Jesus Prayer

Heard in the wild

The longer version

What it means

The Jesus Prayer is one sentence: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." Orthodox Christians repeat it slowly, often with the breath — inhaling on "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God," exhaling on "have mercy on me, a sinner" — and often on a knotted prayer rope, one knot per repetition. It can be prayed for a few minutes or an hour; monks aim to pray it without ceasing. The prayer contains, in miniature, the whole gospel: who Jesus is, and what the person needs.

The teaching around it is called hesychasm, from the Greek for stillness: the practice of quieting the mind and body so that the prayer descends into the heart.

Why people say it

Orthodox Christians say it fulfills Paul's command to "pray without ceasing" — a prayer short enough to carry through a day — and that its repetition, far from being empty, wears a groove that God fills. It also answers the problem of what to say: the prayer is the tax collector's from Luke 18, the one Jesus said went home justified. Christians of every tradition who've adopted it describe it as the prayer they can pray when nothing else comes.

How to respond

If an Orthodox friend mentions the Jesus Prayer or shows you a prayer rope, they've shown you the center of their spiritual life; "how do you use it?" will get a thoughtful answer. If you'd like to try it, you can — it doesn't require being Orthodox, and Christians of every stripe pray it. Say it slowly, with the breath, and don't worry about doing it right. If the repetition seems mechanical to you, know that Orthodox teaching addresses that exact worry and says the mechanics are a doorway, not the destination.

If you hear it in different churches

Orthodox: central, ancient, practiced by monks and laypeople alike, with the prayer rope and the hesychast tradition behind it. Eastern Catholics: the same. Roman Catholics: increasingly adopted, alongside the Rosary. Anglicans, Lutherans, and many evangelicals: adopted from the 1970s on through books on contemplative prayer. Pentecostals and Baptists: less common, though "Lord, have mercy" is universal.

Where does “Jesus Prayer” come from?

The tax collector's prayer, "God, have mercy on me, a sinner" (Luke 18:13), and the blind man's, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me" (18:38), are the sources. The desert fathers of the 300s and 400s used short repeated prayers; the Jesus Prayer in its present form is attested by the 500s and became central to Byzantine monasticism, especially on Mount Athos. The Philokalia, an eighteenth-century collection of texts on the prayer, and The Way of a Pilgrim, a nineteenth-century Russian account of a wanderer learning to pray it continually, brought it to a wide audience. Western Christians discovered it in large numbers in the twentieth century.

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