Prayer and the Jesus Prayer

St. Porphyrios’s distinctive counsel on prayer, and above all on the Jesus Prayer: pray gently, with love and longing, without anxiety, strain, tension, or force. For him the Prayer of the Heart is not a feat of concentration or a technique to be mastered but the movement of a soul in love — the same divine eros that runs through all his teaching, now flowing as prayer. Hence his counsel to say the words tenderly and without pressure, to prize the intensity of love over the duration of effort, and to let prayer be the easy, longing dialogue of the heart with the Christ it loves, rather than a labor wrung from a strained will.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite (canonized 2013)

Prayer Without Strain

St. Porphyrios was an Athonite hesychast, formed at Kavsokalyvia in the tradition of the Jesus Prayer — “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me” — the unceasing prayer of the heart that is the core of the hesychast inner life (on the tradition, see The Jesus Prayer). But his counsel on how to pray it is unmistakably his own, and it applies to prayer the same reorientation that governs his whole teaching: love, not strain.

He warned repeatedly against praying with effort, tension, anxiety, and force. “You do not have to concentrate excessively in order to recite the Jesus Prayer,” he taught; “you do not need special effort when you have divine eros” (St. Porphyrios, Wounded by Love, trans. Raffan, Denise Harvey, 2005, “Prayer”). And on temptation and prayer generally: “Don’t say the prayer with pressure. Say it with love” (St. Porphyrios, Wounded by Love; circulated via pantanassamonastery.org and full-of-grace-and-truth.blogspot.com). The whole emphasis falls on gentleness. The strained, forced, anxious recitation of the Prayer — gritting one’s teeth to concentrate, fighting distraction by main force — is precisely what he counseled against, because it makes prayer a feat of the will rather than the movement of a loving heart, and a strained prayer is a self-centered prayer, fixed on one’s own effort rather than on the beloved Christ.

Tenderly, With Longing

His positive counsel is correspondingly tender. He advised saying the words calmly, humbly, with love and sweetness — even savoring them, one at a time: “Lord… Jesus… Christ… have mercy on me,” smoothly, tenderly, affectionately, silently, secretly, mystically, but with exaltation, with longing, with passion — and, always, “without tension or compulsion and pressure” (St. Porphyrios, Wounded by Love, “The Jesus Prayer”; quoted at pantanassamonastery.org). The juxtaposition is exact and characteristic: passion and longing on the one hand, the complete absence of strain on the other. The Prayer is to be said with the whole heart’s desire — but desire is not the same as effort, and a soul that genuinely longs for Christ does not have to flog itself to pray to Him. The longing carries the prayer. This is the divine eros of his core teaching (see Wounded by Love) now expressing itself directly as prayer: the soul wounded with love for Christ prays the way a lover speaks the beloved’s name — not by discipline but by desire.

Intensity Over Duration

A further note of his teaching follows from this: it is the intensity and not the duration of prayer that matters. “Meaning in prayer comes not from the length of time but from the state,” he taught; one may pray for only five minutes, but if those minutes are offered to God with love and longing, they may surpass a whole night of prayer prayed without love (St. Porphyrios, Wounded by Love, “Prayer”; agapienxristou.blogspot.com). This frees prayer from the tyranny of quantity and the anxious counting of hours and prostrations. The point is never how much one prays but with what love — a short prayer aflame with longing is worth more than a long prayer ground out by duty. Here again strain is dethroned and love enthroned: God measures the heart, not the clock.

This is not a license for laziness — St. Porphyrios kept long vigils all his life — but a reordering of priorities. Effort and length are not forbidden; they are simply not the measure. What matters is the state of the praying soul: whether it prays with love. A great deal of prayer offered without love profits little; a little prayer offered with great love profits much.

Prayer as the Dialogue of a Soul in Love

The deepest thing in St. Porphyrios’s teaching on prayer is that prayer is relational, not technical. It is not a method to be mastered, a technique of breathing or posture or concentration by which a result is engineered. It is the dialogue of the heart with the God it loves — and like all dialogue between lovers, it is natural, easy, and full of longing, not a strained performance. “Pray without anxiety, calmly, with trust in God’s love and providence” (St. Porphyrios, Wounded by Love; full-of-grace-and-truth.blogspot.com). The anxiety he forbids in prayer is the same anxiety he forbids in the struggle against sin and in the raising of children: the anxious, self-fixated effort that has lost sight of the love at the center. Replace the anxiety with love and trust, and prayer becomes what it is meant to be — the breath of a soul in love with Christ.

This reframing has been one of the great gifts of St. Porphyrios to modern Orthodox Christians, many of whom approach the Jesus Prayer with exactly the strained, anxious, technique-seeking attitude he warns against. Against the temptation to make the Prayer a spiritual technology, he sets the simplest of correctives: you are speaking to Someone who loves you, and whom you love. Say His name with love. The rest will follow.

In Conversation with the Hesychast Tradition

St. Porphyrios’s gentle counsel raises a natural question for anyone familiar with the classical hesychast tradition of the Jesus Prayer: does it not stand in some tension with the rigorous, technical instruction found in the Philokalia — the careful guidance on posture, on the descent of the mind into the heart, on the coordination of the prayer with the breath, on the sustained ascetic labor of attention? The answer is that St. Porphyrios neither rejects that tradition nor simply repeats it; he speaks to a particular danger within it, and from a particular standpoint.

The classical instructions on technique were given, in their original setting, to monks under the close direction of experienced elders, as aids to be used with discernment and never as ends in themselves. The danger St. Porphyrios addresses is what happens when those techniques are taken up — especially by laypeople, and especially by anxious modern people — apart from that living direction and that interior love: when the Prayer becomes a spiritual technology, a method one grimly works at to produce experiences, and the “descent into the heart” becomes a goal to be engineered by effort. Against this, he sets the one thing without which all the technique is worthless: love. “You do not need special effort when you have divine eros” (St. Porphyrios, Wounded by Love). His emphasis is a corrective and a reordering, not a contradiction: he restores the Prayer’s center of gravity from technique to love, from effort to longing, from the self’s achievement to the soul’s desire for Christ.

In this he is wholly at one with the deepest stratum of the hesychast tradition itself — and with the nearest Athonite witness to it in modern times, St. Silouan, whose own teaching on prayer is suffused with humility and love rather than technique (see the sibling collection St. Silouan the Athonite). The great hesychast masters always knew that the techniques were servants of love and prayer, never their substitute, and that a prayer without humility and love is no prayer at all however technically perfect. St. Porphyrios, formed at Kavsokalyvia in the heart of that tradition, simply says it again, in his own warm key, to an age peculiarly prone to mistake the method for the thing.

The Place of This Prayer

For St. Porphyrios this love-filled prayer is never a private, free-floating spirituality. It is the prayer of a member of the Church, fed by her sacraments, lived within her life. The soul that loves Christ in prayer loves Him in His Body; the divine eros of the Jesus Prayer and the sacramental life of the Church are, for the Athonite hesychast, one thing (see The Church and the Sacraments). The gentle, loving prayer he taught is not an alternative to the Church’s ascetic and liturgical tradition but its inmost flame — the same hesychast tradition of the Philokalia and of Athos (see the sibling collection St. Silouan the Athonite), prayed in the key of love.

References

Wounded by Love: The Life and the Wisdom of Saint Porphyrios. Translated by John Raffan. Limni, Evia: Denise Harvey (Publisher), 2005. The chapters on prayer and the Jesus Prayer: “you do not need special effort when you have divine eros”; “say it with love,” not with pressure; the words said tenderly, with longing, without tension; intensity over duration; prayer as loving dialogue, not technique.
“St. Porphyrios on the Jesus Prayer.” pantanassamonastery.org. The counsel to say the words “smoothly, tenderly, affectionally… without tension or compulsion and pressure.”
“St. Porphyrios on Prayer and the Will of God.” agapienxristou.blogspot.com and full-of-grace-and-truth.blogspot.com. Intensity over duration; prayer “without anxiety, calmly, with trust in God’s love.”
Orthodoxy Guide: The Jesus Prayer (this repository). The tradition of the Prayer of the Heart within which his counsel stands.