Some prayers are short enough to keep in a pocket. A few words, said once or said two hundred times — in a line at the store, on a drive, lying awake at two in the morning. No book, no candle, no nine days, and nothing to finish.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Twelve words holding about everything: who he is, who you are, and the only thing you actually need. A person can spend a lifetime inside one sentence, and many have.
It comes down from the monks of the Egyptian desert in the fourth and fifth centuries, was carried at Sinai and on Mount Athos, and was gathered into the Philokalia, printed at Venice in 1782. The West mostly met it through The Way of a Pilgrim, a Russian book of the eighteen hundreds about a man who set out to find how you could possibly pray without ceasing. It is often said with the breath — half going in, half coming out — until it keeps going on its own.
Shorten it when you want to. Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me. Or four words: Jesus, have mercy on me. Nothing breaks.
My Lord and my God.
Five words, and they are Thomas's. He had said he would not believe it unless he put his hand in the wound, and then he was standing in front of him and this is all that came out. It is in John 20:28 and it is the shortest complete act of faith anybody has ever made.
Catholics have whispered it at the elevation at Mass for centuries — at the moment the host is lifted, heads down, under the breath. If you have ever wondered what people were saying then, it was usually this.
Deus meus et omniaMy God and my all.
Traditionally St. Francis, and the early Franciscan lives tell it the same way: brothers who went looking for him at night would find him still awake, saying this and not much else, hour after hour. Whether the words are exactly his cannot be shown, but the story is old and it is the reason anybody says it.
It asks for nothing. That is the whole character of it — five words that hand everything over and then stop.
Jesus, Mary, Joseph.
Three names and nothing else. This is the one that comes out when there is no time to compose anything — bad news on the phone, a car sliding, a scan you are waiting on. It has been said at deathbeds for a very long time, on the thought that these three are good company to be named in front of at the end.
There is a longer traditional form if you want it: Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I give you my heart and my soul. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, assist me in my last agony. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, may I breathe forth my soul in peace with you. Most people just say the names.
Paul finishes a letter to Corinth with a word he does not bother to translate: Maranatha. It is Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, sitting untranslated in the middle of a Greek letter because the people reading it already prayed it. It means Come, Lord.
Which makes it, as far as anyone can tell, the earliest Christian prayer we have in the words the first ones used. Two syllables, and still perfectly good.