The Jesus Prayer is among the shortest of all Christian prayers: 'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.' Its words gather the gospel into a sentence — the name and lordship of Christ, the cry of the blind man and the tax collector, the confession of need.
It belongs above all to hesychasm, the Eastern tradition of inner stillness. The prayer is repeated — slowly, with the breath, often counted on a knotted prayer rope — until it sinks from the lips into the mind and from the mind into the heart, becoming a quiet, ceaseless undercurrent of the soul's life.
Though its home is the Christian East, the Jesus Prayer has been received gratefully far beyond it. The nineteenth-century Russian classic The Way of a Pilgrim carried it to the wider world, and Christians of many traditions now pray it as a way of obeying the apostolic command to pray without ceasing.