienced as unguided, adrift, destabilised. However much we try to find this sense of location within the philosophy of mind, evolutionary psychology or whatever, the resonant frequency of that beacon is missing. What we are is not theoretical: we are living beings, beautiful creatures with stars’ iron in our veins; the causes and effects that brought us to birth are shared with those among whom we live.

Finding correlates within the existing Christian non-dual tradition seems to be the beacon I have, with my eyes on the charts rather than on the sea, been missing. Reading Richard Rohr, Cynthia Bourgeault, David Frenette or Martin Laird, I can see that I am not alone out on the waves.

The all that is nothing is the effulgent ground of being from which all things are birthed. Union with Christ means oneness with the unseen and hidden ground of everything, a union that unites every separate thing. But because humans are so focused on single, visible separate things we tend to miss out on the unseen and secret source of everything. Jesus invites us to remember the source of everything when he says, "I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing" (John 15:5). The all of God is nothing because it is no one thing. The all of God is everything, or, better said, every separate thing comes from God.

David Frenette, The Path of Centering Prayer, p.102

Having walked through the fire

The period of early Christianity is one of the key building blocks in my lineage of faith. It’s an overlooked area for much of the Roman Church and its child, Protestantism. With the self-sufficiency and arrogance that has often characterized the West, we have proceeded as if the first centuries of Christianity were unimportant, or not part of the essential Christ mystery. The very things the early Christians emphasized—such as the prayer of quiet, divinization, universal restoration, and the importance of practice—are some of the most neglected parts of the Western Church. 

After the legitimation and, some would say, the co-opting of Christianity by the Roman Empire in the 4th century, many Christians fled to the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Cappadocia (Eastern Turkey). We call these men and women the desert fathers and mothers (or abbas and ammas). The desert Christians emphasized lifestyle practice, an alternative to empires and their economies, psychologically astute methods of prayer, and a very simple spirituality of transformation into Christ. The desert communities grew out of informal gatherings of monastics and functioned much like families. This tradition preceded the emergence of systematic theology and the later Church councils. Since the desert monks often lacked formal education, they told stories, much as Jesus did, to teach about ego, love, virtue, surrender, peace, divine union, and inner freedom. 

Richard Rohr, A Radical Foundation

During the period of pandemic lockdowns, I wrote, in one of the early posts on my other blog,

my growing sense that the contemplative life is once again moving out from the monasteries and ashrams into a new desert, that of the world, or at least of places set apart within the world…

Time and again contemplatives have broken away from the apparent corruption of state churches on the one hand and religion-inspired revolutionaries on the other, sometimes forming loose communities, and retreated from formal organisation almost altogether. Examples are as diverse as the Desert Fathers and Mothers in Egypt and Syria around the 4th century [CE], the Pure Land (Shin) schools of Buddhism founded by Honen and Shinran in 12th and 13th century Japan, and the Quakers in 17th century England.

These contemplative movements, often based around simplicity of practice and openness to the Spirit, seem to arise when not only are the religious establishments in a compromised and sometimes corrupt condition, but the state is in flux, sometimes violent flux. [Our present political uncertainties], scoured by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, would seem to provide fertile ground for contemplative change in this way.

It isn’t merely the sociology of religion at stake here, though. There is a fundamental shift in spiritual perspective, I suggest, when we step outside the conventions and hierarchies of organised religion – to say nothing of the inner bindings of doctrine and dogma – into an uncharted space of presence and necessary, rather than mandated, practice. There is no longer any traction for the human instinct for security and status; those things no longer afford an escape or a distraction from the inner work.

Out there in the wild, there was no one to impress, no need to cultivate a reputation. A lot of things didn’t matter anymore out there. The desert fathers and mothers wanted to keep the edges hot and to imitate the life of Jesus…. In short, theirs was a countercultural spirituality carrying a prophetic edge. Some of them had been draft dodgers and tax resistors. In fact, some of the women had fled from being sold into a marriage that would’ve been little better than slavery. 

A spiritual resistance movement takes shape among these desert monks, questioning the commodification and militarization of life in the wider culture. They had no use for the ego advancement and social climbing to which even Christians had begun to aspire. You see this in their practice of what they called apatheia, a fierce indifference to unimportant things….  

What do you learn to ignore and what do you learn to love? What needs to die in your life and what do you need to affirm unreservedly? These two questions are the heart of desert spirituality. The desert becomes a tomb, said the monks, a place for the demise of the ego. But there’s also an immense joy and release in that, in learning to die before you die. You’re finally set free to live with abandon. No one is freer than those who have looked death in the eye, have walked through the fire, and are able now fearlessly to love.

Belden Lane, quoted in Rohr, ibid.

So once again, we have that sense I wrote of recently, that the nearness of death is in itself a gateway to the vast openness from which all things become, the ground of all that is. There is no getting around it: only as we face the ending of all we thought we were are we free at last to see that what we actually are is none other than what actually is.

Faithfulness

The first thing that we begin to grasp, if we are listening to this teaching, is that meditation is a discipline, a learning process, something we must be faithful to, because in our meditation we are entering into the deepest relationship of our life. We must come to our meditation as if we are approaching the person we love most in the world, and what is needed in all relationships is fidelity. So we enter into meditation with fidelity knowing that in the discipline of it, we are becoming true disciples, true learners.

(from Aspects of Love 1 by Laurence Freeman OSB)

Meditation, any form of contemplative practice, is an odd, sometimes paradoxical kind of a thing in some ways; not least of which is the fact that despite its being so clearly a beginner's activity (see the last post here) it only reveals itself for what it is after long faithfulness. None of the contemplative disciplines is a practice for anyone looking for instant results: only after uncounted repetitions can you begin to see what is going on, and like a human relationship, only after long faithfulness can you truly touch the heart of it, and even then it's not a thing you find, but a place you find yourself in.

Hanging in there is sometimes difficult. It's so easy to think that if I only changed to some alternative practice my difficulties would be resolved, or I'd be able to step up to another level... But there it is again: this isn't about levels, it's about turning up, day after day, just quietly, not looking for any result, but letting go of the whole idea of results.

Meditation is also non-acquisitive. We are not trying to acquire anything; there is nothing to acquire. The dynamic of meditation is not trying to get anything but to lose, to let go. It is in the losing and the letting go that we will find everything that we have, everything that we are given.

(Freeman, ibid.)

Always beginning again

We are always learning; we are always in the learning mode; we are always open to experience. We are not judging our meditation; we are not comparing it. We are allowing it to be integrated into our daily life so that it becomes a normal and natural part of our life. The simplicity of that commitment, the simplicity of that discipline, opens up a path in which everything in our life can be channelled.

 (from Aspects of Love 1 by Laurence Freeman OSB)

I think this is one of the fundamental things to grasp about the contemplative life: that we are always beginning again, always beginners on a path we have trodden countless times already. It ought to be one of the first things we learn, but somehow it never is - the penny only seems to drop after years of practice, years of expecting to "get somewhere".

Of course, God being infinite, he is always infinitely beyond our understanding, however long we keep up this odd way of life; and so we can never really make progress in the practice of prayer. We can only begin again, each time we sit. 

Once again, I have to say that this is one of the things I most like about the Jesus Prayer, that it quite explicitly eschews the idea of progress, of levels of attainment and things like that. It is such a simple practice, open to anyone. You don't need to be ordained, or theologically educated, or have made a certain number of retreats, or have studied the right books: you just sit down and say, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." That's all. It takes about 12 seconds, and the rest of one's life, to pray that little prayer.

The edge of things

To live on the edge of the inside is different than being an insider, a "company man" or a dues paying member. Yes, you have learned the rules and you understand and honor the system as far as it goes, but you do not need to protect it, defend it or promote it. It has served its initial and helpful function. You have learned the rules well enough to know how to "break the rules" without really breaking them at all. "Not to abolish the law but to complete it" as Jesus rightly puts it (Matthew 5:17). A doorkeeper must love both the inside and the outside of his or her group, and know how to move between these two loves.

Richard Rohr, Life on the Edge: Understanding the Prophetic Position

I am coming, gradually, to see that the edge is the inevitable place for anyone called to the kind of quasi-solitary prayer that this blog describes. There is that in me, as there is in a lot of people, which grasps at belonging. It's a way of self-validation I suppose, of identifying with something more than myself, but it is profoundly unhelpful. To get caught up in the politics, in the identity mechanisms, of any organisation - however "holy" - risks damage not only to the solitary pilgrim, but to the church that comes to believe they can be relied upon. 

This is a painful admission. Rohr goes on: 

I am convinced that when Jesus sent his first disciples on the road to preach to "all the nations" (Matthew and Luke) and to "all creation" (Mark), he was also training them to risk leaving their own security systems and yet to be gatekeepers for them. He told them to leave the home office and connect with other worlds. This becomes even clearer in his instruction for them "not to take any baggage" and to submit to the hospitality and even the hostility of others. Jesus says the same of himself in John's Gospel (10:7), where he calls himself "the gate" where people "will go freely in and out, and be sure of finding pasture" (10:9). What an amazing permission! He sees himself more as a place of entrance and exit than a place of settlement. Funny that we always noticed the "in" but never the "out"! 

(ibid.)

To accept that permission, though, while remaining aware of one's own incompleteness (sinfulness), is an extraordinary freedom, despite the social and psychological risk inherent in such a position. As Rohr says, earlier in this same essay:

The edge of things is a liminal space -- a very sacred place where guardian angels are especially available and needed. The edge is a holy place, or as the Celts called it, "a thin place" and you have to be taught how to live there. To take your position on the spiritual edge of things is to learn how to move safely in and out, back and forth, across and return. It is a prophetic position, not a rebellious or antisocial one. When you live on the edge of anything with respect and honor, you are in a very auspicious position. 

It doesn't, I have to say, feel very auspicious. But perhaps that's as well: it would be fatally easy to mistake such liminality for heroism, as Colin Wilson pointed out in The Outsider many years ago. Nevertheless it seems inescapable; it appears that, to the extent one fails to recognise or accept the gift for what it is, one is doomed to reenact one's old mistakes. "Don't pay the ferryman," sang Chris de Burgh; it may be good advice, out on the edge.

The Human Condition

The contemplative journey, because it involves the purification of the unconscious, is not a magic carpet to bliss. It is an exercise of letting go of the false self, a humbling process, because it is the only self we know. God approaches us from many different perspectives: illness, misfortune, bankruptcy, divorce proceedings, rejection, inner trials. God has not promised to take away our trial, but to help us to change our attitudes toward them. That is what holiness really is. In this life, happiness is rooted in our basic attitude toward reality.

Thomas Keating, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation

One of the most common objections to the story-book conception of God is the often-heard, "If evil exists, then God must be evil, or incompetent, or else non-existent." I am not going to attempt to rehash all the many and complex arguments of theodicy; they don't convince anyone, anyway. Keating's comment speaks to my own experience precisely. 

Contemplative faith is, as the Quakers say, an experiential faith (see Quaker faith  & practice 19.02) - explanations and arguments appropriate to the rational, discursive mind so often skip over the surface of our deep selves, over the waves of grief and longing, the currents of desire, like stones over the sea; it is only when they have worn themselves out with bouncing that they will sink out of sight. 

It was Karl Rahner who wrote, "The Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist at all." I have written of this before, often enough, but it bears repeating: the human condition is contemplative (whatever name you choose for that) or it has nothing whatever to say to the "fathomless ocean of pain" we are born into. Only love, the love that bore the Cross, can plumb that ocean's depth.

Praying in faith

Practices such as the Jesus Prayer, and the WCCM's "Maranatha", seem to me truly to be prayers, despite the latter's use of the term "mantra" for their repetitive formula.

The Jesus Prayer, as I have so often mentioned in this blog, derives from the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:9-14) and the accounts of Bartimaeus' healing (Mark 10:46-52) and the blind men on the road from Jericho (Matthew 20:29-34).

Terry Hinks, writing (on 1 Corinthians 16:19-24) in New Daylight:

Finally, [Paul] takes up the pen from the scribe to authenticate the letter in his own hand and with his own personal greeting. These are not just words – they are a blessing and not to be given glibly, far less carelessly. Without love we are nothing, as he said earlier in the letter. The gift becomes a curse if there is no love – either for the Lord or each other. The Lord of love remains the heart of the matter, hence Paul’s prayer and the prayer of the early church: ‘Our Lord, come!’ (v. 22) – in Aramaic, Maranatha.

Love is the final word – the grace of our Lord Jesus and the love Paul has for his difficult church in Corinth – not just any love, but a love for all and a love that we see in Jesus.

These are prayers, addressed in all humility to a God whose grace and mercy are present to us, and to all that is, in Christ Jesus. They are not intended to generate an experience, or even primarily to give rise to a state of mind, in the one praying. They are more like an opening of the heart to that presence as the gift of the Holy Spirit; the prayer itself is then a cleansing and a penitent thing, and its effects, if we need to look for effects, are more peace and stillness than anything else.

Increasingly I am convinced that much of the literature associated with the practice of Christian Meditation, especially those works by Laurence Freeman and Sarah Bachelard, is applicable almost equally to the Jesus Prayer; just as conversely, there is much that WCCM practitioners could learn from authors like Kallistos Ware and Frederica Matthews-Green! One hopeful contemporary sign is the openness in much of the Church to ideas from other streams of Christianity; in contemplative prayer, since the middle of the last century, we appear to be learning to pray together and to trust each other in the way that people like Thomas Merton and Thomas R Kelly seem to have dreamed of.  

It is the latter who seems to me to have summed up the source of the impulse to this kind of prayer in the fewest words:

In this humanistic age we suppose man is the initiator and God is the responder. But the living Christ within us is the initiator and we are the responders. God the Lover, the accuser, the revealer of light and darkness presses within us. ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock.’ And all our apparent initiative is already a response, a testimonial to His secret presence and working within us. The basic response of the soul to the Light is internal adoration and joy, thanksgiving and worship, self-surrender and listening.

Thomas R Kelly, 1941 (Quaker faith & practice 2.10)

The unseen condition of faith

On a... profound level we can think of faith as an existential condition that brings us closer to God in an experiential way. Faith, on this level, is not an answer to a question (such as the question, "Does God exist?"); rather, faith is the establishment of a living relationship with God that renders abstract questions meaningless in the face of living faith. However, a life of faith as an existential condition, if one begins with the question of God’s existence, needs to be nourished by an experiential connection with God. This does not mean a solitary, mystical experience. What the desert Fathers called the ascent towards God may not be found only in the life of the ascetic, but also in the life of any person who lives in faith. The sign of the cross... [for instance], has the same significance of spiritual introspection for any believer as it did for the desert monks of the fourth century.

The spiritual realm is not experienced in the solitude of the desert only. Ordinary people experience it in community. Although Scripture and the history of the church have shown several saints and prophets in direct personal encounters with God (as direct as an encounter between God and humans could be), the way God meets with most people is often subtle: A life in Christ is a sacramental life. This life radiates to the people with which it is shared. This sharing makes evident the presence of Jesus in the church and makes evident the image of God in all of us.

Andreas Andreopoulos, The Sign of the Cross

One of the essential functions of contemplative Prayer of whatever kind, it seems to me, is to maintain that stream of nourishment flowing from "an experiential connection with God". Now, it's important to make what might seem a rather subtle distinction here: an experiential connection is not the same thing as a succession of experiences. A contemplative practice is not a means to peak experiences or exalted states of mind - or it shouldn't be - so much as an often unconscious connectivity. From the practitioner's point of view, it may look as though nothing is going on, and our long-repeated and regular times of prayer are achieving little - but under the surface the Spirit may imperceptibly be bringing about profound changes, and one's prayer may be achieving, out of sight, things undreamed-of in terms of everyday causality. A long and gentle rain will heal and renew the land as a torrential downpour never could, and beneath the all too obvious helplessness and sorrow of the world strange and holy things may be taking shape.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

More things are wrought by prayer

Than this world dreams of…

For so the whole round earth is every way

Bound by gold chains about the feet of God… 

(Morte d’Arthur)

Homewards

Most of us in the West have not grown up with the Jesus Prayer as part of our spiritual landscape, as so many seem to in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Consequently we have difficulty in finding examplars, let alone teachers (staretsy) of the way of the Prayer. And yet we are often advised to "always seek to find an experienced spiritual guide for our practice of the Jesus Prayer. Such a person is important in providing support, encouragement, insight and help on the spiritual path and in managing difficulties that arise in our prayer practice."

Many of the readers of the blog, I imagine, will find themselves in this predicament. Somewhere along the path we have encountered the Jesus Prayer, and something in our hearts has resonated to its simple words. We pick up a book, or visit a website, to find out more - only to meet with this impossible requirement. 

Or is it a requirement? Frederica Matthews Green:

Look for a spiritual mother or father. Many Orthodox Christians turn to their parish priest for this, while others seek one at a men’s or women’s monastery. If you can’t find one, embark on the Jesus Prayer with whatever resources you can gather, but retain an extra measure of caution about your own capacity for spiritual pride. You’re still bound to make some mistakes, but at least you won’t be surprised when you do. Attend worship; be part of a worshiping community. Receive the sacraments (in Orthodoxy, called “Holy Mysteries”). Go to confession, if that is part of your spiritual heritage.

Kallistos Ware went further: 

Yet today, in this present epoch of restless curiosity and ecclesiastical disintegration, there are in fact many who use the Jesus Prayer without belonging to any Church, possibly without having a clear faith either in the Lord Jesus or in anything else. Are we to condemn them? Are we to forbid them the use of the Prayer? Surely not, so long as they are sincerely searching for the Fountain of Life. Jesus condemned no one except hypocrites...

I've found, over the years since I was first introduced to the Jesus Prayer at the end of the 1970s, that there is that in the Prayer which is profoundly healing and, for want of a better phrase, inwardly stabilising. Even when I have been thoroughly lost and without bearings the Prayer has found me and brought me back; not only to its practice, but to the fellowship of the Church, and to the Eucharistic community itself. For me it has been the safest of havens, and a beacon in the shadows where I have found no other light.

Not everyone of course, will share this call - there are many paths up the Mountain, and none is better of itself. But I don't think, if you are one who finds the Prayer tugs at something in you far deeper than words or ideas, an inexplicable yearning when you read Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me... that you need fear slipping out on the running tide of those words. There is there, to repurpose Hopkins' words, "the dearest freshness deep down things", like the scent of the sea wind that will lead you home.

A calling

Not for the first time it has been borne in upon me that the life of prayer is not a choice but a calling. Time and again I have tried, over the course of my life, to sidestep this; and time and again I have been brought back by an infinite patience and grace to a path that seems to have been traced for me.

In Quaker faith & practice we read:

Those of you who are kept by age or sickness from more active work, who are living retired lives, may in your very separation have the opportunity of liberating power for others. Your prayers and thoughts go out further than you think, and as you wait in patience and in communion with God, you may be made ministers of peace and healing and be kept young in soul. 

(London Yearly Meeting, 1923)

I would want to add the word “calling” to the first sentence here: “kept by age, sickness or calling…” Throughout history, even in times of great social need or unrest, the calling to a retired life of prayer and contemplation has been recognised by those to whom it has come.

Simon Barrington-Ward writes of St. Silouan:

…he began to recognise that [his sense of darkness and isolation] was in part the oppression of the absence of the sense of God and the alienation from his love over the whole face of the globe. He had been called to undergo this travail himself not on account of his own sin any more, but that he might enter into the darkness of separated humanity and tormented nature and, through his ceaseless prayer, be made by God’s grace alone into a means of bringing that grace to bear on the tragic circumstances of his time. He was praying and living through the time of World War I and the rise of Hitler and the beginnings of all that led to the Holocaust [not to mention the Russian Revolution, and at the very end of his life, Stalin’s Great Purge]. And with all this awareness of pain and sorrow, he was also given a great serenity and peacefulness and goodness about his, which profoundly impressed those who know him. 

For all of us in our lesser ways, the Jesus Prayer, as well as bringing us into something of this kind of alternation which St. Silouan so strikingly experienced, also leads us on with him into an ever-deepening peace. You can understand how those who first taught and practised this kind of prayer were first called “hesychasts”: people of hesychia or stillness.

Of course all this is by grace, entirely by grace; God’s life and presence given to us freely in Christ. We are called into this. I honestly don’t think we could choose these things for ourselves. Even if we could, they would fall into disuse by our own inertia. We would become bored with the Prayer, terrified by the darkness and the identification with the pain and alienation of the world, as I have all too often been myself. This "travail" of prayer, as much as its consolation, has for me often led to attempts to find another way - but to no avail!

Why would anyone choose such a path, hidden as it is too, mute and inglorious? My only answer must be that I didn't choose it. I have tried, so often, to choose anything but this way; but I have found myself driven back by a kind of interior necessity not of my own making.

Barrington-Ward again:

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 fulfilment… 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…

What seems to be required here has to be a life marked largely by prayer and silence.  In my own case, calling and sickness, or at least weakness from old injuries, seem to work together in a kind of synergism to reinforce this calling to a retired life. Why is it that I find it so difficult to settle down to accepting it?

Of course, how this will work out in the life of each of us called to such a life is a kind of small mystery of our own. It will have to be worked out, sometimes literally with fear and trembling, in the mercy of the Prayer itself.

I think we have, when we find ourselves called to the Jesus Prayer - or indeed any other contemplative practice - and the life that is lived within that practice, to be prepared to walk into the dark, as it were, unknowing, and see how things turn out. The path may be quite straightforward; or it may be quite scandalously tangled and broken. That doesn't seem to be for us to choose - what we are given is that unknowing, and a scrap of faith, like a dusty pilgrim's shell, to hold on to. Or perhaps it holds onto us. In my own case, it seems to be the latter.

[Parts of this post are, inevitably, revisions of things written here earlier. They seem to need repeating from time to time.]

The promise of presence

The call, the promise of blessings, and our willing response inevitably lead to a journey—a journey away from all that is safe and familiar, toward the unknown and very often, towards danger. There is great mental and emotional cost in such a journey, whether it be a physical journey to a strange land, a foreign culture, and an unknown people; or a journey inward, deep into the turbulent, uncharted territory of the mind and heart... The divine call is not always easy to discern and the mysterious promise often takes a long time to make itself manifest. God never promises us success. What God does promise is presence...

(Veronica Mary Rolf, Suddenly There is God: The Story of Our Lives in Sacred Scripture)

I think a statement like this must apply especially to the calling to a life of prayer. Anything we could imagine as "success" is very far from the experience of one praying: what could it mean, even? And yet this call is entirely real, concrete, almost. My own experience of the Jesus Prayer is precisely this, "a journey inward" and yet a journey into inescapable presence. Like many others, in Scripture and elsewhere, I'm not sure that my response could be characterised as "willing"; the best I can come up with is listening. Obedience is another matter...

And yet that presence is infinitely patient; and the call, once given, only grows stronger, despite the lengthening shadows. John Gill:

[The Jesus Prayer] is a direct invocation to the person of Jesus, expressing faith in his divinity and a plea for his mercy. It does not just rely upon mechanical technique and is not in the nature of a magical incantation. Its efficacy is the result of God’s grace, freely given. It is not an impersonal instrument but a prayer replete with meaning, expressing sentiments of humility, repentance, compunction and love.

Perhaps I might be forgiven for adding to Gill's four sentiments that of attention. Not so much the attention of will that any repeated prayer or formula involves, but attention to the presence of God in Jesus, like the beloved apostle's off the shore of Galilee: "It is the Lord!" (John 21:7)

Love and attention - maybe the only response possible or necessary to that inescapable presence - are all in the end we have to offer; and yet they are nothing more than faith expressed; and faith is given (Ephesians 2:8), just as the call is, and its promise.