Chapter 171

Stand With Attention in Your Heart

Seek, and you will find, the Lord has promised. You seek, and be assured that you will find.

What should you seek? Living, tangible communion with the Lord. God’s grace gives this, but we also must labor for it ourselves. Where should you direct your labor? To always remember the Lord, as if he were near and even in your heart. To succeed in this, you are advised to acquire the habit of the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me,” repeating it ceaselessly with the thought of the Lord as being in your heart or near your heart. Stand with attention in your heart before the face of the Lord and say: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” – This is all the work is, and, in essence, nothing else is required.

Everything else that is devised is devised only as an aid to this main thing. The elders say: “Keep your attention in your heart or on the tip of your tongue and hold your hand at your breast”; an eldress says: “Imagine the crucified Lord and, as to the living, speak your prayer to him.” If this is helpful for them, let them do it, but they should not consider it the main work. Others did it like this: they would sit on a small bench, what they put under their feet, press their head to their breast, bend toward their knees, and breathe, saying half the prayer while inhaling and the other half while exhaling. Laboring thus, they acquire the habit of prayer, and then advise others to do the same. And let them, but only let them not think that this is the whole work.

But all this and things like it – these are not the work itself, but accessories. The work is: to stand with your mind in your heart before the face of the Lord and speak your prayer to him. In this, know that noetic prayer is standing with your mind before the Lord with sighing to Him, while the Jesus Prayer – “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me” – is verbal, outer prayer.

By this method the remembrance of God will become firm in your mind, and the face of God will be in your soul like the sun. Place something cold in the sun, and it will grow warm. So too will the soul grow warm from the remembrance of the Lord, who is the spiritual Sun. And what happens after – you will see later.

The first labor is the habit of repeating ceaselessly the Jesus Prayer. And begin, keep saying and saying it, but always with the thought of the Lord. And that is all there is.

Where is the heart? – Where sorrow, joy, anger, and so forth are felt and resonate, there is the heart. Stand there with your attention. The bodily heart is a muscular organ – flesh – but it is not the flesh that feels, but the soul, for which the fleshy heart serves only as an instrument, just as the brain serves as an instrument for the mind.

Do not condemn the elders. Truly, they begin by keeping attention on the tip of the tongue, and then move to the heart. Let them be; only do not consider this noetic work, just as with reciting the Jesus Prayer. Both are outer, bodily work. The noetic work is one alone: lifting your mind and heart to the Lord.

Is the imagination of the crucified Lord an essential work? No, and it too is also helpful, not the main thing. The eldress speaks truly that for keeping the mind from wandering it is good to imagine the subject in form. This you can do. But there is no reason to attach yourself to this image.

The Lord now is in glory, sitting at the right hand – and all the saints around him. – And so one can imagine. But it is better to do without images, for imagination is a crude force. It is better to stand in faith alone, that the Lord is near, than to imagine. The eldress has become used to it, and the image of the crucified Lord has become for her a prayer of the heart, in which all the work lies. That the eldress is absorbed in prayer to the forgetting of everything – this truly is God’s mercy because of her humility, without which this would not have been given. She is not in spiritual delusion, but in truth.

(Letter 896, vol. 5, pp. 164–166)