51: Have mercy on me, a sinner.

"Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner."

This prayer had become the rhythm of my walk. It has become my favorite prayer since I first tried it after reading that Orthodox monks pray it continuously. I later got the idea (reading Anselm Grün) to adjust the prayer to my breathing rhythms, and that was so internalized now that I could hardly start the prayer without inhaling for the first part and exhaling the second.

I also had plenty of songs that I would sing to the rhythm of my staff and my footsteps: Taizé chants, but also hymns like Be Thou My Vision, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing, Ich Bete An die Macht der Liebe. It was great to have songs in 3/4 time, because my staff would hit the ground on every third step. That helped me to support both my legs alternately while I walked.

But usually I would just repeat the Jesus prayer.

The first time I had tried this prayer was on a bus in England. I was soon filled with so much light, such a feeling of a cleaning up of my inner self and a strengthening of a wall against chaos, that I began to weep silently.

I knew this feeling. I had already experienced it, in a much more intense and lasting way, a year before. It is difficult for me to try to describe that, but the words "I once was blind but now I see" would apply, with all the depth of meaning that they could entail. From then on all spiritual truth I encounter seems to be more like a reminder of what I saw at that moment than like a new discovery.

I know people who would consider the prayer to be theologically unsound. "We are not sinners" I heard a pastor say once. "We are saints. It's just that we still sin."

This sounded to me a bit like saying that we are vegetarians who still eat meat. But I have since stopped caring so much about how we use such words. I understand that whoever is justified by Jesus can no longer see his primary identity in his sinful nature even though he still falls daily, and in that sense I am "a saint who hasn't stopped sinning yet." But in so many other ways I can still not "go home acquitted of my sins", as the publican in the parable, unless I call myself a sinner and ask Jesus to have mercy on me.

The meaning of any sentence will change over time if you repeat it often enough. But not every sentence will uplift you and build you up as you repeat it. A prayer like the Jesus prayer may go through a thousand different meanings, but I could feel how it searched my soul and mended bits of it little by little. I could feel how sin is not so much something I do, but something I am. And how Jesus' mercy was a timeless constant; in asking for it I am not only asking to be shown mercy now or tomorrow, but also asking for the mercy that has accompanied me yesterday and last year; and at the same time thanking him for the infinite mercy he has shown me, and thanking him in advance for the mercy by which I would continue to live tomorrow.

At many times I have found it to be the only prayer I am even capable of praying.