Years
back, I spent a lot of time reading church history, works by Christian and
secular scholars alike. I still have 1970s reprints of 19th century
books by Sir William Ramsay (like The
Church in the Roman Empire), the two-volume History
of Christianity by Yale historian Kenneth Scott Latourette, New
Testament History by F.F. Bruce, Alfred Edersheim’s Life
and Times of Jesus the Messiah, and Peter Brown’s Augustine
of Hippo. I also read a lot of the original writings of the early church
fathers, like Origen and Tertullian.
It
was while reading Latourette’s History
that I discovered eastern Christianity in more than a cursory way. The history
of Christianity in Western Europe and North and South America is largely the
story of Latin, or western, Christianity and its Protestant offshoot. Eastern
Christianity has a full and rich history as well – the eastern Roman Empire,
the Greek and Russian Orthodox churches, the desert fathers (and mothers) and
the story of the growing struggle against the spread of Islam. (For all the
talk about the Western imperialistic Crusades in the Mideast, people forget
that before the Crusades there were the Islamic jihads that conquered large
parts of what had been the eastern (and Christian) Roman Empire.
I
learned that the history of eastern Christianity was as fascinating as the history
of its western counterpart. I also learned about the significant differences
between the two.
More
than 20 years later, while visiting our younger son at the University of
Missouri, I picked up a book in the campus bookstore – Short
Trip to the Edge by Scott Cairns. A professor and poet, Cairns is also
a practicing Orthodox Christian believer (just consider that combination for a
moment – a professor at a public university, a poet and an Orthodox believer).
The book was an account of the author’s various pilgrimages to the monasteries of
Mount Athos in Greece.
Suddenly,
Cairns had me in the weeds of Orthodox belief and practice. My reading from
years before helped my understanding. But I had to read the book slowly. Because
much of what it contains was alien to my western Christian mind. I thoroughly
enjoyed the book – even if I wasn’t quite prepared to venerate an icon with a
kiss.
One
spiritual practice associated with Orthodox Christianity is “the Jesus Prayer,”
and it is the subject of Frederica Mathewes-Green’s The
Jesus Prayer. It is a deceptively simply prayer and practice – the repetition
of “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.” An acceptable variant
adds “a sinner” after “me.”
Mathewes-Green,
the author of several books on Orthodox Christianity, explores the history of
the prayer (arising among the desert fathers) and then provides an extensive
step-by-step explanation of what it is, how it works and the training and
practice that’s needed to pray the prayer. Much of this explanation is in the form
of an extended question-and-answer section that becomes a kind of mediation
itself. (And whether the Questions are her own writing device or real questions
that people have asked, I found that she used several questions that I had
about the prayer and practice.)
Along
the way, Mathewes-Green explains the prayer’s place in “remedial awe,” or
learning how immense and majestic God truly is; how transformative the prayer
can be (I loved her insight that “everyone wants to be transformed but nobody wants
to change”); how you will gradually silence the “inner chatter” that crowds
prayer out; and how charity needs to be considered in the contest of personal
relationships.
For
those of us of the Protestant persuasion, the idea of a repetitive prayer –
praying the same words over and over – sounds rather Roman Catholic with its “Our
Fathers” and “Hail Marys.” Yet as Mathewes-Green explains it, this short prayer
is a significant spiritual practice, one requiring guidance and discipline.
