The Prayer of Jesus: The Prayer of the Heart

By Esteban de Emaús

   The experience of solitude and the intimate search for God in one’s own heart lead man to silence. In that void of thoughts, calm the cravings and calm the body, illuminate the Presence that has always been sought. Historical eremitism finds its root in this yearning for eternity and freedom from this very world. Paradise is present right now in the interior of the hermit, who by this very fact transfigures the world with his gaze. This loneliness of the heart is not necessarily due to the separation of men but to a life attentive to the divine presence, in any circumstance. This is also how the urban hermits live, who in their anonymous silence keep alive the original spirit of the first Christian communities; as close to Christ as they are away from all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Juan Pedropablo
• Release date: Jun 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9781547581993

Book preview

The Prayer of Jesus

Beginning to the Practice

Brother  Esteban de Emaús

This book is dedicated to Sonsoles and to Fernando, dear children, who dedicated its life to Jesus's holy name. 

We are grateful especially to the mother, Hilda and to all the nuns of the monastery Abba Padre, for its continuous prayer and support for the Brotherhood project. 

Also, we are grateful to Fray Alberto Justo, for its prayers and its friendship. 

A very special memory for Adrián and Blanca, for Sofia, Sister Margarita, Heraldo and for all the readership of the blog of Jesus's Prayer.

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

THE VAGABOND MIND

THE TYRANNY OF THE BODY

ONE TO DO INDIVIDUAL

THE NECESSARY PROPORTION

DIFFERENT ASPECTS

ON THE PERSPECTIVE

THE SPIRITUAL COMBAT

THE GOD'S WILL

ON THE FAITH

THE SILENT MEDITATION

THE FIRST FRUITS

BEGINNING OF JESUS'S PRAYER

JESUS'S PRAYER

ALERTNESS

HESIQUÍA AND COMPUNCTION

THE PLACE OF THE PRESENCE

ON THE RESPIRATION

ON THE SILENCE

ON THE MINISTRY

THE INTERNAL STATES

IF I LOSE THE PRAYER

CONCERNING THE MEDITATION AND THE SILENCE

SOME INTERIOR REMARKS

TO LIVE IN THE CONFIDENCE

THE PLACE OF THE PRAYER

HOW IS IT ASKED?

TO TRAIN THE LOOK

MAJOR CONSCIENCE

THE KEY

SOME TECHNICAL ASPECTS

THE BELONGING OF THE HEART

WORRY

IT CONSULTS ON THE PHRASE OF THE PRAYER

COMMITMENTS: GIFTS OF THE HEART

GLOSSARY

INTRODUCTION

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"The lumps are big and they are turning, disintegrating under the tool of the farmhand, that according to the ancient custom, the ground of the cultivation works with its hands.

The nurse prepares with tidiness the medication on the impeccable salver. It looks alternately at the recipes and the bottles, from which it extracts the matter indicated for every patient.

The bank is stuffed with the anxious people, with complaints and with hurried movements. The messenger is part of an extensive line in the box 3 destined to the reception of the payment of the taxes.

Between the cell and the chapel crosses the cloister. Across the steamy glasses, the monk contemplates small roses rubies in shoot and the emerald green one of the humid foliage.

In the playtime, the children open its energy playing unrecognizable games and saturate the ambience of noises and screams. The teacher corrects the notebooks and accommodates the pencils on having happened for the desks."

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Five brief descriptions that they precede are contemporary, they pass in our time and its protagonists practise Jesus's Prayer. They are real

situations of friends who have found in the prayer of Jesus's name, a space of calmness in the middle of the thunderstorm. This way of praying has turned to them into a refuge that shelters them of the agitations of the daily world; they protect them from the gales that come of out and of the originated ones from their own mind.

The world can become hostile if we are penetrated by the violence, the competitiveness, the greed, the culture of the appearance that seems to be imposed on that of the Being. Our mind can be handling the values of the way in which he lives and end turned into enemy, in source of worry derived from the endless avidity.

Jesus's Prayer is a refuge because it offers peace to the soul, but it does not generate inertia, on the contrary, it activates the action transformadora. The assiduous practitioner becomes stronger and still in the middle of the world, it finds in itself the sufficient distance between the stimuli and the reaction. It spread this one interior, previously to the answer that happens to the events, to he allows to act with deliberation, looking for the coherence between its conduct and the message of the Gospel.

The Prayer of Jesus's name, known also like the Prayer of the heart, is a particular vocation, a desire of deep unification of the soul and in general, it goes so far as to be felt by old souls, which have lived great and with intensity and which have found a certain misfortune in what it bewilders the others.

It is called that summons the penitents, whom they have taken conscience of its misery, of its mean motivations, of its egoism, and that without losing the hope wish a change of root. It is related neither with the relativism nor with the anthropocentrism, but rather with those who know and feel that everything has been given us and that nothing is done without him knowing it. 

It implies ethics centred on the virtue of the humility, which, contrary to what the logic could suppose, it neither debilitates does not even contract, but it expands certain spiritual attitude that unites steadfastness with the kindness of the heart. The practitioner settles down in the silence and transmits a serene happiness; he knows of the nullity of the efforts, that they exercise without paying attention to the Sacred Presence of the Divine thing.

Born already in the first Christian communities, which were thinking about how in the invocation of Jesus's name, to update its presence; it does to itself asceticism deprived in some parents of the desert before the Vth century and is systematized in the Christian east, particularly in Athos (Greece) about the XIIth century. While it was spreading in the whole Slavonic region and in the Russian monasteries until the XIXth century, the meat was done in some saints and monks of Occident who refer to her in its writings. Today it has taken root in the practice of the faithful and religious in the eastern churches and much spread in our hemisphere.

Jesus's Prayer met with Occident thanks to the publication of Histories of a Russian pilgrim and the later diffusion of the agreements of Filocalia. But it is the technological revolution produced by Internet the one that expands it nowadays beyond the foreseeable thing.

Groups of laymen form in some parishes dedicated to study it, to practise it and to teach it. It is possible to find retirement dedicated to its learning and there exist projects of monastic life articulated about Jesus's prayer. Practically there is no religious bookstore that does not have any copy in which it refers to her.

The fact is that the route of the Name known as Jesus's Prayer, it comes out generational differences and up to cultural. He shares with other methods the systematical repetition of a phrase or a word that unifies the mind concerning a center. Everyday life uses the body as a support to take root in l, using for it the respiration or the attention directed to the cardiac organ.

But the prayer-hesicasta - excellent is provided also with the living presence of that one who is invoked. Of a way quasi sacramental, the mention of Jesus's name with faith and devotion or at least with attention, does present to the resuscitated Gentleman. In a perceptible way who does silence in the heart and who loves what it names; the presence of the sacred thing becomes clear to the senses give spirit, which they end up by influencing in those of the body, sweetening the life.

The continuous repetition of the name of Jesus or of the elected phrase where its name is included, clarifies the perception of what happens in our environment, helps us to perceive to other with major depth (as if the others were receiving major volume) and it increases significantly the conscience of our internal world. A new face is revealed to us, as in a mirror there become clear to us the motivations that were secret in the good apparent actions.

In the book it has warned us that it is necessary not to be discouraged before this new knowledge of us ourselves and one encourages us to persevere polarizing the soul concerning Jesus's person.

Fourteen letters that continue next and the notes on diverse topics, are born of the personal experience of a current hermit who dedicated its life to the route of the Name like spiritual footpath. The letters are a nominal synthesis that he thinks about how to initiate the reader in practice it specifies of the repetition of the Name. Readings with attention and seizures as behavioral reference serve really to get in this asceticism and even to take root in her.

The notes on different topics arise from consultations between friends carried out by e-mail, asking for clarifications indicative on topics that are caused by having initiated this way towards the heart.

We are sure that the personal experience of the brother Esteban de Emaús will result from many utilities for the reader who approach with the open heart. Its testimony shows us that the current of deep spirituality arisen in the first apostolic communities is still current and with renewed force.

The current hesicasmo, sheltered by the Saint Nombre, knows today new panache, to the point of already speaking to him about a catholic hesicasmo, brother and relative