“Well, as I said, the pilgrim—this simple peasant—started the whole pilgrimage to find out what it means in the Bible when it says you’re supposed to pray without ceasing. And then he meets this starets—this very advanced religious person I mentioned, the one who’d been studying the ‘Philokalia’ for years and years and years. . . . Well, the starets tells him about the Jesus Prayer first of all. ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.’ I mean that’s what it is. And he explains to him that those are the best words to use when you pray. Especially the word ‘mercy,’ because it’s such a really enormous word and can mean so many things. I mean it doesn’t just have to mean mercy.” Franny paused to reflect again. . . . “Anyway,” she went on, “the starets tells the pilgrim that if you keep saying that prayer over and over again—you only have to just do it with your lips at first—then eventually what happens, the prayer becomes self-active. Something happens after a while. I don’t know what, but something happens, and the words get synchronized with the person’s heartbeats, and then you’re actually praying without ceasing. Which has a really tremendous, mystical effect on your whole outlook. I mean that’s the whole point of it, more or less. I mean you do it to purify your whole outlook and get an absolutely new conception of what everything’s about.”
—from “Franny,” by J.D. Salinger (1955)

The setting for this monologue is a restaurant in Harvard Square, and the speaker is Franny Glass, a young woman overwhelmed by the noisy inauthenticity of much of the world around her, who is trying to explain (to her self-absorbed Harvard boyfriend) a Christian prayer she has discovered, called the Jesus Prayer. Its origins, in fact, lie deep in Old Testament tradition, and its course can be charted over millennia.

The practice of the Jesus Prayer seems, at first blush, a simple matter. It involves nothing more than the recitation of the name of Jesus, at any time or place and under any circumstance, usually within the phrase, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Its foundations lie in the Old Testament theology of the divine name. Karl Barth, the German theologian, summed up this theology when he said, “The name of Yahweh is simply Yahweh revealed to men.” In other words, the name itself is the concrete presence of God. And so in the book of Deuteronomy, the temple is said to be “the place which the Lord, your God, chooses for the abode of his name.” In the Judaism of Jesus’s time, the concept of “sanctifying the name” of God, kiddush ha-shem, signified a commitment to give witness to Israel’s God with one’s whole life.

The theology of the divine name is entwined in the New Testament with the first petition of the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples, “Our Father, hallowed be thy name.” The claim that Jesus embodies the glory of the divine name appears in a very early liturgical hymn from the second chapter of Paul’s letter to the Philippians. The hymn recounts that God:

bestowed on him the name
that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend
of those in heaven and on earth and
under the earth,
and every tongue confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord.

The Jesus Prayer that is practiced today enacts this hymn; the person who devotes himself or herself to the name of Jesus “bends a knee,” so to speak, in confession of Jesus’s lordship.

Two other New Testament themes shaped development of the Jesus Prayer. One is the aspiration to unceasing prayer, the impulse to make prayer not simply an element among life’s sundry experiences but the essence of being and action. In the gospel of Luke, Jesus relates a parable about a widow who is untiring in imploring an earthly judge to resolve her claim on justice. Introducing the account, the evangelist says: “Then [Jesus] told them a parable about the necessity for them to pray always without becoming weary.”

The New Testament also provides the pattern for the later phrasing of the Jesus Prayer: in Matthew’s chapter 9, for instance, where two blind men cry out to Jesus, “Son of David, have mercy on us,” and in Luke, chapter 18, as part of the parable of the publican and the Pharisee, in which the Pharisee prays self-righteously (“God, I thank you that I am not like other men”), while the publican stands at the back of the temple beating his breast and saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”

The first direct proposal to practice the Jesus Prayer waits until the middle of the fifth century and St. Diadochus, bishop of Photike, in northern Greece, who wrote: “We ought to give to the intellect nothing but the words ‘Lord Jesus.’” Diadochus’s words followed by more than a century, however, the development of two fundamental aspects of the prayer’s spirituality in the deserts of Egypt.

A flowering of monasticism occurred in the early fourth century, commonly referred to as the era of the desert fathers (and desert mothers). It started in Egypt and quickly spread to other major Christian centers in the East (Syria, Palestine, Arabia) and West (Rome, Gaul, the British Isles). Our knowledge of what transpired in these early monastic circles comes mostly from short sayings that were preserved in oral tradition and eventually written down in the Apophthegmata Patrum (Sayings of the Fathers). These passages contain no explicit references to the Jesus Prayer, but they do exemplify the key elements of spirituality that underly it.

The first is the desire for stillness, or hesychia (from the Greek). It takes the form of physical separation from human interaction—going out into the desert—but, more important, it involves the quieting of disorderly interior passions and, ultimately, the overcoming of any and all distractions that sap alertness to the presence of God.

The second component found in the desert teachings is the requirement for constant compunction, or contrition, which the Greeks called penthos. A saying of the desert fathers expresses this theme with typical vividness: “Just as we carry our own shadow everywhere with us, so we ought also to have tears and compunction with us wherever we are.” In such teachings, recognition of human sinfulness is matched by full confidence that God never withholds his loving and healing mercy from those who beseech it. What’s more, the fruit of authentic penthos enables one to “cover over” other people’s sinfulness, by showing God’s mercy to them. Consider this desert story about a monk caught in a scandalous sin: A council of monks is convened to decide how to deal with him. One monk, Abba Moses, noted for his holiness, at first refuses to attend. At last he appears, carrying on his shoulders a leaky bucket filled with sand. Asked the meaning of it, Abba Moses replies, “Here I am, coming to judge my brother while my own sins are running out behind me and I cannot see them.” Needless to say, the meeting is canceled.

From the spirituality of the desert fathers, Eastern Christianity developed a long and deep association with the Jesus Prayer. Perhaps the best-known early Eastern text that sheds light on the prayer’s practice is The Ladder of Divine Ascent, written in the early seventh century by St. John Climacus, an abbot monk on Mount Sinai. “Let the remembrance of Jesus be united to your every breath,” Climacus writes. Notice that he does not refer to a particular formula of prayer, only to a remembrance, probably tied to a scriptural text that could vary.

Climacus has much to say on the subject of hesychia, including this: “Stillness of the body is the accurate knowledge and management of one’s feelings and perceptions. Stillness of soul is the accurate knowledge of one’s thoughts and is an unassailable mind.” Hesychia is ultimately an experience not so much of sedation as of spiritual eros, a fervent desire for God. “I have known hesychasts whose flaming urge for God was limitless,” he writes. “They generated fire by fire, love by love, desire by desire.”

To Climacus, prayer is more than a transaction between the individual soul and God; the union between a person and God has a kind of sacramental efficacy. “Its effect is to hold the world together,” he says. He asserts a necessary dialectic between prayer in isolation and prayer that accompanies our daily activities. The more we set aside time exclusively for prayer, the more the spirit of prayer is going to accompany all our other actions; conversely, the more we apply prayer to our other activities, the more concentrated and intense become our times reserved for prayer.

Ultimately, Climacus sees a dynamism in prayer that travels from a focus on human striving to an experience of the dwelling of the Spirit in us, expressed also in Paul’s epistle to the Romans: “When a man has found the Lord, he no longer has to use words when he is praying, for the Spirit himself will intercede for him with groans that cannot be uttered.”

Another important description of the Jesus Prayer appears in the medieval Byzantine text Method of Holy Prayer and Attention. This work, probably by a monk named Nicephoros from Mount Athos, is notable for introducing physical guidelines into the prayer’s tradition. As a means of shifting from mental noise and worldly commotion to the stillness of a deeper attentiveness, Nicephoros advocates looking downwards, resting the chin against the chest, and coordinating the prayer with one’s breathing. Such techniques have always been controversial and are considered secondary and dispensable even by those who endorse them.

In 1884, The Way of a Pilgrim, an anonymous Russian spiritual autobiography, was published. This slender volume—a passionate account of a simple peasant’s efforts to experience the Kingdom of God within his own heart through the practice of the Jesus Prayer—became an instant classic. It continues to introduce people to the prayer today, as we saw with Franny Glass. In his telling, the peasant hears the first epistle to the Thessalonians and is moved to follow Paul’s charge to “pray without ceasing.” He sets out with a bag holding nothing but a few pieces of dry bread and a Bible and travels from village to village, meeting priests, monks, and wise men. Eventually, he encounters a spiritual father, a staretz, who prescribes reciting the Jesus Prayer 3,000 times a day, then 6,000, then 12,000. Following this practice, the peasant experiences “a burning love towards Jesus and all his creatures.”

It is both the peasant’s quest and his achievement that captivate J.D. Salinger’s teenage Franny, disoriented as she is by the artificiality and seeming meaninglessness of modern life. In her own soliloquy of quest and discovery, Franny gives witness to the Jesus Prayer’s enduring spiritual treasures.

Khaled Anatolios is an associate professor in the School of Theology and Ministry and the author of Athanasius: The Coherence of His Thought (1998). His essay is drawn from a talk he delivered on March 24, 2009, in Gasson 100.