Some time back I spent part of Sunday afternoon at Speakers’ Corner
in Hyde Park. One of the advantages of living close to London in Horsted Keynes
is that just as my parishioners commute to work I as parish priest can commute from
my village to recreation. It fascinates me on occasion to join in debates that
stretch my brain cells. Atheists, Christians, Muslims, Marxists all engage in
Hyde Park as part of the freedom of expression that is distinctive of our
democratic culture. Issues in debate that
week included the army’s removal of the Egyptian president and the perceived
incapacity of Islamic leaders to form broad coalitions of interest.
As I left
the strident debate one of the more engaging characters I’d met took me to one
side and confided he was a Coptic Christian from Egypt and had appreciated my
contribution. Suddenly the intellectual discussion took back stage to a
personal encounter with a believer under persecution. I walked on through Hyde
Park to attend a church service with him on my heart. As I walked, the Jesus Prayer was, as ever, my
companion, settling my mind, centring me on God and his love for the Sunday
crowds picnicking around me, preparing me for the sung evening prayer I was due
to attend at a Church in Knightsbridge.
My experience in
Hyde Park demonstrates the way my mind burns with ideas to be debated internally
and externally, a debating that needs again and again to give way to something
more profound. Just as meeting that Egyptian Christian had an impact on me over
and above the intellectual debate about his country’s politics, so my personal
encounter with God is brought about by the Jesus Prayer as it takes me deeper
than purely mental reflection. Such reflection can be highly distracting so
that an over active mind has been compared variously to a cloud of mosquitoes
buzzing round or to a colony of monkeys leaping from tree to tree. The discipline of reciting the Jesus Prayer
provides what I am calling a simpler mentality, in other words one that sees
the periodic clearing of the mind with useless thoughts put to one side and a
centring on what actually matters here and now.
On my Sunday
afternoon walk I moved from thinking and debating to interceding and
worshipping through the unfolding of events. Those events had included an
important personal encounter, which got me praying for someone at the sharp end
of things. The encounter was a trigger for intercession in which my default
recitation of the Jesus Prayer came to the surface, replacing and so silencing
my thoughts, so that my heart could rest more on God and neighbour. When I
arrived before the altar of the Knightsbridge Church, I had people on my heart
to bring before God for blessing.
In the Orthodox
anthology of spiritual writers St John of Karpathos gives this advice: ‘Long
labour in prayer and considerable time are needed for a man with a mind which
never cools to acquire a new heaven of the heart where Christ dwells, as the
Apostle says: “Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you..?”
(2 Corinthians 13:5) I particularly
appreciated this advice when I read it, being ‘a man with a mind which never
cools’ seeking ‘to acquire that heaven of the heart’ which has Christ’s
indwelling. In the Jesus Prayer I have
found a check to useless cerebral activity that helps circumstances of the present
moment to break into my psyche, warm my heart and help it move, however
untidily, towards the heart of God.
The repeating of
the prayer is not the ‘vain repetition’ condemned by Jesus in Matthew 6:7.
Rather it is a warding off of vain mental preoccupation, once the Jesus Prayer
is given permission by the will to surface from its default interior
cogitation. ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner’: the
phrase takes hold of us and does away with negativity. Containing the Saviour’s name, it’s something
redeeming as there is a close association of name and person in biblical
understanding.
For the Jews of the Old Testament
knowing someone’s name brought you close to all they are about and the name of
Jesus, for Christians, stands for entry into the heart of God himself. Invoking
the name of Jesus places me in God’s presence and opens my heart to his energy
as I voice inside of myself an ongoing desire to surrender myself to God’s
mercy. This is a very powerful dynamic so
that recalling the holy name of Jesus seems very often to bring God’s power
into play within my situation.
The release of the mind into the
heart is key to holy living as it helps our thoughts and indeed our wills to submit
to the work that God has for us and, through us, for a needy world. Repeating
the Jesus Prayer is a means to this end, although it’s a costly exercise because
it involves continual use of the mind to repeat it, which generates some
natural resistance and sometimes a literal pain in the head! The internal flow
of our thoughts is impossible to control fully but there are ways of
disengaging ourselves and rising above that flow of which the Jesus Prayer is a
great servant.
I know a business man who was
sent on a course of Buddhist meditation to improve his performance in the
workplace. The commercial world tends to focus on Buddhism as expert in healthy
spiritual practice as far as its teaching on mindfulness is concerned. A fellow
priest worked out that there were more people enrolled annually on Buddhist
meditation courses in Brighton than attended parish churches.
In my view it is quite
extraordinary how people are giving authority for spiritual expertise to
eastern religions over against Christianity (which is arguably itself an
eastern religion) and this was one of my prompts to write about the Jesus
Prayer which is one among many gifts we can offer from the treasury of
Christian devotion to engage with those seeking to build their interior life in
the materialistic culture we inhabit. Like other forms of eastern devotion it
involves a repeated prayer phrase which has the effect of focussing and
simplifying the mind’s operation.
In his book
on the Jesus Prayer Bishop Simon Barrington-Ward writes: ‘The phrases of the Jesus
Prayer give the top of our mind something to be occupied with, so that the rest
of the mind can be open to the deeper feeling that lies underneath. This is
what those who have used the prayer have called putting the mind in the heart.
The words occupy our surface being at the same time as they communicate with
the depths in us’.
This is an
excellent description of the simpler mentality we are introduced to whereby the
mind is given holy distraction so as to allow prayer from the depth of our
being.
In this
eucharist such prayer is nurtured by the gift of word and sacrament presented
to us. These gifts are enhanced by corporate silence in which we own the gifts
and the Lord who is the Giver. Let us attend to him now, reaching down from the
superficial attention of our minds into that place inside of us we call the
heart where God dwells and would dwell more fully.
No comments:
Post a Comment