Christian mystical practices
A consideration of the Jesus Prayer and the Rosary
I read J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey on the cusp between adolescence and young adulthood. This was a bit after I stopped thinking of myself as a Christian. However, I was full on in my spiritual quest.
And I was captured by how the Jesus Prayer looked like a Christian mantra. And from that seeing how it was used in the spiritual memoir of practice, The Way of a Pilgrim captured my heart. I particularly loved the Pilgrim. The prayer and especially the memoir was an important part of the confluence of causes and conditions that would lead me into a Zen monastery.
This led to the many years of my foundational practices, zazen, and later koan introspection. Along with study, various intimate epiphanies, and a long process of personal integration.
As the years went by, my memories of the Jesus Prayer of the Way of a Pilgrim assured me that whatever I thought of my fundamentalist Baptist religion, the fullness of lived Christianity offered a lot more than my narrow experience of the tradition.
Today when people look back at the inspirations for the uses of sacred words and phrases, they can find warrant in the Scriptures.
In Luke 18:13 “But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’” And in the same chapter “Then he (the blind beggar) shouted, Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” In Paul’s letter 1 Thessalonians 5:17, he famously advises people to “Pray without ceasing.” And in his letter to the Philippians 2:9-10 he says, “Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth.”
To begin a pretty long list of scriptural inspiration.
