Lent 2025: how to pray constantly

In the sixth of a Lenten series, a writer and poet learns what it means to pray constantly

I was given The Way of a Pilgrim by a hermit when, like the Russian Pilgrim who narrates the story, I’d asked how it was possible to “pray constantly” (1 Thessalonians 5:17). I was as much of a novice as Franny in J.D. Salinger’s classic, who faints on a restaurant floor as she tries to copy the Pilgrim’s method of prayer. But I was, and am, also a God addict: I crave walking the day touching Christ’s hem.

This book will help you do that, said the hermit. It will transform your head and your heart. It will give you words that will come to your lips when all others have dissolved in anxiety, distraction or old age. But you must pay attention to the teaching of the Pilgrim – a one-armed widower of the nineteenth century who walks Russia repeating: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.”
The Pilgrim has also been given a book, the Philokalia: a collection of ancient writings that explain the Jesus Prayer (more usually “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner”). He’s told by his Elder to recite the prayer 3,000 times a day at first, then 6,000 times, then 12,000. As he journeys across Russia, meeting a succession of waifs, rogues, and holy men, he repeats the prayer constantly.

But why would we bother with this type of obsessive praying? And how? And how is it even practicable? The Pilgrim answers these questions, with simplicity, as he explores this tradition of the Eastern Church – not in a turgidly academic way, but as part of an odyssey in which an alcoholic soldier, a philanthropic family, a reluctant fiancée, a sceptical clerk and numerous others encounter him. By the end of the book, you realise that this miscellaneous crowd includes you.

As to why we should pursue constant prayer, the Pilgrim is specific: not only 1 Thessalonians 5:17, but Ephesians 6:18 and 1 Timothy 2:8 all, in various ways, ask us to do so. The petition of the Jesus Prayer, and its confession, make it what the Pilgrim calls “the abbreviated form of the Gospel”:

“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.”

The Pilgrim says it’s a way of becoming like the vigilant lover in the Song of Solomon: “I sleep but my heart is awake,” (5:2):

“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.”

The prayer of the heart

Books for Lent: the prayers of a prisoner

The primacy of language is a great theme of the Pilgrim: we become what we repeat. In modern parlance, our brain chemistry is changed by these holy words. As the Pilgrim puts it, quoting St Isaac of Syria, “If you win the mother (the brain/heart) you will have the children also (the fruits).” Language, the Pilgrim explains, transcends even our understanding: the alcoholic soldier whom he meets reports that it was reading the Bible in Old Slavonic that cured his habit – though he couldn’t speak a word of the language: “Even when you don’t understand the word of God, the demons do, and they tremble.”

“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.”

As the Pilgrim walks he prays incessantly. As he gets tired, he calls on the name of Jesus and he’s invigorated; as his feet hurt, he says Jesus’ name and the pain eases; when he’s offended the prayer takes his offence. The words sanctify him: his love of God and neighbour increases.

As to the how of this prayer, it is surprisingly physical. The Pilgrim is taught to inhale as he says “Lord Jesus Christ”, and exhale for “have mercy on me”. This prayer is known as the prayer of the heart: he’s taught to descend into his heart, to hear its beat, and to speak each word in tandem with it, until his deepest being is in sync with God, and he’s “resting in the bosom of Abraham” – Love for Jesus Christ and the Mother of God surging in his heart.

But is any of this practicable? I tried, like the Pilgrim, to live with the Jesus Prayer. Waiting for coffee, on freezing platforms, I mouthed the words as imperceptibly as I could. I soon realised that, like Salinger’s Franny, the focus on breathing and heartbeat only led to faintness, and neurosis about what kept them going. But, sometimes, the Jesus Prayer became the beat to my day. How far did I think I could take it?

When I read of the Pilgrim spending the night with a large, hospitable family, I had to smile: the mother is all over him, feeding, chatting, strolling with him around her garden. Of course, he’s overwhelmed, and has to retreat to a garret to pray. There’s the obstacle for many of us: am I supposed to recite the Jesus Prayer as my husband sits down opposite me, or as my child watches Peppa Pig? We can’t all amble along the Russian steppes. Work must be done; family attended to.

“Secret prayer,” relates the Pilgrim in response, “is found within the depths of each man and …. is carried on in the soul of itself.” Creation is groaning (Romans 8:22) and that groaning is happening in us – whatever we’re doing. The Jesus Prayer is only the utterance of that longing – and the body and mind will carry on praying it if we train them, even if our lips are still.

Everyone, said the hermit who gave me the book, has a prayer stitched into their heart –and it must spring to our lips as naturally as breath. The health of our soul depends on what those words are. The Way of A Pilgrim finally became my own when I went through a spell of chronic insomnia, and repeated the Jesus Prayer for hours through the night. Finally, I would sleep – but if I woke, even for a second, I could hear its words beating in my blood, and knew, as the theologian Peter Damascene is quoted in this book as saying, that “it is more necessary to learn to call on the name of God than it is to breathe”.

“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me …”

The Way of a Pilgrim, translated by Anna Zaranko, is published by Penguin Classics, £9.99, Tablet price, £9.