Few western Christians ever forget the first time they walked into an Eastern Orthodox or Byzantine Catholic church. Candles, incense, icons and mystery; the slow timeless patter of its chants; the dignified "dance" of bowings and prostrations --- the experience of Byzantine liturgy and prayer is all-encompassing, involving the full range of the senses.

Kievan envoys sent to 10th century Byzantium by the Grand Duke Vladimir would have agreed. On observing Byzantine Christians at prayer in Constantinople's great cathedral Hagia Sophia ("Holy Wisdom"), they reported back to their prince, "We could not tell whether we were in heaven or on earth."

That "spiritual opulence," as one writer has described it, comes naturally to a tradition shaped over a period of five centuries in the imperial capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, christened Constantinople by the world's first Christian emperor, Constantine, in AD 333.

Court ritual, monastic piety, the efforts of countless Christian poets --- all participated in the creation of the incomparably rich Byzantine liturgical tradition, the basic elements of which were in place by the ninth century. The tradition was spread by Byzantine missionaries from Asia Minor and the Middle East to the Slavic lands.

But, of course, the spiritual traditions that make up the Byzantine heritage are a great deal older than that. The prayer traditions of Constantinople were themselves an amalgam of Jewish, Antiochian and Greek influences, stretching back to the earliest days of Christianity.

And behind all the court ritual stands, not merely the palace honorifics of Constantinople, but a vision of final unity between heaven and earth.

"We who mystically represent the cherubim," a Byzantine hymn has worshipers declare at the beginning of the Liturgy of the Eucharist, "now lay aside all earthly care to welcome the King of All who comes invisibly escorted by angelic hosts --- Alleluia!"

For the Byzantine Christian, prayer takes place in the court of heaven, to which believers have access by means of Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit. Everything --- architecture, music, paintings, texts --- conspire to remind him or her of this central reality. Domes and cupolas represent the firmament; icons incarnate the "cloud of [heavenly] witnesses" the New Testament Letter to the Hebrews speaks about; and the space around the altar, the "Holy of Holies," is veiled by a screen which points to the impenetrable mystery of God.

Whereas the Christian West's focus, on the whole, tends to be on the Cross and the sacred humanity of Christ, this vision of the wedding of heaven and earth, this anticipation of glory, is the fundamental insight and preoccupation of Eastern Christianity.

Basic characteristics
Perhaps the most unique thing about the prayer traditions of Constantinople is that they make no distinction, as the West often does, between public and private prayer. All prayer, however solitary or domestic in nature, is "public," that is, part of, and based on the Church's liturgy and shaped by the seasons of the Church year.

The use of the Divine Office, or Liturgy of the Hours, particularly Vespers and Matins, for example, is a common, even weekly part of Byzantine parish life, especially on major feasts. The whole notion of "private devotions" is foreign to Byzantine spirituality.

In part, of course, this is due to the deep and pervasive influence of monastic spirituality on the mindset of the Eastern Church. But it also stems from the Byzantine tradition's links with Judaism, where the believer prays, not merely or mainly as an individual, but always as part of a people, a participant in a long and ongoing history.

Another unusual aspect of Byzantine spirituality is its insistence on the role of the body in prayer.

That Byzantine prayer is highly physical is apparent to anyone who's ever attended an Eastern Orthodox or Byzantine Catholic Liturgy. The repetitive rhythms of prayer are mirrored in a large repertoire of physical gestures: making the sign of the cross (from right to left in Byzantine practice, made each time the Trinity is invoked), bowing from the waist, making the metany (from the Greek "metanoia," or "repentance"), a deep reverential bow, full prostrations, raising hands in prayer, placing one's forehead on icons, kissing images.

While such rituals and gestures are common to most religions, they are part and parcel of the very rhythms of Byzantine worship and a way of involving the entire person in prayer.

Full range of arts
Byzantine worship is also characterized by a vivid use of the full range of the arts --- poetry, music and painting.

While no one would wish to deny that the spirituality of the Christian West has inspired masterful works of religious art, religious art in the East tends to be more intimately linked to prayer, an integral part of worship, than in the West where it has often functioned primarily as an ornament or supplement to the worship experience.

Icons --- or traditional religious images of Christ, the Virgin, the saints, and the principal feasts --- are not, for the East, seen as religious catechisms for the illiterate or an expression of the aesthetic tastes of the day. They are central, unchanging aspects of Tradition itself --- "theology in color" as one Russian philosopher puts it, and, even more importantly, windows into that glorified universe, suffused with the life of the Trinity, to which the Byzantine vision of worship directs us.

The Byzantine liturgy is, as a hymnologist has written, "a poet's liturgy." More than the West, where the bare text of Scripture has long been central, Byzantine prayer is enriched by troparia (short hymns proper to the day and season) and kontakia (abbreviated in today's practice, but originally a kind of sermon in verse) and the canon odes (rich poetic allusions to Old and New Testament parallels) penned by Asia Minor's great Christian poets --- men and women like St. John Damascene (AD 645-742), St. Ephrem the Syrian (AD 300?-373), the nun Kassiane (c. AD 808-865) and, most notably, St. Romanos Melodos (AD 527-565), author of many hymns still in use, and especially associated with the Byzantine liturgy's most famous Kontakion, the Akathist Hymn to the Mother of God.

Like icons, the purpose of Byzantine liturgical verse is to inspire the worshiper with a vision of God's glory, drafting a chain of parallels between Scriptural figures and events and the promise of God's grace at work in the Church and in the individual soul.

The Jesus Prayer
One can hardly speak about the particularities of Byzantine prayer without mentioning the tradition's most famous addition to general Christian spirituality: the Jesus Prayer.

Emerging from early monastic settings in the fourth century, the spiritual practice of the constant repetition of a short invocation centered on the name "Jesus" became by the early Middle Ages virtually synonymous with Byzantine mysticism. In the 14th century, the practice had inspired an entire contemplative spirituality called hesychasm, from the Greek hesychia, or "repose." This movement was particularly associated with the theologian-philosopher St. Gregory Palamas and later with 19th century Russian Orthodox monasticism.

The Jesus Prayer involves, as its great proponent Theophane the Recluse wrote, "With consciousness and attention in the heart, saying unceasingly: 'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me.'"

The idea behind the Jesus prayer was, and is, disposing oneself, through constant repetition of the divine Name, to the grace of "self-acting" prayer: a kind of unconscious recollectedness in the midst of daily life, a "habit" of union with God.

As Theophane writes: "When a man eats and when he drinks, when he lies down or when he does any work, even when he is immersed in sleep, the perfumes of prayer will breathe in his heart spontaneously."

Hesychasts used a knotted wool "rosary" to facilitate the practice for beginners and recommended simple bodily techniques to accompany the prayer: head bowed, eyes fixed on the place of the heart and breathing in time to the prayer.

But the important thing about the Jesus Prayer for Byzantine writers --- and, for that matter, prayer in general is that, through it, heaven and earth are joined. "The heart is a small vessel," writes the great ascetic St. Makarios, "but all things are contained in it; God is there, the angels are there, and there also is life and the Kingdom, the heavenly cities and the treasures of grace."

Award-winning Catholic journalist Gabriel Meyer has covered Church issues in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He is a member of St. Andrew Russian Greek-Catholic Church in El Segundo.