Prayer
I’ve always found the Christian notions of “prayer” confusing (and perhaps confused). The innumerable practical books on the subject don’t help with the basic conceptual problem: what is the point of asking for something of a being who is claimed to be fully benevolent and to know all your wishes and needs in advance? The usual answer is something along the lines that by “asking” you enable yourself to receive in an effective manner the good thing that God is wanting to give you; but praying only in order to create the byproducts of the prayer sounds fake.
I still think this is the case, but I recently got a better insight into the general area. I can see the point of meditation as a means of training the mind/spirit, and I sometimes use the Jesus Prayer as a mantra for this purpose. The version I use is “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy” which sits well with the breathing. The full version ends “… have mercy on me a sinner”, which, apart from being too long for a good mantra, assumes a forensic situation in which I am the plaintiff in a court faced with a strict judge of my sins – and this is not the concept of God that Jesus taught. I know perfectly well my need of the inner transformation that spiritual masters tell us is possible but the setting of a law court is, as the masters also tell us, not a good place in which to achieve it. Now, there is a plausible Byzantine tradition (for which there is unfortunately not a scrap of sound etymological evidence) that the Greek “eleison” (have mercy) in the original is derived from “elia” meaning “olive”, with the implication of anointing, So by missing out the “on me a sinner”, and leaning on this tradition I can interpret the mantra as a process of opening myself to a healing anointing that can bring me closer to the godlike.
This took on a deeper meaning recently, however, when I realised that I could do this mantra for someone else: by mentally uniting my breathing with theirs, the possibility of this healing – if this sort of connectivity means anything – was being enabled for both of us. This seemed to me to be a very genuine sense of prayer, and one in the spirit of Jesus as healer.
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The word for sin in the original Greek means missing the mark. Its not the traditional interpretation of sin to think of sin in a judicial manner. Man was made in the image of God and Jesus Christ calls us to become perfect, so our sinfulness is one of not living up to what we are potentially made to become. It is an expression of our humility in relations to God and not an judicial error.
To get a clearer view of Christian prayer check out this web site on orthodox prayer
http://www.OrthodoxPrayer.org
Thanks for this helpful addition. To clarify: I have a twofold problem with what I see as the commonest English conception of the phrase “have mercy on me a sinner” (which, from discussion with my Orthodox friends, I think is very different from the Orthodox view which I allude to favorably in my blog). The first concerns the use of the English word “sin” to translate “hamartia”. As the Oxford English dictionary confirms,
“The stem may be related to that of L. sons, sont-is guilty. In OE. there are examples of the original general sense, ‘offence, wrong-doing, misdeed’. .. 1. a. An act which is regarded as a transgression of the divine law and an offence against God; a violation (esp. wilful or deliberate) of some religious or moral principle.”
The second, and more minor problem, concerns “mercy” which has in itself positive connotations, but which shifts to the juridical when combined with “sin”. Hence my preference for stopping at “have mercy”.
The association of the word “prayer with “asking” is very prevalent, and even John of Damascus continues his classic “definition” of prayer, lifting the heart and mind to God, with “in order to ask what is fitting” (this is from memory, and I’ve never checked the Greek). It is for these reasons that, whether in private or public prayer, I never ask God for a favour, but I unite my concern with God’s unchanging love – a bringing “into the light” as far as I am concerned, though the issue is always totally within God.
The only occasional exception to this has been on occasions when someone close to me has been ill and I feel that I have been “prayed through”, beyond my own will. I see these as moments of consciousness of what is always present, the compassionate breathing out and in of the Spirit through us. It was something a bit like this that I encountered in the moment when my Jesus prayer became entwined with the needs of another.
[...] the “Jesus Prayer”, which I’ve already referred to in an earlier post, with the (abbreviated) Greek words “Kyrie Iesou Christe, eleison”: “Lord, Jesus [...]