The Jesus Prayer

Its roots reach back to the Desert Fathers of Egypt in the fourth and fifth centuries, and its wording draws together the cry of blind Bartimaeus and the prayer of the tax collector in Luke 18. Repeated slowly, often with the breath or a prayer rope of one hundred knots, it is meant to become continuous — "prayer of the heart" — as described in the Philokalia and the nineteenth-century Russian classic The Way of a Pilgrim. It is ideal when you have no words left: short enough to hold on to in anxiety, grief, or temptation, and complete enough to be a whole life of prayer.