What you'll notice
Spend an evening in an Orthodox home and sooner or later you'll find the corner. A shelf, or a whole wall if the family has been at it a while: Christ, the Theotokos, a saint or two whose names match the people who live there. A small oil lamp in red or blue glass, burning. A bottle of holy water. A dried sprig from last year's Palm Sunday tucked behind a frame. A prayer book with a cracked spine.
Before dinner the family stands up, faces the corner, crosses themselves, and someone says the Lord's Prayer. Then everybody sits down and passes the potatoes as if nothing happened.
And out in the world, at the pharmacy or in the carpool line, you'll see someone with a loop of knotted black wool around the wrist, thumb moving one knot at a time.
What it's called
The corner is the icon corner, in Greek the eikonostasi (the home icon shelf) and in Russian the krasny ugol (the "beautiful corner"). The lamp is a kandili (an oil lamp). The set of prayers a person says each day is a prayer rule, a rule in the old monastic sense: a measure you've agreed to keep.
The short prayer you'll hear about most is the Jesus Prayer. Its standard form is "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." Shorter forms are used too: "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me," or simply "Lord, have mercy." The knotted loop is a prayer rope, the komboskini in Greek and the chotki in Russian, usually made with 33, 50 or 100 knots.
What's actually happening
The corner. The icons are there for the same reason they're in church: you pray to Christ and his saints, and it helps to have their faces in front of you (Icons explains why that isn't idolatry). Where a family has a choice of walls, the corner usually goes on the east side, so the household faces the way the church faces. That habit is older than any rule about it. Saint Basil, around 375, lists it among the things Christians do without a written command: "What writing has taught us to turn to the East at the prayer?"1
Morning and evening. Most Orthodox prayer books open both morning and evening prayers with the same short run that opens the Hours in church: "Glory to thee, our God; glory to thee," then "O heavenly King," the Trisagion ("O Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal One"), "O all-holy Trinity," and the Lord's Prayer.2 After that come the morning or evening prayers proper, a psalm or two, and prayers for the living and the dead by name. Many people keep a list of names folded into the prayer book, and it gets longer every year. Plenty of people say only part of the book's prayers, and that's still a rule.
The rule. This is where new Orthodox Christians get into trouble. Those who attempt the Herculean leap from "occasional improvised prayers" to "full monastic cycle by Tuesday" usually last less than a week. A sane aim is a small, stable rule: morning or evening prayers, or both, maybe a psalm, perhaps the Jesus Prayer through the day, and a few prostrations as your body allows. A prostration is a metanoia (literally "repentance"): down on your knees, forehead to the floor, and up again (not on Sundays or in the fifty days after Pascha; Standing, Sitting, Pews, and Kneeling has the canon). Five minutes of prayer, or even fifty seconds, that you actually pray beats fifty-five minutes you feel guilty about not praying.
This guide won't give you a length, because the rule is personal. Each Orthodox Christian works one out with a confessor, and it changes as life changes: a new baby, a night shift, a long illness.
The Jesus Prayer. It's said slowly, often many times in a row, sometimes aloud and more often silently: walking, driving, waiting, falling asleep. The rope keeps count so the mind doesn't have to. One knot, one prayer. Monks wear the rope on the wrist, and plenty of laypeople do too.
Children. Small children pray with the family from the start: a sign of the cross, a kiss for the icon, a short prayer before bed, the Lord's Prayer learned by ear long before it's learned by heart. They copy what they see. If the adults pray in the corner, the children will too.
Meals. Orthodox families pray before eating and give thanks after. The Lord's Prayer is the most common grace; prayer books also print short blessings for before and after meals. The family stands and crosses themselves, and then the meal begins.
Why it matters
Jesus's own teaching on prayer starts behind a closed door: "But you, when you pray, go into your room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in the secret place; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly" (Matthew 6:6).
The Liturgy on Sunday and the corner on Tuesday are one life, not two. The same words come back in both places, the same faces look down from both walls, and the person who has said "Lord, have mercy" a few hundred times during the week hears it differently at the Great Litany.
The rule matters most on the days you don't feel like praying. Feelings come and go; a rule is still there in the morning. Saint Paul tells the Thessalonians to "pray without ceasing" (1 Thessalonians 5:17), and the Jesus Prayer is the Church's most practical answer to how a person with a job might try. Its last words come straight from the tax collector in the temple, who "would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, 'God, be merciful to me a sinner!'" (Luke 18:13). Jesus said that man went home justified.
Where it came from
Praying at set times every day goes back at least to the Didache, a church manual from the late first or early second century, which gives the Lord's Prayer and then says: "Thrice in the day thus pray."3 Facing east was already an unwritten tradition by Basil's time.
The habit of one short prayer repeated all day long comes out of the monasteries. In the early fifth century Saint John Cassian reported the teaching of the Egyptian desert monks: take one verse, "O God, make speed to save me: O Lord, make haste to help me," and keep it in your heart "without ceasing."4 "For keeping up continual recollection of God," Cassian says, "this pious formula is to be ever set before you." That's a psalm verse, not the Jesus Prayer, but it's the same method. The Jesus Prayer's standard wording settled later, and this guide won't pretend to date it.
You'll hear the method in church too. On Lenten weekdays the Prayer of Saint Ephraim is said with prostrations, followed by twelve lesser bows, each with the words "O God, cleanse thou me, a sinner."5 It's the Jesus Prayer's cousin, said with the whole body.
What you do
If you're Orthodox: make a corner, even if it's one icon on a bookshelf. Get a prayer book and use it. Keep the rule you've worked out with your confessor, and if you're building one, ask for a rule you could imagine keeping in five years, not just five days; you can always add later. Carry a prayer rope if it helps you remember. Pray before meals, including in restaurants, where a quick sign of the cross will do. When you miss a day, start again the next one. Nobody's rule survives life without a few gaps.
If you're visiting: at an Orthodox table, stand when the family stands. You don't have to cross yourself or know the words; a quiet "Amen" at the end is plenty. If you're curious about the Jesus Prayer, try it for one minute, slowly, and see what happens. Nobody owns it.
Field Note: the rope is a tool. A prayer rope is an abacus for the soul, neither jewelry nor a charm. If you're given one, the giver hopes you'll use it, which mostly means fumbling through a few knots before you fall asleep.
Go deeper
- Matthew 6:5–15; Luke 18:9–14.
- Hapgood, Service Book, p. 41 (the Prayer of Saint Ephraim with its bows) and p. 43 (the opening prayers).
- Saint John Cassian, Conferences X (NPNF2 11), on continual prayer.
- "After the Chrism Dries," Simply Orthodox; then Vespers, Vigil, and the Daily Round, for the Church's own daily rule.