No, not if you mean the centering prayer movement popularized by Fr. Thomas Keating and others. The Orthodox Church has its own ancient tradition of contemplative prayer called hesychasm, centered on the Jesus Prayer. They’re not the same thing.
Here’s why that matters.
Centering prayer teaches you to choose a “sacred word” and use it to let go of thoughts, emptying your mind to rest in God’s presence. It draws heavily from Eastern meditation techniques and presents itself as a Christian adaptation of those practices. The goal is interior silence achieved through a kind of mental clearing.
The Jesus Prayer works differently. You’re not emptying anything. You’re filling your heart with Christ’s name: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Every word matters. You’re confessing theology, that Jesus is Lord, that He’s the Son of God, that you’re a sinner who needs His mercy. This isn’t a technique for achieving a peaceful mental state. It’s a cry for help directed at a Person.
Orthodox hesychasm (which means “stillness” or “quiet”) isn’t about blanking your mind. It’s about guarding your heart, about watchfulness. The Fathers call it nepsis. You’re learning to pay attention to what’s happening in your inner life, to catch temptations and passions before they take root. The Jesus Prayer becomes a kind of spiritual breathing, a way to keep your attention on Christ throughout the day. But it’s always personal. Always relational. You’re talking to Jesus, not practicing a meditation technique.
There’s another big difference. Centering prayer is often presented as something you can pick up from a book or a weekend retreat and practice on your own. The Jesus Prayer, practiced seriously, requires a spiritual father or mother. Why? Because the inner life is dangerous territory. The Orthodox tradition is full of warnings about prelest, which means spiritual delusion. You can have experiences in prayer that feel profound, that seem like encounters with God, but are actually products of your own imagination or worse. A spiritual guide who knows you, who’s traveled this road before, can help you discern what’s real from what’s deceptive.
St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, a 19th-century Russian bishop who wrote extensively about the Jesus Prayer, warned against practicing it intensively without guidance. He said to go slowly, to pray with attention to the words, not to rush or try to manufacture spiritual experiences. The prayer itself is simple. But the spiritual life it opens up is complex.
If you’re coming from an evangelical background, you might be drawn to centering prayer because it promises a deeper, more contemplative experience than what you’ve known. That hunger is good. But the Orthodox Church offers something better than a borrowed technique. We offer a whole way of life, liturgy, fasting, confession, the Eucharist, the guidance of elders, within which the Jesus Prayer makes sense. You can’t separate the prayer from the Church. That’s not legalism. It’s just how transformation actually works. You don’t become holy by mastering a method. You become holy by living in the Body of Christ, by receiving His grace through the mysteries, by struggling against your passions with the help of brothers and sisters who are doing the same.
Start simple. If you want to pray the Jesus Prayer, begin with just a few minutes in the morning or evening. Say it slowly, out loud if that helps. Pay attention to what the words mean. Don’t worry about coordinating it with your breathing or descending into your heart or any of the more advanced practices you might read about. Just say the prayer. Ask for mercy. Mean it.
Talk to Fr. Michael about it. He can help you integrate it into your prayer rule without overdoing it. And keep coming to Liturgy. Keep going to confession. The Jesus Prayer isn’t a shortcut around the ordinary life of the Church. It’s a way of carrying that life with you when you’re driving to the plant for your shift or sitting in traffic on I-10 or lying awake at 3 a.m. worrying about your kids.
The goal isn’t inner peace, though peace may come. The goal is union with God. Theosis. Becoming by grace what Christ is by nature. That’s not something you achieve through technique. It’s something God does in you when you show up, day after day, and ask for mercy.
Metropolitan Kallistos Ware wrote that the Jesus Prayer is “a prayer of the Church, not of the isolated individual.” That’s the key. We don’t pray alone, even when we’re physically alone. We pray as members of Christ’s Body, surrounded by the saints, guided by the Fathers, held in the prayers of the Theotokos. Centering prayer, for all its appeal, can’t offer that. It’s a modern innovation trying to fill a hunger that the Church has been feeding for two thousand years.
So no, don’t practice centering prayer. But do learn to pray. The Jesus Prayer is waiting for you, and it’s been working for a very long time.
