The practice of the Jesus Prayer can be divided into three, or even four, steps.
The first step is oral prayer, when the mind often runs away, and a man has to make great effort to collect his scattered thoughts. This is a hard-earned prayer, but it gives a man a repentant frame of mind.
The second step is prayer of the heart, when the mind and the heart, the reason and the feelings, act in concert. Then the prayer is performed uninterruptedly; no matter what a man does – eating drinking, or resting – the prayer keeps going on.
The third step is creative prayer which is capable of moving mountains with a single world. Such prayer was possessed by the holy desert-dweller Saint Mark of Thrace. Once a certain monk came to him for edification. During their conversation Mark asked, “Those men of prayer who can move mountains – do they exist now?” While he was saying this, the mountain on which they were located shuddered. Saint Mark addressed the mountain as though it were a living being: “Calm down – I wasn’t talking about you.”
Finally, the fourth step is the kind of exalted prayer that only the angels have, and which could hardly be given to one man in all of humanity.
~Saint Barsanuphius of Optina
“On the Jesus Prayer,” Talks With Spiritual Children, in The Orthodox Word, Vol. 49, No. 3, May-June, 2013, Saint Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, Platina, CA, p. 137.
Filed under: Christian, Eastern Orthodox, faith, Jesus Christ, prayer, spiritual life
