The Jesus Prayer

“Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me”

The Jesus Prayer - The Eastern Orthodox Prayer of the Heart -

The way of a Pilgrim 

Written in the nineteenth century The way of a Pilgrim is the English title of a 19th-century Russian work, recounting the narrator's journey as a mendicant pilgrim across Russia while practising the Jesus Prayer. It is unknown if the book is literally an account of a single pilgrim, or if it uses a fictional pilgrim's journey as a vehicle to teach the practice of ceaseless inner prayer and communion with God.

The pilgrim's inner journey begins when he is struck upon hearing the words of Paul (in I Thessalonians 5:17) to "pray without ceasing." He visits churches and monasteries to try and understand how to pray without ceasing. His travels lead him to a starets (a spiritual father) who teaches him the Jesus Prayer—"Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me"—and gives him practical advice on how to recite the prayer uninterruptedly, as a type of mantra.

The book details the gradual spiritual development and struggles of the narrator, and the effect the narrator's spirituality has on those around him.

“The continuous interior prayer of Jesus is a constant uninterrupted calling upon the divine name of Jesus with the lips, in the spirit, in the heart, while forming a mental picture of His constant presence, and imploring His grace, during every occupation, at all times, in all places, even during sleep...... One who accustoms himself to this appeal experiences as a result so deep a consolation and so great a need to offer the prayer always that he can no longer live without it, and it will continue to voice itself within him of its own accord.”