Last night I woke up in the wee small hours, just after 1:30 AM to be precise. I know because I went out into the kitchen and looked at the digital clock on the stove.
It was early to get up, but I knew I was too awake to go immediately back to sleep. I went back to bed and lay down, staring at the ceiling in the dark. This kind of thing was happening to me quite a bit last fall, and since getting laid off from my job last month, it has only increased, adding another factor into the calculus of anxiety.
Recognizing the familiar mental state, I immediately switched into a mental recitation of the Jesus Prayer, whispering softly to myself in the darkness, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, the Sinner."
The Orthodox believe that this simple recitation is the quickest and best way to pray spontaneously, such that one can do it almost constantly in one's mental background as one goes throughout the day, fulfilling Paul's direction to "pray without ceasing." The Catholics also advocate the use of the Jesus Prayer, but they are more apt to mention other repetitive prayers such as the Rosary. Protestants, well,...that's a different story. It depends on which Protestants you ask, and how they interpret Matthew 6:7. I can testify that my experience (as a Protestant) is that it is anything but "vain."
I am at the point where launching into the repetitive prayer is almost like taking a fast-acting drug that makes my anxieties fly away. I trust God implicitly and feel myself pulled more deeply into that trust. Of course my mind wanders I say the prayer, and my thoughts latch onto various things, but as long I continue with the prayer, I do not feel myself pulled into the anxiety I had felt upon waking. It has taken years of practice to achieve this, remembering its efficacy over and over. The next thing I knew it was hours later I found myself waking a second time, still in the darkness, but the peace of the empty mind that one can sometime find when waking.
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