At the monastery, we pray all 150 psalms in a two-week cycle because they were Jesus’ hymnbook. Today’s psalm is terribly repetitious: Various phrases keep saying the same thing—be obedient, walk in God’s ways, keep God’s commandments. Yet, on another level, such repetition is like a rosary that keeps repeating, “Blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus.” Russian spirituality features a repetition of the Jesus Prayer (e.g. “Lord, have mercy on me”) at least a thousand times a day. Many of us have experienced hearing a song in the morning that we are unable to shake out of our minds as it continues to play itself over and over. “Pray without ceasing,” instructs Paul (1 Thess. 5:17). But how is that possible? By choosing a sentence, phrase, or even a word—a mantra—and repeating it in the morning until it is sufficiently installed so that it echoes on its own all day, almost impossible to stop.

For this spiritual discipline, it is wise to choose a mantra that expresses best what one most urgently needs to learn if one’s life is to be changed. Amid my anxieties, doubts, and wavering, I know what I most need to repeat, until belief crowds out unbelief, that nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:39). One’s mantra is a discipline that not only can evoke God’s constant presence but also aid in contemplation for halting our minds from taking weedy paths of diversion.