The Grammar of the Heart — Reflection VI

When Prayer Becomes a Way of Seeing

“The remembrance of Jesus, combined with heartfelt fervor, will destroy all the enchantments of our thoughts.”

— St. Hesychios the Priest

We usually begin prayer by thinking that prayer is something we do.

We set aside time.

We say words.

We keep a rule.

We read the Psalms.

We stand before an icon.

We invoke the name of Jesus.

We become distracted and begin again.

All of this is necessary.

But after many years another possibility begins to reveal itself.

Prayer is not simply something we do.

Prayer is doing something to us.

Quietly, beneath the level of our awareness, it is teaching the heart how to see.

This is one of the mysteries of repetition.

Modern people often distrust repetition. We associate authenticity with spontaneity. Words repeated too frequently seem in danger of becoming empty.

And certainly they can.

The lips can continue while the heart is far away.

The Fathers knew this perfectly well.

Yet they also understood something we easily forget: the human heart is formed by what it returns to.

Again.

And again.

And again.

We become what we remember.

This is why remembrance occupies such an important place in the ascetical tradition.

Remember God.

Remember death.

Remember the Kingdom.

Remember your sins.

Remember mercy.

Remember that you stand before God.

The point is not to accumulate religious thoughts. It is to gather the scattered heart around what is real.

Most of our lives are lived in forgetfulness.

We forget God.

We forget ourselves.

We forget the person standing before us because we are already thinking about the next thing.

We forget death and behave as though everything were permanent.

We forget mercy and judge.

We forget providence and become anxious.

We forget that we are creatures and attempt to become Providence ourselves.

Then prayer interrupts the forgetting.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.

The words are simple.

Almost painfully simple.

There is nowhere for the intellect to hide in them.

Jesus.

Christ.

Son of God.

Mercy.

Me.

And then again.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.

At first the prayer may seem narrow.

After a time, it begins to contain everything.

Fear enters it.

Desire enters it.

Sin enters it.

Gratitude enters it.

The person we love enters it.

The person we cannot forgive enters it.

The future enters it.

Death enters it.

The whole world enters it.

The words do not become larger.

The heart does.

This is why the Jesus Prayer cannot finally be understood as a technique for achieving interior quiet.

Its deepest purpose is communion.

We call upon a Person.

The Name is not a spiritual device.

It is the Name of the One we love.

And love changes attention.

Anyone who has deeply loved another person knows this. The beloved begins to inhabit perception. We notice what would matter to him. We remember what she would delight in. The world itself becomes filled with references to the one we love.

Something analogous happens in prayer.

The name of Jesus begins slowly to accompany our seeing.

We look at another person and the Name is there.

We encounter our weakness and the Name is there.

We awaken in the night and the Name is there.

We become frightened and the Name is there.

We sit beside someone who suffers and there may be nothing useful to say, but the Name remains.

Eventually prayer begins to move beneath speech.

Not necessarily as some extraordinary mystical state.

Often much more simply.

A disposition develops.

The heart begins to turn toward Christ instinctively.

This instinct is itself a form of knowledge.

We usually think knowledge requires conscious reflection. But much of what is deepest in us operates before reflection.

A musician does not calculate every movement of his fingers.

A person fluent in a language does not consciously reconstruct its grammar before speaking.

Years of practice have entered the body.

What once required deliberate effort has become a way of inhabiting the world.

Something similar can happen spiritually.

At first we struggle to remember God.

Later, by grace, remembrance begins to arise on its own.

At first we must force ourselves not to judge.

Later condemnation begins to feel foreign to the heart.

At first mercy is a commandment.

Later it becomes the way we want to see.

At first silence feels empty.

Later unnecessary words become burdensome.

At first surrender feels like defeat.

Later the attempt to control everything becomes exhausting.

This is how a grammar becomes interior.

We no longer consciously consult the rules.

We have begun to speak the language.

The Fathers call us toward this unceasingly.

St. Paul says, “Pray without ceasing.”

At first this sounds impossible if prayer means constantly producing religious thoughts.

But perhaps unceasing prayer is something deeper.

A life whose deepest orientation is toward God.

The mind may be occupied.

The hands may be working.

The body may be tired.

The day may be filled with interruptions.

And beneath it all there remains a quiet movement:

Toward Him.

This has become increasingly important to me because life rarely permits the conditions we imagine necessary for prayer.

There are seasons when silence is abundant.

There are other seasons when someone needs us.

A door opens.

A phone rings.

A meal must be prepared.

A question is asked for the fifth time.

Then the sixth.

Then the seventh.

Something spills.

Someone falls.

The day disappears into small obediences.

It is tempting to imagine that prayer has been interrupted.

But perhaps prayer is being revealed.

The desert is not always a geographical solitude.

Sometimes the desert is the impossibility of escaping the person before us.

And then the Name must learn to live there.

Lord Jesus Christ.

While washing dishes.

Have mercy.

While helping someone stand.

Lord Jesus Christ.

While waiting.

Have mercy.

While listening again.

The prayer begins to join itself to ordinary gestures until the distinction between prayer and life becomes less clear.

This does not make every action holy automatically.

It means that every action can become a place of remembrance.

And remembrance changes perception.

The person interrupting me is no longer merely an interruption.

The delay is no longer merely an obstacle.

The limitation is no longer merely something preventing me from living my “real” life.

God is here too.

This is difficult knowledge.

I often resist it.

There remains in us a persistent fantasy that somewhere beyond the present circumstances lies the life in which we will finally become who God intended us to be.

When things settle down.

When the uncertainty is resolved.

When the burden lifts.

When we have more silence.

When we know what comes next.

Then we will pray.

Then we will surrender.

Then we will live attentively.

But the Fathers keep returning us to today.

This cell.

This brother.

This obedience.

This prayer.

This breath.

Here.

The Name anchors us there.

And over time something even more profound can happen.

Prayer begins to alter not only how we see our circumstances but how we see other people.

If we spend years asking for mercy, it becomes increasingly difficult to deny mercy to another.

If every day I stand before Christ as a beggar, what right have I to stand before my brother as a judge?

If my entire hope rests upon gift, how can I organize the world according to deserving?

The Jesus Prayer contains an anthropology.

It tells me who Christ is.

And it tells me who I am.

He is Lord.

I am the one who needs mercy.

That knowledge, if it descends deeply enough, can dismantle entire structures of judgment within us.

Not all at once.

Sometimes painfully slowly.

But the prayer continues its work.

This is why the elders insist that prayer and repentance cannot be separated.

Prayer without repentance can become spiritual self-absorption.

Repentance without prayer can collapse into self-accusation.

But together they keep the gaze where it belongs.

Upon Christ.

And as the gaze remains there, the heart changes.

Perhaps this is why the saints sometimes seem to inhabit a different world from ours while standing in exactly the same one.

They see what we see.

Illness.

Conflict.

Failure.

Beauty.

Sin.

Death.

Human weakness.

But they see these things from somewhere else.

Or rather, through Someone else.

Where we see an enemy, they see a person for whom Christ died.

Where we see humiliation, they find an opportunity for humility.

Where we see interruption, they encounter a brother.

Where we see catastrophe, they do not deny the suffering but somehow continue to perceive providence.

Where we see the end, they remember the Resurrection.

This is not optimism.

It is not positive thinking.

It is not a religious interpretation imposed artificially upon reality.

It is the fruit of a heart that has spent so long turned toward God that God has become the horizon within which everything else is perceived.

Perhaps this is what prayer ultimately desires to accomplish in us.

Not merely that we think about God more frequently.

That we begin to see with a heart shaped by His presence.

Then the words of prayer have accomplished something extraordinary.

They have become silence.

The silence has become attention.

The attention has become love.

And love has become a way of seeing.

The heart has learned another language.

Soon we will need to give that language a name.

The Fathers have one.

Phronema.

But before it becomes a theological word, perhaps we should recognize what it describes.

A heart that has prayed long enough that prayer has begun to shape perception.

A heart that has repented long enough that mercy has become more believable than condemnation.

A heart that has suffered long enough that explanations matter less than presence.

A heart that has remained before Christ long enough that, almost without knowing when it happened, it has begun to see the world differently.

This is not yet holiness.

It is certainly not arrival.

Perhaps it is simply the beginning of sight.

And so we return to the Name.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.

Again.

And again.

Until one day, by grace, we discover that we have not only been saying the prayer.

The prayer has been teaching us how to see.