Coming recommended from my friend James, I decided to read Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger. It was an okay book, a little slow at times, but still a good read.

One of the major themes of the book involves The Way of the Pilgrim and The Jesus Prayer -

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, the sinner.

Towards the end, there was a passage that jumped out at me so I thought I’d share it. To set up the scene, Franny is suffering “a spiritual and existential breakdown,” becoming “disenchanted with the selfishness and inauthenticity she perceives all around her,” and after reading The Way of the Pilgrim, is trying to reach spiritual enlightenment by praying unceasingly. Zooey, her brother, has come to talk with her. Here, he questions her motives for reciting the “Jesus Prayer” (bolding my own).

The part that stumps me, really stumps me, is that I can’t see why anybody-unless he was a child, or an angel, or a lucky simpleton like the pilgrim-would even want to say the prayer to a Jesus who was the least bit different from the way he looks and sounds in the New Testament. My God! He’s only the most intelligent man in the Bible, that’s all! Who isn’t he head and shoulders over? Who? Both Testaments are full of pundits, prophets, disciples, favorite sons, Solomons, Isaiahs, Davids, Pauls- but, my God, who beside Jesus really knew which end was up? Nobody. Not Moses. Don’t tell me Moses. He was a nice man, and he kept in beautiful touch with his God, and all that-but that’s exactly the point. He had to keep in touch. Jesus realized there is no separation from God… Oh, my God, what a mind!…Who else, for example, would have kept his mouth shut when Pilate asked for an explanation? Not Solomon. Don’t say Solomon. Solomon would have had a few pithy words for the occasion. I’m not sure Socrates wouldn’t have, for that matter. Crito, or somebody, would have managed to pull him aside just long enough to get a couple of well-chosen words for the record. But most of all, above everything, who in the Bible besides Jesus knew-knew-that we’re carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we’re all too…stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look? You have to be a son of God to know that kind of stuff. Why don’t you think of these things? I mean it, Franny, I’m being serious. When you don’t see Jesus for exactly what he was you miss the whole point of the Jesus Prayer. If you don’t understand Jesus, you can’t understand his prayer-you don’t get the prayer at all, you just get some kind of organized cant. Jesus was a supreme adept, by God, on a terribly important mission. This was no St. Francis, with enough time to knock out a few canticles, or to preach to the birds, or to do any of the other endearing things so close to Franny Glass’s heart. I’m being serious now…How can you miss seeing that? If God had wanted somebody with St. Francis’s consistently winning personality for the job in the New Testament, he’d've picked him, you can be sure. As it was, he picked the best, the smartest, the most loving, the least sentimental, the most unimitative master he could possibly have picked. And when you miss seeing that, I swear to you, you’re missing the whole point of the Jesus prayer. The Jesus Prayer has one aim, and one aim only. To endow the person who says it with Christ-Consciousness. Not to set up some little cozy, holier-than-thou trysting place with some sticky, adorable divine personage who’ll take you in his arms and relieve you of all your duties and make all your nasty Weltschmerzen and Professor Tuppers go away and never come back. And by God, if you have intelligence enough to see that-and you do-and yet you refuse to see it, then you’re misusing the prayer, you’re using it to ask for a world full of dolls and saints and no Professor Tuppers.