The saint Abbot Isaiah, the Egyptian hermit, says of the Jesus Prayer (1) that it is a mirror for the mind and a lantern for the conscience. Someone has also likened it to a constantly sounding, quiet voice in a house: all thieves that sneak in take hasty flight when they hear that someone is awake there. The house is the heart, the thieves, the evil impulses. Prayer is the voice of the one who
By Father Matthew Baker In his On the Making of Man, St Gregory of Nyssa likened the human body to a kind of musical instrument, played upon by the mind of man. In the same work, he dismissed as pagan the idea of man as microcosm. Yet later, in his dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection, Gregory espoused precisely this notion of microcosm in order to express the mediatorial role of the human being between intelligible and
By Jim Wellington How do we pray the Psalms? We should surely take our lead from the Holy Fathers of the Early Church and learn from their wisdom. Whilst researching the origins of the Jesus Prayer, I came across some fascinating insights in psalm-commentaries accredited to Fathers of the third, fourth and fifth centuries. These insights and the understanding of the Psalms which they promote, would have been available to the earliest monks and nuns
The “continuous reading” of Genesis, Isaiah and Proverbs has its origin at the time when Lent was still the mainpre-baptismal season of the Church and Lenten services werepredominantly catechetical in their character, i.e., dedicatedto the indoctrination of the catechumen. Each of the threebooks corresponds to one of the three basic aspects of theOld Testament: the history of God’s activity in Creation,prophecy, and the ethical or moral teachings. The Book of Genesis gives, as it were,
The prayer of the Church is always biblical—i.e., expressed in the language, images, and symbols of the Holy Scriptures. If the Bible contains the Divine Revelation to man, it is also man’s inspired response to that Revelation and thus the pattern and the content of man’s prayer, praise, and adoration. For example, thousands of years have passed since the Psalms were composed; yet when man needs to express repentance, the shock of his entire being
Desperation Nothing is so strong as desperation. It knows no defeat at the hand of any, whether on the right hand or the left. When someone has cut off in his mind all hope of life, no one is more daring than he; no foe can face him, no rumors of affliction can weaken his purpose, for every affliction which may come is less than death, for he has resolved to accept death for himself.
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