Section 07: Prayer and the Church

St. Porphyrios’s teaching on prayer and on the Church — the two pillars of the inner life as he lived and taught it. His counsel on the Jesus Prayer is among the most distinctive in the modern tradition: pray gently, with love and longing, without strain, anxiety, or force, for the Prayer is the movement of a soul in love, not a feat of concentration. And the place of this prayer, for the Athonite hesychast, is never private religiosity but the Church — the Body of Christ, with her sacraments (above all confession and the Eucharist) as the very medicine and food by which the soul is healed and united to Christ.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite (canonized 2013)

Contents

File Topic
Prayer and the Jesus Prayer His counsel on the Jesus Prayer: gently, with love and longing, without anxiety, tension, or force; intensity over duration; prayer as the dialogue of a soul in love rather than a technique; how “love, not pressure” reshapes the whole practice; the place of the divine eros in prayer
The Church and the Sacraments His ecclesial rootedness: the Church as the Body of Christ and the necessary place of salvation; confession and the Eucharist as the medicine and food of immortality; his lifelong priestly and confessional ministry as the lived expression of this; love of Christ as inseparable from love of His Church

How to Use

  • Read Prayer and the Jesus Prayer for his distinctive, gentle counsel on the Prayer of the Heart, which applies his whole teaching of “love, not strain” to prayer itself.
  • Read The Church and the Sacraments for the ecclesial ground of everything: that the love of Christ he preached is lived in and through the Church and her mysteries.
  • His counsel on prayer is the application to the inner life of the core teaching in Section 05.

Cross-References