The Jesus Prayer

The Jesus Prayer is the short prayer “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me”, with variations, repeated continually as a way of fulfilling the apostolic command to “pray without ceasing”. It developed among the monks of the Egyptian and Sinai deserts and became the central practice of hesychasm, the Eastern Christian tradition of inner stillness.

Hesychast writers describe a method in which the prayer is joined to the breath and the attention brought down from the head into the heart, so that the prayer becomes the prayer of the heart, praying itself without effort. Its aim is not a technique of concentration but continual remembrance of God, in humility and repentance, opening the person to grace.

The anthology of the Philokalia, published in Venice in 1782, gathered texts on this practice, and the anonymous nineteenth-century Russian Way of a Pilgrim made it widely known. It is often compared with the repetition of a mantra or the divine name in other traditions, though its content, a plea for mercy addressed to a person, is distinctive.