Chapter 61
On the Jesus Prayer and Living Communion With the Lord
61.2.1 The mercy of God be with you!
61.3.1 Ask, and you will receive, the Lord promised. You ask, and be assured that you will find. What should you seek? Living, tangible communion with the Lord. The grace of God gives this, but we ourselves must also labor for it. Where, then, should you direct your labor? To remembering the Lord always, as near and even in your heart. To succeed in this, you are advised to grow accustomed to the Jesus Prayer: “Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me”—repeating it unceasingly with the thought of the Lord as present in your heart or near your heart. Stand with your attention in your heart before the face of the Lord and say: “Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” That is the whole work, and by its very nature nothing more is required.
61.4.1 Everything else that is devised is devised as an aid to this, the principal thing. The elders say: keep your attention in your heart or at the tip of your tongue, and hold your hand at your chest; the eldress says: imagine the crucified Lord and, as to one who is alive, speak your little prayer to Him. If it helps them, let them do it, only let them not consider this the main thing. Others did it this way: they’d sit on a little stool, the kind you put under your feet, press their head to their chest, bend down to their knees, and breathe: saying one half of the prayer while inhaling, and the other while exhaling... Laboring in this way, they acquire skill in prayer, and then advise others to do the same... And let them, only they shouldn’t think that this is the whole thing. But all this and things like it are not the thing itself, but accessories. The thing itself is: to stand with your intellect in your heart before the face of the Lord and speak the prayer to Him. In this connection, know that noetic prayer is standing with the intellect before the Lord with sighing toward Him, while the Jesus Prayer – ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me...’ – is vocal, outward prayer.
61.5.1 By this means the remembrance of God will be established in the intellect, and the face of God will be in the soul like the sun. Place a cold object in the sun, and it will be warmed. So too the soul will be warmed by the remembrance of the Lord, who is the noetic sun. And what will happen after that, you’ll see later.
61.6.1 The first labor is to acquire the habit of repeating the Jesus Prayer unceasingly... So begin, keep repeating and repeating, but always with your thought on the Lord.
61.7.1 And that’s all there is to it...
61.8.1 Where is the heart? Where sorrow, joy, anger, and so on are felt and experienced—that’s where the heart is. Stand there with your attention... The bodily heart is a muscular pump—flesh... but it’s not the flesh that feels, but the soul, for whose feeling the fleshly heart serves only as an instrument, just as the brain serves as an instrument for the intellect.
61.9.1 Do not judge the elders. Most likely they begin by holding their attention at the tip of the tongue, and then move to the heart. But let them be; just so long as they don’t consider this noetic activity, any more than saying the Jesus Prayer. Both are external things, bodily... The noetic work is one thing only: to ascend with intellect and heart to the Lord.
61.10.1 Is imagining the crucified Lord an essential thing? – No, it too is auxiliary, not primary. The eldress speaks the truth when she says that to keep the intellect from wandering it’s good to imagine an object in image form... This is possible... But there’s no reason to become attached to one image alone. The Lord is now in glory, sitting at the right hand, and all the Saints are around Him. And so one can imagine. But it’s better to do without images, because imagination is a crude faculty. It’s better to stand in faith alone, that the Lord is near, than to imagine. The eldress has grown accustomed to it, and the image of the crucified Lord has become one with her prayer of the heart, in which all the work consists. That the eldress is absorbed in prayer to the point of forgetting all else—this truly is the mercy of God, on account of her humility, without which this would not have been given.
61.11.1 She is not in spiritual delusion, but in truth.
61.12.1 You can’t stop idle talk. Idle talk is the most destructive thing. An equal evil is when people walk around without guarding their feelings... Both things greatly hinder progress in prayer... When the Jesus Prayer begins to establish itself in the heart, then the tongue will be bound... It will be bound by reverence before the Lord who is present.
61.13.1 Know also that you must conduct your affairs so that conscience condemns you in nothing, and if it does condemn you, you must immediately pacify it with repentance. And the body must be lightened by eating little, sleeping little, and working hard...
61.14.1 May the Lord bless you!
61.15.1 Be saved!
61.16.1 Your well-wisher, Bishop Theophan.
61.17.1 P.S. S. Do you have a copy of the Unseen Warfare? There the work of prayer is set out in detail... Please read and reflect on it.
61.18.1