Feast of the Translation of the Apostle John

Tomorrow is the feast day of the Translation of the Apostle and Evangelist John. As an offering we have translated the first chapter of the Gospel written by him.

The Gospel According to John

Chapter 1

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.

He was in the beginning with God.

All things came to be through him, and without him not one thing came to be which has come to be.

In him was Life and the Life was the light of men.

And the Light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.

There was a man sent by God whose name was John.

He came for witness, to bear witness concerning the Light, so that through him all men believe.

He was not the Light, but [came] to bear witness concerning the Light.

It was the Light which is true, which illumines every man coming into the world.

He was in the world, and the world came to be through him, and the world did not know him.

He came to his own place and his own people did not receive him.

As many, then, as received him, he gave to them authority to become children of God, to those who believe in his name,

Those who were born not from blood, nor from the will of the flesh, nor from the will of man, but from God.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we saw his Glory, Glory as of the Only-Begotten by the Father; [and he is] full of Grace and Truth.

John bears witness concerning him and has cried, saying: This was he whom I said: He who is coming after me has come to be ahead of me, for he was before me.

For all of us took from his fullness, and grace for grace.

For the Law was given through Moses; Grace and Truth came to be [given] through Jesus Christ.

No one has ever seen God; the Only-Begotten Son, he who abides in the bosom of the Father, he has explained.

And this is the witness of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him: Who are you?

And he confessed and did not deny. And he confessed: For I myself am not the Christ.

And they asked him: What then? Are you Elias? And he says: I am not. Are you the Prophet? And he answered: No.

They therefore said to him: Who are you? So that we give an answer to those who sent us.

He said: I am a voice crying in the wilderness: Make straight the way of the Lord, as Isaias the prophet said.

And those who had been sent were from the Pharisees.

And they asked him and said to him: Why then do you baptize, if you are not the Christ, nor Elias, nor the Prophet?

John replied to them, saying: I baptize in water; among you stood one whom you do not know.

He is the one who is coming after me, he who has come to be ahead of me, of whom I am not worthy to loose the straps of his sandals.

These things happened in Bethabara, beyond the Jordan, where John was baptizing.

The next day John sees Jesus coming towards him and says: Behold the lamb of God, he who takes up the sin of the world.

He is the one about whom I said: Behind me is coming a man who has come to be ahead of me for he was before me.

And I did not know him, but so that he be manifested to Israel, for that very reason I came baptizing in the water.

And John bore witness, saying: For I have seen the Spirit descending as a dove from Heaven and it remained on him.

And I did not know him; but he who sent me to baptize in water said to me: On him whom you see the Spirit descending, and remaining on him, this is the one who baptizes in the Holy Spirit.

And I have seen, and I have born witness, that this is the Son of God.

The next day again, John was standing, and two of his disciples.

And looking upon Jesus as he is walking, he says: Behold the Lamb of God.

And the two disciples heard him speaking and followed Jesus.

Having turned, therefore, and having seen them following, Jesus says to them:

What do you want? They then said to him: Rabbi (which translated means Teacher) where are you staying?

He says to them: Come and see. They came and saw where he was staying. And they stayed with him that day. It was about the tenth hour.

It was Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter, one of the two who heard from John and followed him.

He first finds his own brother Simon and says to him: We have found the Messiah, which is, interpreted, the Christ.

And he led him to Jesus. Having looked upon him, Jesus said: Are you Simon the son of Jonah? You will be called Kephas, which is interpreted Peter.

The next day, Jesus wished to go out into Galilee. And he finds Philip and says to him: Follow me.

Philip, then, was from Bethsaida, from the city of Andrew and Peter.

Philip finds Nathaniel, and says to him: We have found him whom Moses wrote in the Law, and the prophets, Jesus the son of Joseph, from Nazareth.

And Nathaniel said to him: Is it possible that there is anything good out of Nazareth? Philip says to him: Come and see.

Jesus saw Nathaniel coming towards him and says concerning him: Behold, truly an Israelite, in whom there is no cunning.

Nathaniel says to him: How do you know me? Jesus replied and said to him. I saw you before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree.

Nathaniel replied and said to him: Rabbi, you are the Son of God, you are the King of Israel!

Jesus replied and said to him: Because I said to you, I saw you underneath the fig tree, do you believe? You will see greater things than these.

And he says to him [sing.]: Amen, amen I say to you [pl.]: From now you [pl.] will see Heaven opened and the angels of God ascending, and descending upon the Son of Man.

The Jesus Prayer 7

To finish this series on the Jesus Prayer, we might point out the following. God is not something sensible. Hence, God will not appear to you in images, colours, voices and so on. While you are praying the Jesus Prayer you should be concentrating on the words of the prayer and ignoring these sorts of things.

Here are a few books that you might find interesting:

Anonymous. The Way of the Pilgrim and The Pilgrim Continues His Way. Translated from the Russian by R. M. French. Originally published: 2^nd Ed., 1954. New York: Harper. Fourth Printing by the Seabury Press, 1972. New York, NY, USA: The Seabury Press. Also: 1991, New York, NY, USA: HarperSanFrancisco, A Division of HarperCollins Publishers.

(Sakharov), Fr Sophrony. 1991. Saint Silouan the Athonite. Translated from the Russian by Rosemary Edmonds. Tolleshunt Knights by Maldon, Essex, UK: Stavropegic Monastery of St John the Baptist. Also: 1999. Crestwood, New York, USA 10707: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

Wounded by Love. The Life and the Wisdom of Elder Porphyrios. 2005. English translation by John Raffan of Bios kai Logoi (see next entry). Limni, Evia, Greece: Denise Harvey (Publisher).

Gerontos Porphyriou Kausokalybitou (Elder Porphyrios [Baïraktares] of [the Athonite Skete of] Kausokalybia). Bios kai logoi (Life and discourses). B’ Ekdosis (2^nd Edition), 2003. Chania, Crete, Greece: Hiera Mone Chrysopeges (Holy Monastery of Chrysopege). (In Modern Greek, original from which the English translation in the preceding entry was made.)

The Philokalia. The Complete Text compiled by St Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and St Makarios of Corinth. Translated from the Greek and edited by G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard and Kallistos Ware with the assistance of others. Five Volumes. 1979–. London, UK: Faber and Faber.

The Jesus Prayer 6

In this post we discuss how actually to pray the Jesus Prayer. If you have not already done so, please read thoroughly previous posts ‘The Jesus Prayer 1’ through ‘The Jesus Prayer 5’.

…

So we assume that you are Orthodox, that you have gone to confession, and that your Confessor has given you permission to practise the Jesus Prayer. If you don’t fit this description, then what we are saying is not for you. We say this because we cannot take responsibility for what happens to you if you don’t fit this description. Read on if you wish, but we don’t take any responsibility.

We also assume that you are a lay person with a job. If you are a monk or a nun or a priest, we expect that you have a guide who is more competent than us to tell you what to do and how much to do of it. If you are a lay person but don’t have a job, you will merely make the appropriate changes to what we suggest.

The best time to pray is in the early morning before the sun rises. If you can fit this into your schedule, it is the best thing. If you can’t, fit the prayer into your schedule where you can. Some people are early-rising morning people; others are late-night people—and this apart from what their daily duties permit them to do. If you just can’t hack it to get up early in the morning, then pray late at night. It is best if you haven’t just eaten.

Let’s assume that you are praying early in the morning. If you can arrange it with your priest, it would be good if you kept antidoron and holy water on hand at the house so that you could take these things (first the antidoron) when you first get up. In some cases your confessor will allow you to keep Great Holy Water and to take it every day (first the Great Holy Water, then the antidoron).

After you take the antidoron and the holy water (or the Great Holy Water and the antidoron), then make yourself a cup of coffee or tea. We prefer tea because coffee makes us physically active—we want to move around physically—whereas tea keeps us mentally alert without making us physically active. But whatever you think best is fine, even doing without tea or coffee.

Next, although its practice is part of the larger issue of the spiritual life, it would be good if you made an examination of conscience once a day. This is normally done at the end of the day. However, if your routine is such that it has to be combined with your period of prayer, then in our opinion it would be good to make the examination of conscience before beginning the prayer, even if that is early in the morning.

Next, you should have a stable place to pray. Depending on your economic circumstances, this could be anything from a chapel on the grounds of your mansion to a space on the floor of your one-room pad. This stable place to pray is not absolutely necessary. After all pilgrims wander around reciting the Jesus Prayer and they get heard. However, it helps.

Next, although we recommend praying before dawn, or even late at night, we do not recommend that you pray in complete darkness. At the very least, there is a good chance that you will fall asleep. The room should be dimly lit, with a colour of light that is not hard on the nerves. For example, a blue-lit prayer room would be grotesque. So would a room brightly lit with fluorescent lamps. If you want to use candles, or prayer lamps, yes they provide an adequate colour and level of lighting. But be careful of fire. You should keep your eyes open when you pray, so that you are grounded, so that you do not get lost in fantasy, so that you don’t fall asleep. The candle, lamp or other source of light should not be in your immediate field of vision. You are not going to use it for concentration exercises; it will distract you.

Please don’t play music, even Byzantine chant. You can do that some other hour of the day.

If there is a lot of noise about—say you live across the street from a place where they empty the garbage late every night with a lot of banging—you might consider ear plugs.

While the prayer rope is obviously meant for counting prayers, we find it easier to set an electronic alarm clock to go off at the end of our period of prayer and to use the prayer rope as an aid to concentration without bothering to count the prayers. Counting prayers is distracting. The ticking of a non-electronic alarm clock is also distracting.

How should you sit? Well yes, you can go out and order or make a prayer stool of the right height. You can also sit on a kitchen chair. The chair shouldn’t be soft and cosy. On the one hand, you’re going to drift off; on the other hand it’s not really appropriate. Please don’t sit on the floor in a position that you learned in yoga. Should you put your chin on your left breast above your heart? Maybe. Ask your confessor. These things are not that important. When you’re in a cave praying twenty-four hours a day, then you can worry about them.

Now forget whatever you’ve heard about how to pray the Jesus Prayer. Simply start reciting the words of the formula: ‘Lord Jesus Christ Son of God have mercy on me a sinner.’ Do NOT put an emotional load—as if you were a method actor emoting—onto the words. Simply repeat the words of the prayer. Concentrate on the meaning of the words. Here, there is a subtle point: on the one hand, you want to aim for a heartfelt rendition of the words of the prayer; on the other hand, you don’t want to force things. Repeat the prayer slowly, but not excessively so. At this stage, you should be aiming for a natural rendition of the prayer. This is important, because you have to start by calming down, and if you put a heavy emotional load on the words, if you over-concentrate on the words of the prayer, if you grind each word of the prayer out of your heart (‘heart-felt’), then you are going to damage yourself. Better to recite the words of the prayer naturally. The heart-felt stuff will come later. However, you shouldn’t recite the prayer indifferently or mechanically as if it was an ‘obligation’ you had to fulfil or a magical mechanical mantra that will do everything by itself in no time flat. After all, you really do mean that you are a sinner asking Jesus Christ the Lord the Son of God for mercy. Let the alarm-clock take care of when you should stop praying. Simply use the prayer rope for concentration, advancing one knot for each prayer. When you get to the end of the rope, continue. That’s why it’s a loop.

Do NOT make any effort to coordinate your recitation of the Jesus Prayer with your breathing. Proceed naturally.

Be careful of all those things that you suddenly remember you had to do. Unless it’s very urgent. Here we have another one of George’s stories. George was visiting a monastery when a novice told him the following:

One day I was praying the Jesus Prayer about three o’clock in the morning. I heard something that sounded like rain. Now although I knew I was supposed to ignore the temptation to stop the prayer to check out the rain, I succumbed, stopped the prayer and went to the window to look at the rain. Outside, instead of raindrops I saw fire. I thought to myself, having been appropriately calmed by the practice of the Jesus Prayer, ‘Hum, I don’t think the Fathers light fires like that at three o’clock in the morning’. So I put in an alarm. Fortunately the Fathers put out the fire before the monastery burned down.

Now here is another very important point. You are going to have memories, fantasies, images and so on coming into your field of consciousness. Just ignore them. That’s why you have your eyes open. Get on with the business of saying: ‘Lord Jesus Christ Son of God have mercy on me a sinner.’ Anything that’s important can be taken care of when the alarm clock goes off.

And that’s all there is to it.

The Jesus Prayer 5

Protestants and others should be able from our previous posts to infer our recommendations about their use of the Jesus Prayer. However, we want to pass on a story, which is true, that our friend George told us. George was visiting an Orthodox monastery. There, he heard about Father James.

Father James was a Calvinist pastor called Rick, middle-aged, married, with a couple of children. Rick was well-educated and serious in his love of Jesus Christ. As a pastor he got interested in Orthodoxy. Icons started to appear here and there. His sermons started to take on an Orthodox tinge. His church council, disturbed, required him to make a confession of faith. Rick eventually got a divorce, freely giving everything to his wife, including the children, and then went to an Orthodox monastery. There he was received, a penniless stranger. Over time, he was catechized, baptized and eventually made a monk. During his baptism, his Orthodox baptism, the Holy Spirit descended in a particularly evident manner upon Rick, and the Abbot, who had the gift of clairvoyance, spent much time in a meeting after the baptism discussing the Holy Spirit with the brotherhood. Rick had difficulties in adapting to the monastery because of his somewhat authoritarian personality. But he struggled and was eventually made a monk. Before he was made a monk, he was offered a bishopric. He turned it down. He wanted to become a monk. He became a monk with the name James. Later, he became a hermit, making some progress in the Jesus Prayer. Eventually God gave Father James a case of cancer. One day he woke up in the hermitage with a very sharp pain. He lay down, and Jesus Christ gave him a very great feeling of peace. That same day someone came by the hermitage and, realizing that Father James was ill, came back in a car with the monastery doctor and the monk responsible for the grounds. They took Father James away, and within days he was in the hospital. The prognosis was very poor. The doctors told him the truth. Father James was operated on; he had radiation therapy to relieve the pain. He returned to the monastery. He received palliative care. Another monk was sitting with Father James on the balcony of the monastery talking with him when Father James—who had stick-on pain-killers because of the very great pain he was in—said, ‘This is a very great blessing of our God. I wouldn’t have it any other way.’ A week later, Father James was buried. Another monk, who was nursing Father James, had publicly said to Father James: if you find favour with God, I want to die such and such a death. Five weeks after Father James died, that monk died in the way he wanted.

We can see from George’s story that, when Pastor Rick left everything for Jesus Christ, in accordance with the Gospel Jesus Christ accepted that and honoured it. Moreover, we can see that Jesus Christ blessed Rick at his Orthodox baptism. Moreover, whatever was good in Rick’s pre-Orthodox life, God kept and used. For even before Rick was baptized into the Orthodox Church he loved Jesus Christ. However, Rick accepted all the doctrines of the Orthodox Church without reserve and without ulterior motive. He was not of two minds. Finally, we can see that Rick had difficulties because of his personality. That was probably due to his Calvinist background. He had to work to overcome his weaknesses.

The Jesus Prayer 4

Let’s suppose now that you’re Roman Catholic and want to pray the Jesus Prayer. We assume here that you have no interest in leaving Catholicism. Of course, the considerations of the previous post apply, mutatis mutandis, to you also. There are a few other considerations, however, which lead us to recommend that you remain within your own tradition.

The Roman Catholic tradition has a different anthropology from the Orthodox tradition. It views man in a different way. You have been brought up in a culture and in a religious tradition that views man in that way. The spiritual traditions of the Roman Catholic Church speak to men (and women) brought up in that culture and in that religious tradition. When you look at the Jesus Prayer, you do so through the filter of your own culture and religious tradition.

It is a bit like icons. The Roman Catholic Church has a genuine artistic tradition, one that diverged in the early Medieval period from the common artistic tradition of Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Nowadays, Roman Catholics sometimes paint icons, supposedly in the Byzantine tradition. However, having been reared on artistic norms embedded in Western culture, the artists never really succeed. Something else, something rather odd, is the result. So it is with the Jesus Prayer. Something else comes out of it when a non-Orthodox takes up the Jesus Prayer, even if he is Roman Catholic.

There is the further danger of dilettantism. In the Roman Catholic Church today, there is a certain smorgasbord attitude towards religion. Many things are on display. We pick and choose. This is sometimes called by Roman Catholics themselves, ‘cafeteria Catholicism’. In this smorgasbord, the Jesus Prayer is a mild curry. It’s hot all right (‘Eastern’) but not so hot it really burns like yoga. We make sure that we get a prayer stool of the proper height, with the proper design. We worry about whether our prayer rope is knotted in the proper Byzantine style and whether it has 33 knots or 50 or 100. We worry about our posture. That is not what the Jesus Prayer is about.

Next, there is the problem in modern Catholicism of syncretism. Often, use of the Jesus Prayer is a stage on a road that started with a Roman Catholic ‘take’ on meditation with mantras, with a Roman Catholic ‘take’ on yoga. We disagree with this.

Finally, there are movements in the Roman Catholic Church, even among religious, that depart from the historical teachings of the Roman Catholic Church either in morality or in basic Christian dogma. It is not for us to judge, but the persons involved in these things are going to get burned. The Jesus Prayer is just going to add fuel to the flame.

So we recommend that you stay within your own tradition.

If you are interested in Orthodoxy for itself, you should start with a historical treatment of the Orthodox Tradition.

The Jesus Prayer 3

Let’s suppose that you’re Orthodox. The first thing to do to begin the Jesus Prayer is to make a good confession to an Orthodox priest. We are not in a position to give you a guide on how to confess but would like to raise some issues that are particularly relevant to the practice of the Prayer.

The first thing is your relationship to God. Here it is very important to make a very detailed confession to the priest concerning anything which might have disturbed your relationship to God. Have you ever been involved in non-Christian spiritual practices such as Transcendental Meditation, gurus, Tibetan Buddhism, yoga, New Age? Have you ever been initiated as the disciple of a guru? Have you ever practised non-Christian forms of meditation and prayer, including hatha yoga, T’ai Chi Ch’uan and even karate? Have you ever been involved in non-Orthodox movements such as Pentecostalism and the Charismatic Renewal? Have you ever been re-baptized by an evangelical group? Have you ever gone to fortune-tellers, mediums, card-readers, palm-readers? Even as a joke or a game, such as with the ouija-board? Have you ever been involved in the occult, witchcraft (even white magic); used the Tarot; done astrology; or consulted the I Ching using the coins or yarrow stalks? Even if you have stopped, and a long time ago, you should bring these matters up. They are very important issues, and in some cases may require recourse to an Athonite confessor. Athonite confessors can be found not only on Mt Athos but also elsewhere, on missionary endeavours. Athonite confessors are not more privileged than other confessors before God, but they have a lot of experience with these kinds of issues.

Do you have doubts about the dogmas of the Church? Do you have your own personal interpretation of Orthodoxy? Of Christianity? Is it mixed up with New Age ideas? These may just be tempting thoughts, but bring them up. Be frank with your confessor on these things.

Next, your relationship with other people. Do you commit sins of the flesh? Have you unconfessed sins of the flesh? An Athonite elder remarked that sins of the flesh have a disturbing influence on the soul that is particularly deep. If you are a practising homosexual, you have to be frank with yourself and with your confessor. We do not intend to raise the issue of your civil rights in a pluralistic and post-Christian society. That is a matter for another forum. However, God is not mocked, and the Jesus Prayer is a Christian method of prayer.

Are you in habitual conflict with anyone? Do you hate your mother? Your father? Your spouse? Your children? Do you have a grudge against anyone? Do you get angry often? This last is particularly important. If you are under a relationship of obedience such as of a child with a parent or such as of a disciple with his elder, are you obedient?

Have you wronged anyone?

Next, explain to the confessor if you are on medication for any psychiatric or psychological condition. The Jesus Prayer, as a repetitive activity, stresses the brain. There is a danger that if you have an underlying medical condition you will precipitate a psychiatric episode by use of the Jesus Prayer. Here, you have to be frank with your confessor. It would also help if you have already consulted with your therapist on the relative danger that you might be in, and the degree to which you can engage in such a practice without harm. Even if you are not on medication but in therapy—and even if that is only because it is the fashionable thing to do in your part of society—you should discuss your potential use of the Jesus Prayer with both your therapist and your confessor from the point of view of your psychological condition.

There are three psychological issues of particular relevance to taking up the Jesus Prayer: pride, sorrow (grief, depression etc.) and anger. A spiritual writer remarks that these three things are impediments to taking up the eremitical life. While beginning the Jesus Prayer is not the same thing as becoming a hermit, the same logic applies. Do people tell you that you are arrogant, conceited, proud and so on? Are you a know-it-all? Are you beginning the Jesus Prayer out of arrogance? Because you can? Because you’re better equipped than other people? Because you have a right to have a vision of God? ‘The Lord meets the proud in battle; to the humble he gives grace.’ (Prov. 3, 34.)

Are you depressed or in grief over a death in the family or over something similar? Have you just gone through a divorce? Have you lost your job?

Do you nurse hatred for anyone? Do you get angry easily? Are you unable to control your temper? Do you fly into rages?

These are all danger signs and should be discussed thoroughly with your confessor (and with your therapist if you have one) in the context of taking up the Jesus Prayer.

Are you on drugs? Now it might be thought that a member of the Orthodox Church would not both be on drugs and interested in the Jesus Prayer, but you never know. Psychedelic drugs such as LSD, peyote and mescaline mixed with the Jesus Prayer are a ticket to the insane asylum. We once met a fellow who believed that the Devil was one of the 144 sub-deities. He used to take 1000 micrograms of LSD and practise raja yoga—and this on a regular basis. He had seriously contemplated suicide. In despair he occasionally turned to calling on Jesus. Jesus hears, but what can he do? You can’t be a servant both of Jesus Christ and of the Devil. Substance abuse in general is an impediment to the use of the Jesus Prayer. Here you have to bite the bullet and be frank both with yourself and with your confessor.

Finally, ask permission of your confessor to practise the Jesus Prayer. Ask him how much to practise it. Listen. The very act of asking permission will put you on the right road.

The Jesus Prayer 2

Last time, we talked about the Jesus Prayer without saying what it was. So let’s do that now. In its most basic form, the Jesus Prayer is the following prayer: ‘Lord Jesus Christ Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.’ There are variations, but nowadays this is the standard form of the Prayer. Now what makes this prayer so special? Monks recite this prayer twenty-four hours a day! Now that’s pretty odd. Don’t monks sleep? They recite the prayer in their sleep! We can see that something very odd is involved here. If monks can recite prayers in their sleep…

Let’s look at the content of the prayer before getting into this mystery of monks reciting prayers in their sleep.

The first word of the Jesus Prayer is ‘Lord’. The person praying the Jesus Prayer is addressing Jesus Christ as Lord. The person praying the Jesus Prayer has the relationship to Jesus Christ of a servant to his Lord. Next, Jesus Christ is addressed as ‘Son of God’. When he is praying the Jesus Prayer, the person praying the Jesus Prayer confesses that Jesus Christ is the Word of God made flesh. He confesses the divinity of Jesus Christ. (We Orthodox believe that Jesus Christ also had a full human nature.) Next, the person praying the Jesus Prayer asks Jesus Christ to have mercy on him. In this petition is summed up all the person’s needs, both spiritual and material. Next, the person praying the Jesus Prayer confesses to Jesus Christ that he is a sinner. We Orthodox do not believe that while he is on earth a person is ever ‘saved’ in such a way that he can ever forget that he is a sinner. Until our last breath we have the relationship to Jesus Christ of a sinner asking mercy from his Lord. We could say much more about the content of the Jesus Prayer, but let’s now look at how it’s prayed.

In its full exercise by an advanced monk, the Jesus Prayer is repeated mentally (silently) in the heart twenty-four hours a day. This might seem a very hard thing to do. It is. It requires Grace, the Grace of the Holy Spirit. We Orthodox believe we receive the Holy Spirit in Baptism and that our Baptism is the basis of any spiritual progress that we might make after that. However, not everyone in the Orthodox Church who has been baptized prays the Jesus Prayer twenty-four hours a day. A special grace is required. St Silouan the Athonite, who died on Mount Athos in 1938, writes that he received the grace of the unceasing Jesus Prayer in the heart while he was in prayer before an icon of the Virgin Mary. The Jesus Prayer continues automatically in the heart, even in sleep, and the monk ‘follows it’ with his mind—with his attention and with his intention. By that we mean that the monk pays attention to the prayer and that he ‘means it’. This is very important, and it is one of the basic differences between the Jesus Prayer and a mantra. The Jesus Prayer is a petition to Jesus Christ, the Lord, the Son of God; and the monk prays the Jesus Prayer seriously, as someone who honestly asks mercy of the Only-Begotten Son of God. Remember the Tax-Collector in the Parable of the Tax-Collector and the Pharisee. That is how the monk prays the Jesus Prayer.

Now, this is how an advanced monk prays the Jesus Prayer. Tomorrow, we will discuss how we begin the Jesus Prayer, what things to look out for and so on.

The Jesus Prayer 1

The Jesus Prayer is an Orthodox method of prayer. The first recorded reference to the Jesus Prayer is found in the Gnostic Chapters of St Diadochos of Photiki, written about 450 ad. St Diadochos was the Bishop of Photiki, a town in the Epirus region of Greece. St John Cassian, writing in his Conferences about 425 ad, speaks in very similar terms about a related method of prayer that he found to be used by the monks in Egypt when he lived in Egypt with the monks around 400 ad. St John Cassian was writing in Southern France. The Jesus Prayer is used today in Russia, on Mt Athos and in Orthodox Monasteries elsewhere in the world. It has been popularized in the West by J. D. Salinger in his novel, Franny and Zooey. An anonymous Russian work called The Way of the Pilgrim, the manuscript of which was found in the Russian Monastery on Mt Athos, describes its use. This work has been translated into English. The method of the Jesus Prayer resembles to a certain extent the use of the mantra in Buddhism and Hinduism, and the use of zikr in Sufism. That has created much interest in it in the West. However, as a Christian method of prayer, the Jesus Prayer retains some differences from the mantra and zikr, and there is danger in using it as a mantra. However, this similarity of the Jesus Prayer to the mantra and zikr has led to quite a popularity for it in New Age circles, and even in Roman Catholic circles. In some cases, the Jesus Prayer is used to attract young Catholics away from the ‘Far East’ with an Eastern method similar to yoga that retains a Christian identity. This in our view is a mistaken use of the Jesus Prayer. The Jesus Prayer is an Orthodox method of prayer and depends on the Orthodox identity of the person praying. In the deeper stages of the practice of the Jesus Prayer, the mind of the person praying is brought into the person’s heart, and the person proceeds to engage in mental ascesis. On the one hand, if there is a faulty understanding of what a person is, and of the meaning of the terms ‘mind’ and ‘heart’ and ‘mental ascesis’ (that is, a faulty understanding of mystical psychology), there is a danger of serious damage to the person practising the Jesus Prayer. On the other hand, if, in a non-Orthodox setting, the deeper stages of the practice of the prayer are excluded out of hand, then the person practising the prayer and his teacher are in danger of fooling themselves. The Jesus Prayer is normally practised by monks. Some lay people practise it also.

Question from Reader 1: Are you reading the Bible in Greek?

QUESTION: Are you reading the Bible in Greek?

ANSWER: Yes.

First, the Old Testament. In the Orthodox Church, the Old Testament is read in the Septuagint Version. The Septuagint is in ancient Greek, in a form of Greek called 'Hellenistic'. In the case of Orthodox Churches that are not Greek-speaking, the Old Testament is translated into the national language from the Septuagint.

The Oxford English Dictionary says this in its entry for ‘Septuagint’:

The Greek version of the Old Testament, which derives its name from the story that it was made by seventy-two Palestinian Jews at the request of Ptolemy Philadelphus (284-247 b.c.) and completed by them, in seclusion on the island of Pharos, in seventy-two days. (Denoted by LXX.)

The authority for the old story is the Letter of Aristeas to Philocrates, long known to be spurious, which purports to give contemporary evidence of the undertaking. The translation is now held to have been made of Egyptian Jews, independent of each other and living in different times.

There is a web site (link updated August 29, 2010) that has comprehensive information on the Septuagint, with many links.

The canon of the Septuagint is broader (it contains more books) than the Protestant version of the Old Testament, based on the Masoretic edition, and broader (but not much) than the Roman Catholic edition of the Old Testament.

The Septuagint exists in a fairly limited number of versions (ancient manuscripts). There is a critical edition.

The psalms are of course included in any edition of the Septuagint. In the Septuagint, the numbering of the psalms, and to a certain extent their division into specific psalms, differs from Western translations of the Old Testament based on the Masoretic edition of the Old Testament. The Septuagint also includes Psalm 151, not accepted in the West.

However, for the translations of the psalms, I have been using a service book called the Psalter. This contains the psalms with the readings, numbering and divisions of the Septuagint, but arranged for recital during the services in Church. The edition I am using was published in Athens in 2005. When I’m stuck for a word to convey the exact nuance of the Greek, I sometimes refer to the Revised Standard Version, even though it is based on the Hebrew. This is not very useful. The King James Version is more useful.

Next, the New Testament. I use the textus receptus of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. It is in the original Greek. In the critical apparatus of the edition of the Greek New Testament called Nestle-Aland (26^th Edition), the readings denoted M (Majority) more or less correspond to the textus receptus, as the editors of Nestle-Aland themselves point out. Nesle-Aland is the standard critical edition of the New Testament in the original Greek. It contains most of the variant readings found in the manuscripts of the New Testament.

For the Gospel in particular, I depend on an edition of the original Greek originally published in Venice in 1847. When I am interested in the variant readings of a passage, so as to shed further light on the meaning of that passage, I refer to the variant readings in Nestle-Aland.

In translating the New Testament, if I am stuck for a word to convey the nuance I am looking for, I prefer to look at the King James Version, but I also refer to the Revised Standard Version. However, I do not have much confidence in the King James translations of the epistles of Paul, since those translations depart quite visibly from an Orthodox interpretation.

In cases of serious doubt about the meaning of a passage of Scripture, whether in the Old or in the New Testament, I refer to the commentaries of the Fathers of the Church, starting with St John Chrysostom.

In the case that I am translating a passage of Scripture as it is used in the Church services, I refer to the service books of the Orthodox Church for the exact form of the text to translate. That is why the translation of the Gospel in the previous post begins ‘The Lord said’. Reference to any edition of the New Testament, including the textus receptus, will show that that phrase is not in the Bible. In the service books of the Church, it is added to the Gospel passage in order to make the reading in Church smoother. Similarly, my choice of where to begin and where to end the Gospel passage was dictated by the service book for Orthros of the Feast of the Elevation of the Holy Cross. It was not arbitrary. (Orthros corresponds in the West to ‘Matins’, the early morning service.)

Feast of the Elevation of the Holy Cross

The Gospel reading of Orthros:

The Lord said: ‘Father, glorify your name.’ There thereupon came a voice from Heaven: ‘Both have I glorified it and will I glorify it.’

The crowd, that which stood by and heard, was saying that a clap of thunder had occurred. Others were saying: ‘An angel has spoken to him.’

Jesus replied and said: ‘Not for me has this voice occurred, but for you.

‘Now is the judgement of this world; now will the ruler of this world be utterly cast out.

‘And I, if I am raised up from the earth, will draw all men towards myself.’

(He was saying this, then, to indicate by what death he was going to die.)

The crowd replied to him: ‘We heard from the Law that the Christ remains to the Age, and how do you say that the Son of Man must be raised up? Who is this Son of Man?’

Jesus thereupon said to them: ‘For yet a little time the Light is with you. Walk while you have the Light, so that the darkness not overcome you. And he who walks in the darkness does not know where he is going.

‘While you have the Light, believe in the Light so that you become Sons of Light.’

(John 12, 28–36.)

It is on the Cross that the Son is glorified by the Father. This is not a literary device: the glorification of the Christ occurs not in the Resurrection but on the Cross. Who can penetrate to the depth of this mystery?