Pentecost Compline with Jesus Prayer (2015)
By Luke Johnson | October 13, 2015
The Jesus Prayer ("Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner") is an ancient form of prayerful meditation, a way of quieting and focusing your mind in prayer.
Rowan Williams notes, "The prayer isn't any kind of magical invocation or auto-suggestion – simply a vehicle to detach you slowly from distracted, wandering images and thoughts. These will happen, but you simply go on repeating the words and gently bringing attention back to them. If it is proceeding as it should, there is something like an indistinct picture or sensation of the inside of the body as a sort of hollow, a cave, in which breath comes and goes, with an underlying pulse. If you want to speak theologically about it, it's a time when you are aware of your body as simply a place where life happens and where, therefore, God 'happens': a life lived in you."