Make Speed to Save Us – Br. Jamie Nelson

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Br. Jamie Nelson

Saint John Cassian

Psalm 70

“O God, make speed to save us. O Lord, make haste to help us.”

If you’ve spent much time here in this chapel, those words will sound familiar. It’s a line from scripture: the first verse of Psalm 70. We recite it at the beginning of most daily prayer services: Noonday Prayer, Evening Prayer, and Compline. The Brother who is officiating chants the first phrase, and the congregation responds with the second.

That monastic ritual has been in place since St. Benedict first wrote his Rule around AD 530. Yet the tradition’s origins are even older than that. St. Benedict included it in his Rule because of the influence of an older monastic author: St. John Cassian, whom we celebrate today.

St. John Cassian was born around AD 360 in the region of present-day Romania. As a young man, he made his way to Skete, one of the early seedbeds of monasticism located in the Egyptian desert. Devout men and women had migrated to the desert to pursue a solitary life of prayer, following in the example of St. Anthony of Egypt a century before. Others banded together into small communities with daily life shared in common, much as we Brothers live out our life today.

Cassian stayed fifteen years in the desert, being formed through prayer, relationship, and daily life with God. After time in the two most influential Christian cities of his day, Constantinople and Rome, he founded a monastic community near present-day Marseille, France, where he lived out his days. The community he founded was a double monastery, with buildings for both men and women, including his biological sister.

If St. John Cassian were to have a stained-glass window in our clerestory monastic founders series, his window would be located between Augustine[1] and Benedict.[2] He was a contemporary of Augustine; the two were born and died within just a few years of one another.

If St. John Cassian were to have a stained-glass window, it would be to honor him as the author of two major works in monastic spirituality, the Institutes and the Conferences. These writings served as key theological and structural roadmaps for St. Benedict as he wrote his Rule. Not only did they inspire the content, in several chapters Benedict directly recommended both works as daily reading fare.

The Conferences are structured as a sort of oral history of the Desert Fathers. It recounts conversations with fifteen elders from Cassian’s desert days, describing the lived experiences, memories, and traditions of a since-vanished community.

One of the elders interviewed for the Conferences, Abba Isaac, shared his wisdom on unceasing prayer using Psalm 70:1.[3] He saw the verse as a universal prayer formula attuned to every human experience, noting, “It embraces all the feelings which can be implanted in human nature, and can be fitly and satisfactorily adapted to every condition.”[4] He advised repeating the verse over and over while going about one’s daily life: while working, walking, or worrying.

You might consider carrying this verse with you this week. Let it accompany you from the time you wake up until you fall asleep at night. For every prayer begins from the same longing: to draw nearer to the God who is already near to us in loving relationship (1 John 4:19).

So join me now by saying: “O God, make speed to save us. O Lord, make haste to help us.”