Breath Prayer

Charlie called it a ‘God moment’. I saw it happen. My wife, Nancy, and I were recording a weekly session of “Focus on the C” for KCRO, Omaha’s 660AM Christian radio station. We were talking about “aspirations”, or today what is called “Breath Prayer”. Charlie says, “What would be an example of a breath prayer.” And Nancy says, “A Breath Prayer is just 6 to 8 words or syllables long. A lot of them are taken from the Bible. One example is ‘Not my will but your will be done.”

I can visibly see the words sink into Charlie’s heart. “I just had a God moment,” he says. This is the power of a Breath Prayer or aspiration as they were called in “the old days”. Aspiration comes from a Latin word, aspirare, which means ‘to breath’. Breath Prayers were used by Christians early in the history of the church as a way to have access to Bible passages throughout their day. There were no printing presses. Copies of the gospels and other Bible texts were expensive and rare. So the first believers memorized short passages or phrases, “Son of David, have mercy on me”; “My yoke is sweet, my burden light”; “My Lord and my God”. And they would bring them to mind and repeat them throughout their day.

A particularly famous Breath Prayer is the “Jesus Prayer”, the central theme of the 19th century Russian spiritual classic of the Orthodox tradition, The Way of a Pilgrim (http://tinyurl.com/wayofpilgrim). The story is of a Russian pilgrim wandering through the countryside and towns teaching this Breath Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me” and the practice of saying it continuously. The scripture text that spiritual writers quote for this practice and that the pilgrim in this classic quotes is 1 Thessalonians 5:17, “Pray always”. Richard Foster in Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home (http://tinyurl.com/prayerfindingtheheartstruehome), and Rick Warren in The Purpose Driven Life (http://tinyurl.com/purposelife) both teach about Breath Prayer.

How to Do the Breath Prayer
1. Find a quiet place.
2. Try starting easily with perhaps a 5 minute daily practice.
3. Pick out a favorite 6-8 word or less phrase from the Bible. Perhaps shorten a favorite passage to a few words that can be said in a single breath.
4. Set a timer for 5 minutes.
5. Perhaps break the phrase in two, thinking one part breathing in and a second breathing out.
6. Attend just to your breath and the prayer.

But back to the “God Moment” recording “Focus on the C”. Here’s how I know how Charlie experienced that moment. You see, my wife, Nancy, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease last July. When the first symptom showed up, the trembling in her left hand, the other changes came almost instantaneously. All of her movement slowed. Her personal “gas tank” suddenly shrunk: her energy almost disappeared. Her left side, trembling all day long, became sore and stiff each night.

You’ve seen Parkinson’s if you watch the news. The late Catholic Pope, John Paul II, died of Parkinson’s. We watched him die, day by day, week after week, year after year, as the disease slowly drained him of his life. So when my wife, Nancy, said, “Not my will, but your will be done”, she was speaking what she had been praying and living for nine months. And she breathed her faith into Charlie.