Prostrations

Referenced by: Eastern Christian

The body does not lie as easily as the mind does.

The mind can perform devout thoughts. It can generate impressive-sounding prayers, articulate deep-sounding feelings, construct sophisticated theological frameworks — all while the actual center of the person is somewhere else entirely, unmoved. The mind is the tradition's most eloquent self-deceiver.

The body is harder to fake. When you kneel, you are acknowledging something — whether you feel it or not. When you press your forehead to the floor, you are enacting a posture whose meaning is not ambiguous: smallness before greatness, creature before Creator, the self offering itself. The body can go through these motions without interior engagement — but it cannot do so as easily as the mind can generate words without interior engagement. The body's commitment tends to pull the interior along.

This is the contemplative logic of prostrations.

In Eastern Christianity, the prostration — metanoia in Greek, the same word as "repentance," which tells you something important about what the body is doing — is a fluid, rhythmic movement: standing upright, bowing deeply, bending the knees, lowering to the floor to touch it with both hands and the forehead, then rising back to standing. Done with care, it has the quality of a wave or a breath — the self going down, the self rising.

Prostrations are performed at specific points in Orthodox liturgical services, particularly during Great Lent. The prayer of St. Ephrem the Syrian — "O Lord and Master of my life, give me not a spirit of sloth, despondency, lust for power, and idle talk" — prayed three times during Lenten services with a full prostration between each petition, is perhaps the most common formal use of the practice.

In private prayer, prostrations can be incorporated freely: before the prayer rule begins, as a way of moving the body into the space of prayer; between periods of the Jesus Prayer; as a response to moments of particular compunction or gratitude.

The Greek word for prostration — metanoia — means literally "change of mind" and is the standard New Testament word for repentance. The same word applies to the interior turning of repentance AND to the bodily act of prostration. The Fathers understood the two as aspects of the same reality: the interior turning of metanoia and the exterior enactment of metanoia are not separate — they reinforce and express each other.

For the person who has prayed only in words and thoughts, the addition of even a few prostrations per day tends to shift the quality of prayer noticeably. Something about the rhythm — up, down, up — interrupts the body's momentum toward its usual preoccupations, deepens the breath, and opens the prayer that follows into something more present and less abstract.