The Jesus Prayer
A single repeated sentence at the centre of Orthodox contemplative practice.
A brief petition addressed to Jesus Christ by name, asking his mercy, repeated attentively for minutes or hours at a time. Monks of the Egyptian desert and later of Mount Athos built a contemplative discipline around it: hesychasm, from the Greek for stillness. Church councils affirmed the practice in the fourteenth century after the theologian Gregory Palamas defended it. The Philokalia is its classic anthology.
The Jesus Prayer is one sentence asking mercy, and it is repeated. Shorter and longer forms are both used, and the practice is to say it until it continues without deliberate effort.
It belongs to the hesychast tradition and to the collection of texts known as the Philokalia. It reached English readers largely through the nineteenth-century Russian account translated as The Way of a Pilgrim, whose narrator learns to say it continuously.
It is often counted on a knotted prayer rope. Teachers in the tradition are consistent that sustained practice belongs with a spiritual director rather than alone, and that warning is not decorative.
Does it have a text?
A fixed text in the sense that it is one sentence, but the wording varies between the short and long forms and between English renderings, and this site holds no Orthodox editions. Choosing a form without an edition to cite would be inventing one, so its own page describes it and does not print it.
When it comes up
Other forms of prayer in Orthodox
- The Divine Liturgy — The central Orthodox service, sung throughout and almost entirely fixed.
- The Orthodox daily cycle and prayer rule — Vespers, Matins and the hours in church, and a personal rule kept at home.
- Prayer with icons — Prayer before images that are venerated rather than worshipped.
- Orthodox supplication and blessing services — Short services asking for help, healing or blessing outside the main liturgy.
- Orthodox prayer for the departed — Memorial services for the dead, kept at set intervals after a death.
This page describes a practice. It does not tell you how to perform it, or whether you should. Practice varies by region, community and household far more than a page like this can carry, and nobody credentialed in the tradition has signed anything here. The full dossier names its sources.