jesus prayer

I’ve been reading about [Heyschasm], the Eastern Orthodox mystical tradition of turning inward to find God, to seek the solitary to better serve as a conduit for divinity and love. The Jesus Prayer becomes a mantra, a meaning-in-itself, interwoven with the utterance and its actuality, to bring the Mind into the Heart to better know Him:

Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, the sinner.

Apparently the last section, “the sinner”, was added later, at which point maybe a certain cynicism had developed about the new faith’s reception. The mantra is repeated, over and over and over and over and over again, as if to encourage the mind to keel over and into the soul through sheer linguistic exhaustion. Word-sense, what is it anyway, but a mirage, analytic but dead and cold delimited container that gets in the way of the diffuse infinitely colorful transcendent and manifold emanation that we spend our whole cosmic existence re-learning and re-acquainting ourselves with? The wheel turns and the sky is lost in vertigo, the laundromat of turning dirty stars and the detergent of jouissance brimming over at last, obscuring the constellations we’d grown to love and forget once again.

This is a familiar theme, the inadequacy of language, it’s a timeless conceit, but one that I won’t grow tired of, Maybe it’s because my own mind is so limited, so small like some goldfinch’s, caught in the nearest localities and perching at on the nearest stimulus before moving on yet again; there is no scale or perspective, there is no motif, no plot structure, no thread, just the continuous always-humming present of my own flux of sensations and twitches of emotion. Is that any way to live? What happened to the narrative, the drama and the eloquent unfolding of a schema written by a grander elegant hand? For all my talk of divinity and contemplation I am truly a flitting structureless and even godless child, with no conception of the Big.

Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, the sinner.

Should I be waiting for my anointment, for my admission into some esoteric order of cabalistic nihilists, learn these secrets of null magick to acquaint and dine with the void? The ornate design is gold but flaking, crude and losing its luster, and the maw yawns and glitters emptily. I like that, though: null priest of some arcane null order that has been serving annihilation since the dawn of meaning, before Judas betrayed Jesus Meaning for thirty pieces of silver. We are still waiting for a resurrection and have run out of silver. But no, I’m not even worthy of that, that would give me the weight of cosmology and I am just a mote scorched by a sunbeam.

I’ve waxed too poetical, too florid and disgustingly overwrought. The theme decrypted: Suck It Up. Tough It Out. Be A Man. You Are Alone, If You Are Lucky, Maybe Not For Eternity. The same circles and tired arguments and insecurities, with the odd punctuations of fun. It will work out eventually, I think. I’ll keep praying while I wait.

Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, the sinner.