The Poetry of Praise
A Prayer in Quiet
Anthony Esolen
Jesus was on his way from the oasis of Jericho up to Jerusalem, along that dangerous road cutting across mountains and pitched beside deep ravines. It was the road he used in his parable of the man who was beaten and robbed and left for dead. Still, it was well-traveled, and as he went his way—for the final time in the flesh—he and the crowd that followed him heard a man crying, Jesus, Son of David, have pity on me! (Mk 4:47).
I am sure that the crowd was not hushed on its journey; that’s not the way crowds are. But they wanted this man to shut up, and that certainly is the way crowds are—the way we are, when the call for God is too near. But the man cried all the louder, “Son of David, have pity on me!” Then Jesus, moved with pity, told his followers to call him over.
What do you want me to do for you? Jesus asked him.
Master, said the man, called Bartimaeus, Son of the Honorable, I want to see.
Go your way, said Jesus. Your faith has saved you. And his eyes were opened, and he followed Jesus along the road.
The noisy and the still
It’s baffling to consider how little the people around Jesus understood him, but then, with the advantage of two thousand years of learning and worship, what can we ourselves say? We are silent when we should speak, and we chatter when we should be silent.
Jesus once warned the noisy with the parable of the Pharisee and the flunky for the Romans—for that is what the tax-farmers were. The two men were in the temple, and the Pharisee prayed in this manner, mainly to himself: O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity—greedy, dishonest, adulterous—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice in a week, and pay tithes on my whole income (Lk 18:11-12). I do this, I do that; while the wretched flunky stood in the back of the temple and dared not raise his eyes to heaven, but he beat his breast and said, O God, be merciful to me a sinner! That poor man went home justified, said Jesus, and the other did not.
The Pharisee had clothed himself in his deeds and in the outward works of the law, where he was at home, like a spider in its web. Jesus does not deny the goodness of fasting and tithing. He does not deny the beauty of the law. But the publican stood as if naked before God. That is the essential condition of man. Let’s be honest. It is said that Saint Philip Neri remarked, as he watched a man led off to execution, “There but for the grace of God go I.”
Hence the power of those quiet and honest words, the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
All in a Holy Name
What’s in a name? When it comes to Jesus, everything.
The Son of God humbled himself and became man, and was obedient unto death, even the terrible death upon a cross. And therefore, says Saint Paul, God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth (Phil 2:9-10). It is idle to suppose that our Lord might have been named Simon or Samuel or Judah. His is the name like no other: it means the Lord saves. We do not pray the Simon prayer or the Samuel prayer, as fine as those names are. “Lord,” we cry, “O Lord who shall save, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
But I shouldn’t translate the Holy Name of Jesus out of the world! He had a name, as everyone does. He is the Lord, and he is Jesus, that man who walked the earth, the man whom the blind son of Timaeus called out to on the Jericho road. When we say, “Lord Jesus, have mercy upon me,” we place ourselves with that blind man, or with the suffering woman who wanted to touch the hem of his robe, or with the thief who was crucified beside him on Calvary. Names do not vanish in eternity. “Come, Lord Jesus!” cries the apostle who had revealed him to us as the Word and who saw him transfigured upon the mountain. He has a face, and we long to look upon it. He has hands, imprinted with the marks of our sin and his love, and we long to see them and to touch them. And sometimes, when times are dark, all that seems left to us is to look at the man Jesus on the cross, and say, “Wherever others may go, let me stand here beside you, Jesus.”
The prayer of solitude
I confess I have much to learn about the place of the Jesus Prayer in the spirituality of the Eastern Churches, where it figures prominently. Where did the prayer come from? Its ultimate source is the New Testament, as we’ve seen, but as to where people first cried out, as a recognized and common prayer, “Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” that’s something of a mystery. We do know that the prayer is ancient, and it seems likely that the hermits in the deserts of the east were familiar with it.
People who understand neither our faith nor the monastic life suppose that they imply a rejection of the world, as a Buddhist seeks to free himself of the wheel of change, or as the ancient Epicureans, looking down upon the mass of men and their frantic and disappointing pursuit of love and wealth and power, turned their backs on them and sought the bland and modest pleasures of philosophical discourse. But to follow Jesus into the desert, into silence, is an adventure, binding the soul of the quiet man or woman more intimately with the souls of the rest of mankind.
Think of the scenes again. Bartimaeus pierces through the crowd with his cry. They seek to silence him, but he won’t be still. When he is healed, he doesn’t shrug and walk home. He joins the flock. The Pharisee has isolated himself behind a wall of noise, the noise he himself makes. He is so busy telling himself how good he is, he forgets to pray. He shows love for neither God nor man. But the publican, muttering in the back of the Temple, knows he is a sinner, and that means he is thinking of what he has done to his fellow men. To say, “I am a sinner,” and to mean it, is to say, “I have offended God and my neighbor.” That is no noise. It is the plain truth. We are weakling archers with skinny arms and trembling hands. We miss the mark again and again. We fail in love. At our most ordinary, we stand by and watch as wicked men nail our Savior to the cross. We hand them the hammer and the spikes. At our worst—but we shudder to think of that.
The desert hermits sought solitude after the pattern of Jesus, who went up a mountain to pray, or set off from the shore in a boat, or fell to his knees in the garden of Gethsemane. The wellspring of love for our brothers is our love for God, so it behooves us often to seek God in silence. At such times the simplest prayers can be the most powerful. The Jesus Prayer is such.
Have mercy on us
“I tremble to consider that God is just,” said the elderly Jefferson, looking back at so many years of American slavery. We should rejoice, and tremble too, to consider that God is merciful. Here I’d like to glance at the one place in the New Testament where we hear the plea Kyrie, eleison in precisely that form. Jesus has come down from the lonely mount of Transfiguration, and the crowds are making their usual noise, because of a man whose son the disciples could not heal (Mk 9:14-29).
The lad was moonstruck, said the father. Perhaps he was an epileptic. Perhaps he was simply mad. He sometimes pitched himself into the fire or the water. We might think of ourselves as that boy, or his father, or the helpless disciples, or the interfering crowds, or all of them together. We are spiritual cripples, and we do not know what we are doing, and sometimes we harm our souls in this way, sometimes in that way, and we have no cure. Even when we turn to Christ and say, “Lord, have mercy”—Kyrie, eleison—we are like that father, who says, I do believe, help my unbelief!
When Jesus saw the crowd, he commanded the dumb and deaf spirit to come out of the boy, and it did so with convulsions, and the boy fell to the earth like a corpse. Plenty of the bystanders, helpful as always, said, He is dead! He was not dead. Jesus took him by the hand, and he got up and went home with his father. This kind, said Jesus afterwards, can only come out through prayer and fasting.
That might suggest to us a heroic spiritual regimen, one we are not strong enough to endure. But again the Jesus Prayer comes to our assistance. It is the essential petition, and it is simple and quiet and strong. “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Say it when you can think of nothing else to say. The Holy Spirit will interpret it for you.
Anthony Esolen is professor and writer-in-residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in N.H., translator and editor of Dante’s Divine Comedy
