The Community and the Jesus Prayer

The spiritual and liturgical life Sophrony built at the Monastery of St. John the Baptist: a community whose center is the Jesus Prayer — “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me” (and, in its corporate form, “upon us”) — prayed aloud together for long stretches in place of much of the fixed cycle of services; an international, multi-ethnic, “double” community of men and women living under one elder; and a rhythm of prayer, Eucharist, and obedience in which the hesychast practice of the Holy Mountain was adapted to a settled communal life in the West. This file describes that life and pins its spiritual rationale to Sophrony’s own writings.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (20th-c. elder; disciple of St Silouan)

The Jesus Prayer at the Center

The distinctive mark of the life Sophrony established at Essex is the place given to the Jesus Prayer. The invocation — “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner” — is the hesychast prayer of the Christian East, the short, repeated calling on the name of Jesus that the monks of the Holy Mountain practice as the heart of unceasing prayer (1 Thessalonians 5:17), and which Sophrony had himself learned and lived through more than two decades on Athos (Sophrony, On Prayer, 1996, the chapters on the Jesus Prayer; Sophrony, His Life Is Mine, 1977, on the Name and the prayer; on the prayer in the wider tradition, see Orthodoxy: The Jesus Prayer). What Sophrony did at his monastery was to make this prayer not merely a private discipline practiced in the cell but the corporate, communal act around which the whole common life of the house was ordered.

Sophrony’s understanding of the prayer was theologically dense, and he set it out at length in On Prayer and in His Life Is Mine. The Name of Jesus, for him, is not a mere formula but the place of a real meeting with the Person who bears it; the invocation of the Name is an entry into the presence of the living God who is “I AM,” and the prayer for mercy is the cry of the whole fallen Adam (Sophrony, On Prayer, 1996; His Life Is Mine, 1977; We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988). He insisted that the prayer must be united with repentance and with the keeping of the commandments, and that its true depth is reached only through the descent into humility — the “keep your mind in hell, and despair not” he had received from St. Silouan (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, trans. Edmonds, 1991; On Prayer, 1996). Per the repository methodology (§3.5), these claims about the inner working of the prayer are reported as Sophrony’s own teaching, pinned to his writings, rather than asserted as adjudicated fact.

In the corporate practice of the monastery, the singular “have mercy upon me” naturally widens into the plural “have mercy upon us” — the whole gathered community, and through it the whole of mankind, brought into the one prayer. This corporate, all-human dimension is continuous with the prayer “for the whole Adam” that Sophrony learned from Silouan and made the center of his theology: the one who prays does not pray for himself alone but bears all men in his heart before God (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, trans. Edmonds, 1991; We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988, on praying for the whole Adam; on the prayer for the whole Adam in his elder, see St. Silouan the Athonite).

The Prayer in Place of the Fixed Services

The most striking practical feature of the Essex life — the one most often remarked by visitors and most distinctive among Orthodox monasteries — is that Sophrony substituted long periods of the corporately recited Jesus Prayer for much of the fixed cycle of the daily services. Where a typical Orthodox monastery orders its day around the full liturgical typikon — the lengthy chanted offices of Vespers, Compline, the Midnight Office, Matins, and the Hours, with their psalmody, canons, and hymnography — the community at Tolleshunt Knights gathers, morning and evening, to pray the Jesus Prayer aloud together for extended periods, the invocation repeated again and again by the whole assembly, with the Divine Liturgy celebrated on its appointed days (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1 and on the community’s prayer; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; the monastery’s own accounts).

Sophrony’s rationale for this unusual arrangement was pastoral and spiritual rather than a depreciation of the liturgical tradition. He judged that for a community gathered from many nations and languages — Russian, Greek, English, French, and others — and not formed from childhood in the chanted Byzantine and Slavonic offices, the long sung typikon could become a barrier of words rather than a vehicle of prayer; the Jesus Prayer, by contrast, was short, universal, learnable by all, and capable of carrying the whole community into a sustained, attentive standing before God (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). The arrangement was thus partly a response to the international character of the community and partly the expression of Sophrony’s conviction that the heart of the monastic life is unceasing prayer of the heart, to which the fixed offices are servant rather than master.

The practice has not been without comment. Some observers have seen in the substitution of the Jesus Prayer for the fixed cycle a departure from the received Athonite and Byzantine typikon, and the question of how far a monastery may set aside the appointed services in favour of the Prayer is a real one in the literature on Sophrony’s foundation. [Disputed: the Essex practice of replacing much of the fixed liturgical cycle with long corporate recitation of the Jesus Prayer is presented by Sophrony and by sympathetic interpreters as a legitimate and pastorally motivated adaptation of Athonite hesychasm to an international community (Sakharov, *I Love, Therefore I Am*, 2002, ch. 1; Louth, *Modern Orthodox Thinkers*, 2015); other observers have noted it as an unusual departure from the standard monastic *typikon*, and the exact balance between the Prayer, the Divine Liturgy, and such offices as are retained is described variously and has changed over time, so that no single fixed "rule" should be read back into the whole history of the community.] What is agreed is that the Jesus Prayer, prayed corporately and at length, is the axis of the Essex life as Sophrony built it.

The International and Multi-Ethnic Community

From its beginning the community at Tolleshunt Knights was international. Drawn first from the circle that had gathered around Sophrony in France, it grew to include Russians, Greeks, English, French, and others, and conducted its life and its prayer across several languages (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). This multi-ethnic character was not incidental but was built into the foundation’s canonical situation: as a stavropegial monastery directly under the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the house belonged to no single national jurisdiction and could gather monks and nuns from across the Orthodox world without entangling itself in the divisions of the émigré Churches (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1; see Founding the Monastery of St. John the Baptist).

The international and multilingual character of the community is, as noted above, bound up with the centrality of the Jesus Prayer. A short invocation common to the whole Orthodox tradition, easily prayed in any tongue, could unite in one act of prayer a community that the long Slavonic or Greek offices might have divided along lines of language and formation. The form of prayer and the form of the community are, in Sophrony’s foundation, two aspects of one thing: a house meant to be a place where the hesychast prayer of the Holy Mountain could be lived by people of every nation in the modern West (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; on the bridging of Athonite prayer to the West, see the collection README).

A “Double” Community of Men and Women

Among the unusual features of the Essex foundation is that it is a “double” monastery — a community of both monks and nuns, men and women living the monastic life on the same property under the one spiritual father (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; the monastery’s own accounts). The two communities keep their own enclosure and discipline while sharing the central acts of the common life — above all the Divine Liturgy and the corporate Jesus Prayer. This arrangement, rare in the modern Orthodox world, was again made possible in part by the monastery’s stavropegial status and by Sophrony’s role as a single elder over the whole household.

The form is ancient — double monasteries under one spiritual authority are known from the early and Byzantine periods — and Sophrony’s adoption of it was of a piece with his conception of the community as a single family gathered around an elder, rather than as two institutions side by side. The unifying principle was the person of the spiritual father and the one prayer in which all shared, not a merely administrative co-location (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1; on the centrality of the elder, see Orthodoxy: Spiritual Direction).

Prayer, Liturgy, and Obedience

The daily rhythm Sophrony established held together three things: the corporate Jesus Prayer, the Divine Liturgy, and obedience. The long periods of the Prayer, morning and evening, framed the day; the Eucharist, celebrated on its days, was its sacramental center, the meeting with Christ to which the Prayer’s invocation of the Name pointed; and the ordinary work and life of the community were ordered by obedience to the elder and to the discipline of the common life (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1; Sophrony, On Prayer, 1996; His Life Is Mine, 1977). Obedience, for Sophrony as for the whole hesychast tradition, was not mere submission to authority but a spiritual instrument: the cutting-off of self-will that opens the heart to grace and makes unceasing prayer possible (Sophrony, On Prayer, 1996; Saint Silouan the Athonite, trans. Edmonds, 1991).

Underlying the whole was the theme that runs through all Sophrony’s teaching: repentance. The community dedicated to St. John the Baptist, the preacher of repentance, was built so that the Jesus Prayer’s “have mercy upon me, a sinner” might be lived as the keynote of the common life, the descent into humility that, for Sophrony, is the precondition of the vision of the Uncreated Light (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988; On Prayer, 1996; on repentance and the Forerunner’s patronage, see Founding the Monastery of St. John the Baptist). The Prayer, the Liturgy, and obedience were not three separate observances but three faces of a single movement: the turning of the whole person, and through him the whole Adam, toward the God who is “I AM,” in repentance and in the hope of communion with Him.

The Community After Sophrony

Sophrony lived in and over this community until his death on 11 July 1993, and it has continued the form of life he gave it (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1; the monastery’s own accounts; on his feast and glorification, see the collection README). The Monastery of St. John the Baptist at Tolleshunt Knights has become, in the decades since, one of the principal channels by which the hesychast prayer of the Holy Mountain — the Jesus Prayer, lived in community — has been made known to the modern West, and a place of pilgrimage for those drawn to Sophrony’s witness and to the theology of the person and the Uncreated Light that he taught (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; on theosis and the Light, see Orthodoxy: Theosis). The community is the living continuation of the life this file describes: the Jesus Prayer at the center, the international and double household, and the rhythm of prayer, Liturgy, and obedience that Sophrony built.

See Also

References

  • Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. On Prayer. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996. (The Jesus Prayer, the Name, repentance, and obedience as the framework of the life of prayer.)
  • Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. His Life Is Mine. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. London: Mowbray; Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1977. (The Name of Jesus and the personal God; the prayer of mercy.)
  • Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. We Shall See Him as He Is. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Tolleshunt Knights, Essex: Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist, 1988. (Repentance, the prayer for the whole Adam, and the vision of the Uncreated Light.)
  • Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. Saint Silouan the Athonite. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991. (“Keep your mind in hell, and despair not”; the prayer for the whole Adam learned from Silouan.)
  • Sakharov, Nicholas V. I Love, Therefore I Am: The Theological Legacy of Archimandrite Sophrony. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002. (Ch. 1 on the community’s prayer, the corporate Jesus Prayer in place of much of the fixed cycle, the international and double community, and the rhythm of prayer, Liturgy, and obedience.)
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (The Essex community and its distinctive use of the Jesus Prayer.)
  • Scripture: 1 Thessalonians 5:17.