ORTHODOX TEACHINGS

If the wound of sin is the breaking of communion, prayer is an essential way that communion is mended. Not through effort or eloquence, but through the slow, patient turning of the human person back toward God, again and again, across a lifetime.

How and Why We Pray

Orthodox Christians pray in many ways, at many times. We pray together in the Divine Liturgy, joining our voices to the prayer of the whole Church across two thousand years. We pray the daily cycle of services that mark the hours of light and dark. We pray at home, before icons, in the morning and at night, before meals and at the close of the day. We pray for one another, for the living and the departed, for the Church and for the whole world.

Prayer, in the Orthodox understanding, is not chiefly about asking for things. It is about being present with our loving God who is already present in us. It is the practice by which the human person, wounded and distracted, is slowly gathered back into communion with Christ, and through Christ, with everyone and everything He loves.

Stillness of the Heart and The Jesus Prayer

"Pray without ceasing," St. Paul writes (1 Thessalonians 5:17). "This is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you." At the heart of living out this teaching is a single, simple prayer the Orthodox tradition has carried for more than fifteen centuries: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

This is the Jesus Prayer. It is short enough to be prayed in a single breath and deep enough to be prayed for a lifetime. Monks of the Eastern Church have prayed it so continuously that it sinks below conscious thought and becomes, as one of the desert fathers put it, the prayer that prays itself. The tradition that surrounds this practice is called hesychasm, from the Greek hesychia, meaning stillness or quiet. 

Hesychasm is the long Orthodox apprenticeship in inner silence, the slow learning of how to stand attentively before God without the noise of one's own thoughts getting in the way. This contemplative dimension of Christian prayer was largely lost in the Christian West after the Middle Ages. The Orthodox Church has kept it, not as a specialty for monks but as the inheritance of every baptized Christian. Anyone can pray the Jesus Prayer. Anyone can begin the work of inner stillness. The path is open.

Prayers We Have Been Given

Orthodox Christians are not asked to invent prayer. The Church hands down a deep treasury of prayer that includes the Psalter, the prayers of the saints, the hymns of the great feasts, and the morning and evening prayers said at home. A simple Orthodox prayer book contains centuries of accumulated wisdom about how to speak to God, what to ask for, how to give thanks, how to repent. When we use these prayers, we are praying with the whole Church across time. The prayers of St. Basil the Great, St. John Chrysostom, St. Ephrem the Syrian, and many others are still spoken in Orthodox homes today, in essentially the words they first wrote. We are not alone when we pray. We are never alone when we pray.

A Rule of Prayer

Many Orthodox Christians keep what is called a prayer rule: a simple, regular pattern of prayer at home that anchors the day. A rule might be as short as a few minutes of morning and evening prayer from a prayer book, with the Jesus Prayer said throughout the day. Or it might be longer, depending on one's stage of life and what a spiritual father has counseled. The point of a rule is not to accumulate prayers but to make prayer a steady habit, a quiet rhythm that holds the day rather than something fit in around its edges. 

A rule grows over time. It is meant to be sustainable, not heroic. What matters is not the length of the rule but the steadiness of the turning back toward God, again and again, across a lifetime. For a practical introduction to building a prayer rule at home, including the Jesus Prayer and a simple set of morning and evening prayers, see our prayer booklet.