The Jesus Prayer on the Bus

On a pious illusion and what was lost between Poiana Mărului and London

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The Orthodox Christian of today has the impression that the Jesus Prayer is within reach. And rightly so, if we look at the landscape. The Philokalia sits translated in full on bookstore shelves — twelve volumes in the English Palmer-Sherrard-Ware edition, reprinted continuously for over four decades. The Way of a Pilgrim can be found in any monastery, in dozens of editions. Books about Elder Joseph the Hesychast, about Saint Sophrony of Essex, about Father Cleopa, about Saint Paisios the Athonite — all are accessible. Hundred-bead prayer ropes are sold in any church shop. On the internet you can find audio recordings of the Jesus Prayer recited in various styles, advice about the body’s posture, instructions about breathing technique. Conferences on hesychasm. Documentaries from Mount Athos. Online sermons of priests explaining the degrees of prayer.

And above all, you find the exhortation. The exhortation that comes from the pulpit, from the book, from the article, from the YouTube sermon: "Say the Jesus Prayer at any time — on the bus, in the car, while shopping, while cleaning the house, while washing dishes, while walking in the park. The Name of Jesus can be invoked anywhere and anytime. There is no need for special preparation, special place, special time. Only let the heart be open."

This exhortation is widespread, comes from spiritual figures whom no one can suspect of bad faith, and seems to fulfil exactly the word of Saint Paul: "Pray without ceasing" (1 Thessalonians 5:17). For the average Orthodox Christian, this combination — accessibility of materials, generous pastoral exhortation, traditional vocabulary — produces a seemingly natural conclusion: we have the Jesus Prayer, we know it, we can practice it anytime, we are in continuity with the hesychast tradition.

The present article argues that this conclusion is an illusion. Not malicious — on the contrary, it is a pious illusion, sustained by people of good intentions. But it is an illusion that produces, in depth, the very opposite of what it promises: people who believe they practice the prayer of the heart but never actually practice it; people who, after years of "saying it on the bus," are surprised that nothing has happened to them; people who confuse occasional remembrance of the Name of Christ with what the Holy Fathers called kardiake proseuche — the prayer of the heart.

To see why, we must look at what the prayer of the heart actually is in the living tradition of the Church, what happened to this tradition on Romanian soil, and why the present state of the discourse about it — however full of goodwill — masks a historical rupture that no rhetoric can heal.

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I. Great Saints and Great Renewals

There is a historical observation that contemporary discourse avoids, though it is easily verifiable: a large part of the saints linked to the hesychast tradition, especially from the late Byzantine period through the modern era, had at the centre of their lives the invocation of the Name of Jesus and the inner work of prayer. Not merely people who wrote about it, but people in whom the prayer had descended into the heart and was uttered ceaselessly — in speech, in liturgical service, in eating, in walking, in sleep.

Saint Gregory Palamas (†1359), Saint Symeon the New Theologian (†1022), Saint Nil Sorsky (†1508), Saint Paisius Velichkovsky (†1794), Saint Seraphim of Sarov (†1833), the elders of Optina (19th century), Saint Silouan the Athonite (†1938), Elder Joseph the Hesychast (†1959), Saint Sophrony of Essex (†1993), Saint Paisios the Athonite (†1994), Father Ephraim Katunakiotis (†1998) — all practiced the Jesus Prayer as the foundation of their entire spiritual life. The list could continue. This is no coincidence. In the hesychast tradition, the vision of God is organically linked to the purification of the heart, to watchfulness, and to the ceaseless invocation of the Name of Christ — it is not the only form of holiness, but it is one of the clearest and best-attested paths of the Orthodox contemplative life.

Moreover — and here enters the second observation — every great renewal of Orthodoxy in the past millennium came through the rediscovery of the Jesus Prayer, not through anything else. The fourteenth century with the Palamite controversy and the crystallisation of the teaching on the divine energies; the eighteenth century with Saint Paisius Velichkovsky and the appearance of the Philokalia (Venice 1782, then Dobrotolyubie in Slavonic, 1793); the nineteenth century with Russian Optina and the movement of the elders; the twentieth century with Elder Joseph the Hesychast and his disciples who rekindled Athonite monastic life after its interwar decline. Each time: the same cause, the same fruits. Not administrative reforms, not social action, not academic theological brilliance — but a few people who sought, in silence, year after year, the vision of God through the invocation of the Name.

These two observations — the correlation between contemplative holiness and the prayer of the Name, and the link between ecclesial renewals and its rediscovery — pose the inevitable question: what place does Romania have in this history? Does it have a place at all, or has it always been merely a recipient of traditions coming from elsewhere?

The answer is surprising, and one whose consequences contemporary Romanian Orthodox discourse generally knows but does not draw.

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II. The Golden Age: Vasile, Paisius, and the Forgotten Romanian School

In the first half of the eighteenth century, the Romanian Lands were among the few places in Orthodoxy where monasticism could breathe freely. In Russia, Peter the Great had abolished in 1724 the sketes and most of the small monasteries — of the 1,200 monasteries existing in 1700, only 452 still functioned in 1800. In Ukraine under Polish rule, Uniate pressure was striking the Orthodox monasteries. In the Ottoman Empire, Athonite life was in slow decline. In this context, Moldavia and Wallachia became the last places where a monk could live by the hesychast rule without being crushed.

It is here that a Ukrainian monk born in Poltava in 1692, who came to Romanian soil at the age of thirteen, enters the picture: Vasile, the future Elder of Poiana Mărului. He spent almost his entire monastic life in Wallachia — at Dălhăuți Skete for two decades as abbot, then at Poiana Mărului, gradually forming a federation of eleven sketes in the Buzău-Vrancea area, all organised according to a strict hesychast rule. (I have written at length about his life and teaching in a separate article, dedicated to his commemoration on April 25. Here we are interested only in what he transmitted further.)

In 1750, on Mount Athos, Elder Vasile tonsured a young Ukrainian named Plato, giving him the name Paisius. This Paisius Velichkovsky (1722-1794) would become, through his work at Dragomirna, then Secu, then Neamț Monastery, one of the central figures of modern Orthodox hesychasm. At Neamț, under his guidance, lived more than a thousand disciples. From there, through translated Philokalic manuscripts and through generations of formed monks, the Paisian tradition passed into Russia.

The words of Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov (1807-1867), one of the greatest Russian ascetic writers of the nineteenth century, are revealing. Recommending to young monks what to rely on in the study of the Jesus Prayer, he wrote: "The writings of Elder Vasile can and must be regarded as the very first book to which anyone wishing to practice the Jesus Prayer successfully in our times must absolutely turn." And Saint Theophan the Recluse, his contemporary, made a similar recommendation. That is to say: in the nineteenth century, two of the greatest saints of the Russian Church considered that the foundational manual of the prayer of the heart for the modern world had been written by an elder from the Buzău Mountains.

This is not a minor historical curiosity. It is one of the most powerful claims that can be made about the role of the Romanian Lands in modern Orthodoxy. The Paisian tradition sent from Moldavia to Russia generated the entire Russian hesychast renewal of the nineteenth century — Saint Seraphim of Sarov, the Optina elders (Leonid, Macarius, Ambrose), Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov himself, Saint Theophan the Recluse, later Saint John of Kronstadt, and through Optina down to Father John Kulîghin who in 1945 came to Bucharest with the prayer descended into his heart. The circle closed: the tradition had left Moldavia in the eighteenth century and returned to Romania in the twentieth, by way of Russia.

The Romanian thinker Nichifor Crainic called the eighteenth century "the golden age of Romanian Orthodoxy." Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov: "It is said that the institution of elders has been revived at the end of the last century by a famous anchorite, Paisius Velichkovsky, and his disciples." The Romanian Lands had not received the tradition — they had sent it forth.

This is the historical context we must keep in mind when we speak today about the Jesus Prayer in the Romanian space. Romania did have a hesychast school. One of the most influential in all modern Orthodoxy. The question that follows is troubling: what happened to it?

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III. The Silence Between 1794 and 1945

After the death of Saint Paisius in 1794, the community at Neamț began to fragment. The great multinational brotherhoods, held together by his personality, began to break apart owing to disagreements among Russian, Ukrainian, and Romanian monks. The skete of Poiana Mărului, lacking a successor with the authority of Saint Vasile, gradually lost its status as a hesychast centre. The federation of sketes in the Buzău-Vrancea area dissolved. The tradition did not disappear suddenly — it continued in fragments, through Saint George of Cernica (†1806), a direct disciple of Paisius, through a few disciples scattered across the monasteries of Moldavia, through copied manuscripts that continued to circulate. But it was no longer a school. It was a thinning memory.

Then came the nineteenth century with its successive blows. The secularisation of monastic estates under Cuza, in 1863, confiscated approximately twenty-six per cent of the country’s land — land that belonged largely to the monasteries — and drastically reduced the number of monastic settlements. The "dedicated" monasteries (those under the jurisdiction of the Eastern patriarchates) were simply abolished or secularised. Foreign monks were expelled. Many of the old Paisian centres were reduced to a precarious existence. During this same time, in Russia, at Optina, the Paisian tradition flourished: Dostoevsky went there to see Saint Ambrose, Russian writers discovered the elders, the tradition was transmitted from disciple to disciple in conditions of relative stability. In Romania, it was thinning. At the end of the nineteenth century, while in Russia Saint Ambrose of Optina was forming generations of elders, in Romania the hesychast tradition survived only in pockets, through a few silent fathers in the sketes of Moldavia.

In the twentieth century came other blows. The First World War disorganised monastic life. The interwar period attempted some recovery, but without a living centre of hesychast transmission. Then came communism.

In 1945, when a handful of Romanian intellectuals — the poet Sandu Tudor, Professor Alexandru Mironescu, Archimandrite Benedict Ghiuș, the young Andrei Scrima, Father Sofian Boghiu, Father Roman Braga, and others — began to gather at Antim Monastery in Bucharest for conferences on Orthodox spirituality, they were searching for something they sensed was missing. On Pentecost Sunday of that same year, at Cernica Monastery, they met a Russian monk who had fled the Bolshevik terror: Father John Kulîghin, formed at Optina Monastery, a disciple of the last Optina elders before the Soviets closed the monastery. He was sixty years old. He did not speak Romanian — their understandings took place through an interpreter. He had no formal education. But he had what they were seeking: prayer descended into the heart.

The testimony of Saint Sofian Boghiu, later, about Father John: "He had received a great gift from God — the gift of unceasing prayer, which was uttered in his heart continually, even at night. For many years now, in him, the invocation of the Name of the Lord had descended from the mind into the heart, and he was praying when he spoke and when he served, when he ate and when he walked. Prayer for him was like breathing. And in sleep he was praying."

So the Burning Bush (Rugul Aprins) was born. The name came from the bush of Moses that burned without being consumed — the classical patristic image of unceasing prayer. Father John became, for two years, the spiritual axis of the group. He transmitted to them the Paisian rule. He gave them the blessing to begin the practice. He taught them what it means for the mind to descend into the heart, what the cell-rule means, what measure means — how many prayers per day, under what conditions, with what end. It was exactly what had been missing in Romania for a hundred and fifty years: a living spiritual father who carried the tradition in his own person, not merely in books.

And then came the final blow.

In January 1947, at Cernica Monastery, Father John Kulîghin was arrested by the Securitate. He was deported to Odessa, sentenced to forced labour for life. No further trace of him was found. He died, probably, in the camp. In 1948, the "Burning Bush of the Mother of God" association was outlawed. In February 1958, the Securitate launched the final operation: the arrest of all members of the group. Sandu Tudor (by then become Hieroschemamonk Daniil) was sentenced to twenty-five years of forced labour for the practice of the prayer of the heart — so it is written in the indictment — and died at Aiud prison in 1962. Father Sofian Boghiu, Father Adrian Făgețeanu, Father Roman Braga, Professor Alexandru Mironescu, the writer Vasile Voiculescu, and the others received heavy years of detention. Voiculescu died shortly after his release, broken by prison. Of the sixteen defendants in the principal trial, none escaped without sentence.

The communists understood, paradoxically, better than many contemporary Orthodox voices, what the prayer of the heart is. They understood that it is not a neutral pious exercise, but a reality which produces free men, men whom a totalitarian system cannot reach. That is why they liquidated it physically.

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IV. Father Cleopa and the Limits of an Era

Here we arrive at a delicate point, which must be stated with care. Father Cleopa Ilie (†1998) was one of Romania’s greatest spiritual fathers in the twentieth century. He spoke about the Jesus Prayer. He has sermons explicitly dedicated to it. He recommended prayer ropes, explained the degrees of prayer following Saint Theophan the Recluse, transmitted knowledge of it to thousands of laypeople who passed through Sihăstria Monastery. There can be no question of contesting his honour, his sanctity, his importance.

But we must make a distinction that popular discourse avoids: being a great spiritual father who speaks about the prayer of the heart is not the same thing as being a great hesychast geronda who forms a school of disciples in the inner work. Father Cleopa was the first. Elder Joseph the Hesychast, Saint Sophrony of Essex, Saint Paisius Velichkovsky were the second.

The difference is not one of holiness or of depth — it is one of role and context. At Sihăstria, Father Cleopa was first of all the spiritual father of a large brotherhood, a preacher to pilgrims, a counsellor to the hundreds of laypeople who came daily. His historical mission, in the conditions in which he lived (decades on end under the communist regime, with the Securitate at the gate, with the prohibition on receiving young disciples in the monastery, with the total control of the state over ecclesiastical life), was to keep the faith alive at the broad level of the people, to form spiritual fathers of brotherhoods, to transmit Orthodox teaching in a profoundly hostile context. He accomplished this mission in a way that few could have carried out.

But the formation of a hesychast school in the technical sense of the term — with young disciples received for years in the cell under direct guidance, with personalised rules of prayer, with gradual progression through the degrees of prayer under attentive spiritual supervision, with transmission from geronda to disciple in conditions of stillness and freedom — this formation presupposes an ecology that in communist Romania was simply not possible. No great hesychast geronda is formed when the Securitate bugs your cells, when the authorities decide how many monks you may receive, when any group of stable disciples can be charged with "counter-revolutionary organisation." Father Cleopa, to be clear, knew the practice — he came from a line of Moldavian spiritual fathers who preserved the Paisian memory. But the conditions to transmit it as a structured school, with dozens of young disciples formed over years on end, did not exist.

This is not a critique of Father Cleopa. It is the observation of a structural rupture between generations. Joseph the Hesychast was able to be Joseph the Hesychast because Athos, however declined, was still free. He had caves where he could withdraw with two or three disciples for decades, without anyone asking for permission, without state surveillance, without "political education" sessions with the monks. He could send letters, receive visitors, form disciples at his own pace. This was the ecology that produces a geronda.

Sihăstria under communism, however well governed, could not be this ecology. Father Cleopa saved what could be saved — the faith of the people, the basic teaching, the piety of the layperson — and did so masterfully. But the transmission of the hesychast school proper, as a structured work with rules, measures, and stable disciples, could not be carried out. The line was broken in 1947 with the deportation of Kulîghin and was not restored.

So it was that, after 1989, when freedom finally came, no hesychast school structurally comparable to Paisian Poiana Mărului or to the circle of Elder Joseph the Hesychast’s disciples emerged in Romania. Not because of a lack of vocations, not because of a lack of faith — but because what is missing is living transmission at the level of a school.

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V. Anatomy of the Contemporary Illusion

Into this void was born the rhetoric of "say it anywhere." And it is important to understand it correctly: it is not perverse, not cynical, not a conspiracy against hesychasm. It is the well-intentioned attempt of an Orthodox culture which has lost its living transmission to preserve nevertheless something of the tradition for the layperson who asks. The parish priest cannot give to a believer who works eight hours a day in an office the rule of prayer that an Athonite geronda would give to a disciple living in a cell. So he gives what he can: the exhortation to invoke the Name of Christ during daily activities. It is useful. It is Christian. It is better than nothing.

The problem is not the exhortation in itself — it is the confusion the exhortation produces, when it is not accompanied by clarity about what is and what is not the prayer of the heart. For the Holy Fathers did not call "the prayer of the heart" the practice of invoking the Name of Christ on the bus. They called something else by that name.

The tradition, from Saint Gregory of Sinai to Saint Vasile of Poiana Mărului, from The Way of a Pilgrim to Saint Sophrony, speaks consistently about two distinct things which must not be confused.

There is the remembrance of God in the course of daily activities — the invocation of the Name during meals, during walking, during manual labour, at any moment of the day. This is an old, authentic practice, recommended to all Christians since the time of Saint John Chrysostom, who in his homilies to the Antiochian laypeople exhorted them in exactly this way. It is the kindergarten of prayer. It is the first step. It is what anyone can do, without special preparation. Useful, necessary — but not the prayer of the heart.

And there is the prayer of the heart properly speaking — kardiake proseuche — which presupposes three things that the bus cannot offer.

First, time exclusively dedicated. Not "alongside other things," but hours set apart, in which one does nothing else. Saint Vasile of Poiana Mărului, in his Introductions, spoke of the occupation with prayer as a vocation in itself — not as a background to other activities. Saint Sophrony of Essex recommended to his lay disciples at least one hour in the morning and one in the evening, in stillness, with measured rule. The Russian Pilgrim had received from his spiritual father a progressive rule: first three thousand prayers per day, then six thousand, then twelve thousand. These numbers must not be taken as a universal recipe — they are the measure of a particular case, under a particular guidance. What must be retained is the principle: the prayer of the heart has measure. It has number. It has duration. He who does not count, does not practice — he does something else.

Second, external conditions. Not because God could not be invoked anywhere, but because the human mind, in its fallen state, cannot gather itself in God in conditions of maximal dispersion. The Holy Fathers ask, for the prayer of the heart, stillness, solitude, darkness (or at least not strident lights), stable bodily posture, concentrated attention. All these are not formalisms — they are instruments by which the mind, which by its nature scatters towards the senses, is helped to gather itself. The bus offers the exact opposite of every one of these conditions. This is not a critique of the bus, it is an ontological observation.

And third, guidance. This is perhaps the most painful absence for the contemporary Orthodox Christian. The whole tradition — without exception — has insisted that the prayer of the heart cannot be learned from books, but only from a living spiritual father who has walked the way himself. Books are useful, but without a guide they produce delusions (Saint Vasile of Poiana Mărului wrote explicitly about this danger — Russian prelest, Greek plánē, the deception that comes from practice without a guide). Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov said that in our times, when true spiritual fathers are rare, the candidate for prayer must content himself with a modest practice, under the guidance of a priest whom he consults regularly — not invent his own path.

These are the three real conditions: dedicated time, fitting conditions, living guidance. The absence of any one of them transforms "the prayer of the heart" into something else — either remembrance (which is good), or pious self-deception (which is dangerous).

The rhetoric of "say it anywhere" masks this distinction. It tells people that they are practicing the prayer of the heart when in reality they are doing only remembrance. And the consequence, after years, is always the same: people find that nothing has happened. Not because the prayer of the Name is false, but because they never practiced it in the sense in which the tradition calls it that. They practiced an imitation without measure and are surprised that it does not produce the fruits of the one with measure.

And the diagnosis of Elder Joseph the Hesychast — a saint of the twentieth century, not of the ancient Paterikon — comes to cut through pious illusion with a cold blade. At one point, Elder Joseph moved from a very poor cell at Saint Basil’s Skete (Little Saint Anne) to the New Skete — a place with better conditions, easier access to food, more ease of daily life. It was still Athos. It was still a monastic cell. It was still in stillness, with two or three disciples, with the perfect order of a life consecrated exclusively to prayer. And yet — his testimony to his disciples was this:

"When I lived at Saint Basil’s Skete, fresh fish was a rare luxury, whereas here I can have it whenever I want. But now that I have material comforts, God no longer gives me spiritual consolations with the same intensity as at Saint Basil’s. Now I draw near to the King’s palace and knock at the gate, but it is not opened. Then, however, not only was the gate opened, but I would enter and speak with the King."

And about another monk’s truly luxurious cell, Elder Joseph observed sharply: "Can a monk who lives in a place like this say ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me’? He has already received mercy. I do not believe a man can say the prayer here."

If a saint of the twentieth century, after decades of extreme ascetic struggle, after the cleansing tears and the vision of the uncreated Light, finds that the mere improvement of material conditions in an Athonite cell thins his prayer’s grace — what shall we say of ourselves, the laity of the Western metropolises, surrounded by more comforts than any Athonite monk ever dreamed of, who try to say the prayer on the bus in London or Bucharest, between phone notifications and announcements for the next stop?

The question is not rhetorical. And it leads to no easy answer.

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VI. Diagnosis, Without Cheap Solutions

We can now summarise the journey. The great contemplative saints of Orthodoxy were practitioners of the Jesus Prayer, and every ecclesial renewal occurred through its rediscovery. Romania had, in the eighteenth century, one of the most influential hesychast schools of modern Orthodoxy — the Vasile-Paisius centre, from which sprang the Paisian Philokalia and, by way of transmission, the entire Russian hesychast renewal. This school dissolved after 1794 and effectively faded over the course of the nineteenth century. The single serious attempt at reconnection in the twentieth century — the Burning Bush, with Father John Kulîghin as a living spiritual father from the Optina line — was physically liquidated by the communists between 1947 and 1962. The great Romanian spiritual fathers of the twentieth century, including Father Cleopa, preserved what could be preserved in their conditions — the faith of the people, the basic teaching, the lay piety — but could not rebuild a hesychast school in the technical sense, owing to structural reasons linked to the regime. After 1989, in freedom, we have not restored the thread.

This is the situation. And contemporary Orthodox discourse — the exhortation to "say it anywhere, on the bus, while shopping" — functions as a poultice over this rupture. It is not malice, it is helplessness. The well-meaning priests give what they can from what is left to them. The laity receive with piety what is given to them. And so, the entire contemporary Romanian Orthodox culture lives with the impression that it practices the prayer of the heart, when in reality it practices an occasional remembrance — useful, but incomparable with the real work which the Holy Fathers call by that name.

What follows from this diagnosis? The present article proposes no recipes. It would be unworthy — and would be exactly the kind of cheap resolution that it criticises. Who would dare, after looking face to face at the rupture between Poiana Mărului and the contemporary bus, to give a list of five steps by which "to acquire the prayer of the heart in ten minutes a day"?

A few things must be said, however.

First: sincerity in the face of the distance is more important than consolation. The Orthodox layperson of today — whether from London, Bucharest, Athens, or Moscow — is not a Joseph the Hesychast. He is not even a disciple of a Joseph the Hesychast. He lives in a culture that has lost the living transmission of this work. This distance is real and cannot be cancelled by pious rhetoric. Accepting it is the first form of authentic humility in this matter.

Second: the Name of Jesus remains holy and effective wherever it is invoked. The remembrance of God on the bus, while shopping, during work, is a good thing, recommended by tradition, profitable to the soul. It must not be abandoned. It must only be named correctly. Remembrance is its name. Not the prayer of the heart.

Third: he who feels called to the real work cannot evade the reality that this presupposes effort, measure, conditions, and — above all — living guidance. Today, this guidance is more easily found in a few places in the world than on the soil of the former Poiana Mărului: on Athos, in the American monasteries formed by the disciples of Joseph the Hesychast, at Essex in Father Sophrony’s brotherhood, in some monasteries in Cyprus, Greece, Serbia. Pilgrimage is no longer optional — it is part of the contemporary condition. He who truly wants the work must go where the thread is still living, because in his own place he no longer finds it.

Fourth — and here the circle closes: the loss of the hesychast school in Romania is not merely a personal problem of the layperson who wants to pray. It is a historical rupture which the entire Romanian Orthodox Church should look at face to face, with the grief that is owed. The Burning Bush was cut down in full bloom. Father Daniil Sandu Tudor died at Aiud for the prayer of the heart. Father John Kulîghin died, probably, in a Soviet camp, with no known grave. These are not merely biographical tragedies. They are the central wound of Romanian Orthodoxy in the twentieth century, one which pious talk about "prayer anywhere" anaesthetises rather than heals.

Healing, if it ever comes, will not come through rhetoric. It will come when a few people go where the thread is still living, stay there twenty or thirty years under direct guidance, and return, or do not return — God knows. But until then, let us at least not lie about the state in which we find ourselves. Let us call remembrance, remembrance. And the prayer of the heart — the prayer of the heart. This distinction, however small it may seem, is the only one that keeps open the door to what we have lost.

And the bus, anyway, is not going anywhere. We can invoke the Name of Jesus on it. It is good to do so. But let us not believe that, in doing this, we are continuing Saint Vasile of Poiana Mărului.

We are only people who have remained, after much war, with a pious illusion and with a journey not yet begun.