The Jesus PrayerSimon Barrington-Ward |
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BRF have recently published a new edition of a little book by Simon Barrington-Ward called The Jesus Prayer, which he originally wrote in 1996. He has added to and rewritten parts of the original book, particularly the section on the history of the prayer, and included a new introduction. He writes about the book: 'The Jesus Prayer, as it came to be called, developed out of a way of praying which emerged in the early Christian church of the third and fourth centuries, an era of great persecutions. This was also an era in which, in a rapidly growing, populous and increasingly worldly church, a number of Christians moved out to the edge of their villages to pray in solitude. They wanted to recapture the closeness to God in Christ of the earliest Christians and the martyrs. Eventually, a number of these people, men and also some women, began to move out into the deserts of Egypt, Sinai and Syria to pray on their own. Some prayed in small groups, some in solitude in separate huts or cells but often coming together with others to worship on Sundays. A common mode of prayer amongst them took the form of one phrase or sentence, often chosen from the Psalms or the Gospels, or spontaneously composed to reflect the feelings of the person praying, a phrase which was then repeated constantly. 'A classic example of the kind of sentence or phrase that they used and one of the most popular one word or one sentence prayers was what was called 'the Prayer of the Tax Collector', from Luke 18:9-14, 'God be merciful to me, a sinner', which was fused with the prayer of blind Bartimaeus, 'Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me' (Mark 10:46-52 and Luke 18:35-43). As this prayer was said over and over again by those seeking the presence and love of God in Christ through the Spirit in the fifth and sixth centuries, it took the form, 'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me!' or '... have mercy on us!', invoking the ‘power of the Name’ of Jesus. Thus it constituted a kind of profoundly Christian integration of both Eastern (Hellenistic) and Semitic ways of praying, which very gradually caught on in both the Eastern Church and later in the Russian Church also, where it was eventually to strengthen the martyrs and confessors in the ‘gulags,’ the prison camps of 20th-century Russia. 'My little book, The Jesus Prayer, describes how I first met with this way of praying, and how it can bring us into the practice of the presence and love of God ‘in Christ’, and thus into a true and gently increasing stillness in that presence. The book outlines the history of the prayer in a way which is intended to lead the reader more deeply into it, and goes on to describe how to pray the prayer. The Jesus Prayer, used alongside the Lord’s Prayer and other forms of worship, offers us, with great simplicity, an entry point into an accessible and gradually unfolding way of contemplation and intercession combined. I believe it can help members of all our contemporary churches to grow into a deeper Christ-centeredness and so into the 'faith active in love', which will flow through the heart of that true mission, into which we all are being summoned now.' Simon Barrington-Ward (formerly General Secretary of the Church Mission Society, 1975-85 and Bishop of Coventry 1985-97). |
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