The Way of the Pilgrim

For this season of Lent, we have been praying The Jesus Prayer in our Vespers meeting on Wednesday nights at Otter. That prayer is Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

This prayer has an interesting history: A 19th century traveler stopped in a Greek Orthodox church and heard Paul's phrase from I Thess. 5:17 "Pray without ceasing. Struggling with how he could do that and on the advice of a spiritual director, he began to pray The Jesus Prayer continuously as he walked. His director told him to pray it 12,000 times a day. As he prayed, he found that the prayer moved from his mind and lips to his heart (the prayer is now called 'a prayer of the heart')and finally to his whole body becoming so internalized that it was present with him whether he was awake or asleep. He wrote about his experience in a pamphlet called The Way of the Pilgrim. The book is now a treasured theological document of the Greek Orthodox Church.

In thinking about prayer and doing some research for my small group on Sunday night, I was struck with the idea that we really do not do much teaching on prayer except for intercessory prayer. Maybe our children think that is all that prayer is about.
So, for a while I will be mulling about the different kinds of prayer we can teach ourselves and our children.