"Where?" I asked.

She did not know. But it was there.

Jesus warned us against vain repetition. But allowing the name of Jesus to be a part of our life rhythm is never vain unless we try to take credit for it.

"But the Bible says a mantra . . ."

"Please go home and check the Bible and see if you can find out where it is forbidden, and come back and bring me chapter and verse," I suggested.

If she looked it up, she didn't find it, not in a concordance, not in the text.

Mantra is simply a convenient borrowed word for the kind of prayer that is constant, which helps us to pray at all times – which the Bible does tell us to do. For the Christian, the mantra can be any short petition from the Bible, preferably one which includes the name of Jesus. The most frequently used petition is the cry of the blind man on the road to Jericho, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner, or the shorter version, Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.

This is familiarly known as the Jesus Prayer, and I am uncomfortable whenever anyone says, "I use the Jesus Prayer," for we never "use" the Jesus Prayer. It uses us.

And far too often we take the name of Jesus casually, or even worse, possessively. I do not want to be what my husband calls "a bumper-sticker Christian." Recently we were parked behind a car with two bumper stickers. The one on the left said I LOVE MY PEKINGESE. The one on the right said I LOVE JESUS. Somehow I do not put much stock in that kind of love! Perhaps I was turned off by I LOVE MY PEKINGESE and I LOVE JESUS side by side because there was something possessive about those messages, something separating the owner from those who have neither pekingese nor Jesus as pets. That scares me. The Word is not a pet. The Word is the wildness behind creation, the terror of a black hole, the atomic violence of burning hydrogen within a sun. Christ is both lion and lamb, and lions are not domesticated.