{"id":4431,"date":"2026-06-15T08:46:47","date_gmt":"2026-06-15T13:46:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gchristopherscruggs.com\/?p=4431"},"modified":"2026-06-15T08:47:33","modified_gmt":"2026-06-15T13:47:33","slug":"the-practical-prayer-of-the-heart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gchristopherscruggs.com\/?p=4431","title":{"rendered":"The Practical Prayer of the Heart"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Last week, I introduced the Jesus Prayer, \u201cLord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner.\u201d This week, I want to discuss the practical benefits of the prayer. A common complaint about this and other contemplative prayers is that they\u2019re really for monks and people who don\u2019t live in the \u201creal world.\u201d This involves a misunderstanding. While there are monastics and professional priests who are deeply involved in contemplative prayer, including the Jesus Prayer, many ordinary people practice it in their daily lives. On and off throughout my professional life, I have been one of those people. My goal was not to become a monk or reach nirvana. My goal was to be a better lawyer, pastor, or leader.<\/p>\n

The Practical Purpose of the Jesus Prayer<\/strong><\/p>\n

The purpose of the Jesus Prayer is not to enter into some kind of mystical state. Experienced practitioners often say that highly emotional, mystical experiences are not signs of spiritual accomplishment but of an inexperienced or adolescent spiritual life. Those who practice the prayer most effectively are those for whom it becomes simply a part of who they are as they go about their day-to-day lives. Even for monks who practiced the prayer for long periods of time, mystical teachers suggest that part of each day should be spent in manual labor. This indicates that material reality and our material need to work to make a living should not be separated from our spiritual need for meaning in life and a connection with ultimate reality.<\/p>\n

The Prayer of the Heart is designed to overcome the division in our culture between the body, emotions, and the mind, or, in more traditional spiritual vocabulary, between the head and the heart. In our culture, this becomes even more important because one of the symptoms of our culture is a division between minds and bodies (the head and the heart) that encourages people to develop fairly serious neurosis and even psychotic symptoms. One of the purposes of the Jesus Prayer is to reintegrate our minds, bodies, and emotions into a unity.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

We Cannot Divide our Psychosomatic Unity<\/strong><\/p>\n

One characteristic of the modern world is the division between mind and body. The philosopher Descartes spoke of material things (\u2018res extensa\u2019) and mental things (\u2018res cogitans\u2019) as distinct. This encourages a division in which the head, or what we would call the mind, and the heart, or what we would call the body, are considered separate and unconnected. This does not align with the best explanation of what we can see in our world. Modern physics, for example, discerns a mental element all the way down into the quantum world. Wherever we go, we find meaning. The physicist and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead took this to mean that there was a mental element to reality \u201call the way down\u201d into the subatomic world. For Whitehead and those influenced by his insights, there is a mental pole and a physical pole to one integrated reality. [2].<\/a><\/p>\n

It is never bare, thought, or bear existence that we are aware of. I find myself as essentially a unity of emotions, enjoyments, hopes, fears, regrets, valuations of alternatives, decisions \u2013 all of them subjective reactions to the environment as an as active in my nature. My unity \u2013Descartes \u201cI am\u201d\u2014is my process of shaping this welter of material into a consistent pattern of feelings.<\/strong>[3]<\/a><\/p>\n

Put another way, it\u2019s not as easy as some people believe to separate minds, bodies, and emotions. Mind and matter seem to be two sides of the same coin. Furthermore, when it comes to emotions, we realize they are deeply connected to our minds and the way we think. The reverse is also true. Our minds affect the kinds of emotions we feel. And of course, we all know that our bodies affect both of these things. If I\u2019m sick, my emotional life is impacted, as is my mental life and ability to reason properly. In other words, in some way, it\u2019s not possible to divide our minds, our bodies, and our emotions. In fact, I believe it\u2019s dangerous and unhealthy to do so. That\u2019s the reason we live in a culture that finds it so easy to be neurotic. We\u2019ve done this for about 300 years in a very unhealthy way.\u00a0The Prayer of the Heart is designed to help us reintegrate ourselves into our relationships with God, our fellow human beings, and creation itself.<\/p>\n

Results of Division<\/strong><\/p>\n

From the foregoing, it is clear that, from a purely practical point of view, we human beings have a problem acting with wisdom and love because we struggle to integrate mind, body, and spirit into a healthy unity. The Greek language uses a word that implies the needed unity\u2014nous<\/em>\u2014often translated as \u201cmind\u201d or \u201cheart.\u201d We do not have an English word that quite captures the full meaning of nous<\/em>. Most of us who begin to think about what is sometimes called \u201cOrthodox Healing\u201d have a hard time grasping the notion that we have a capacity to understand or perceive truth that is not merely the result of what is called discursive thought or \u201cthinking things through with our minds.\u201d The nous <\/em>is not merely our minds, for it includes our hearts and emotions as well. It includes our capacity to \u201cput things together,\u201d perceive reality correctly, and rest in that truth with our entire being.<\/p>\n

From a spiritual point of view, our ability to perceive and respond to reality, whether accurately or not, is shaped by our self-centeredness and tendency toward selfishness. We are sometimes anxious and inclined to act out of fear and other negative emotions. Finally, we are inclined to make decisions that are not in our own best interest. The Orthodox believe that this is not \u201csin\u201d in the sense of something we inherited, but rather a brokenness or lack of health that we have developed by immersion in a social context in which all of those around us act in just the same way, and we are inclined to do. If we call this our sin nature, that is fine, but we need to remember that it translates into our personal inability to act with wisdom and love by which we distort ourselves and others.<\/p>\n

The Jesus Prayer reconnects us with the life of God, enabling us to embody the Christlike wholeness for which we were created. In simple terms, think of the Jesus Prayer as a healing tool. It helps us restore our natural ability, as unified beings, to live in God’s presence, filled with His life, and to see and respond to the world as the Eternal One envisioned. One way it does this is by creating space between us and the flow of thoughts, what the Greeks called logismoi,<\/em> so we can stand outside them and respond without being controlled by negative thoughts arising from anxiety, fear, or unhealthy desire, which can lead to a false reaction.<\/p>\n

Reintegration<\/strong><\/p>\n

I want to return to last week for a moment. In that blog, I wrote about four stages of the spiritual life, the final two of which are:<\/p>\n