I didn't know that the Copts did not always say the Jesus Prayer.
There's a BBC series that had Fr. Lazarus in an episode. It was about an Anglican vicar, Peter Owen Jones, traveling the world and participating in different religions to learn about them (I believe it was called Extreme Pilgrim). Fr. Lazarus seemed like an unassuming, friendly, and generous man.
My understanding is the Jesus Prayer was in abeyance for a time, but remember, the prayer Kyrie Eleison is literally a shortened version of the Jesus Prayer, or rather the Jesus Prayer could be considered a longer version of it, and so the use of the Kyrie as an arrow prayer is ancient. The Syriac Orthodox have also used the Ave Maria for a long time, and the Magnificat, and there is also an Eastern Orthodox / Greek Catholic version of it fairly similar to the Roman Catholic version:
Theotokos Virgin, rejoice, Mary full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, for you have borne the Saviour of our souls.
Another English translation of the same text reads:
Mother of God and Virgin, rejoice, Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, for thou hast given birth to the Saviour of our souls.
Indeed, it was Extreme Pilgrim, but he did a follow up series called Around the World in 80 Faiths some of the highlights of which included a visit to Mandaeans who had to flee Iraq in Sydney, a visit to a Mevlevi (whirling dervish) cema in Aleppo which no longer exists due to the Old City being completely destroyed, a visit to Yazidis in Iraq before the ISiS genocide which probably killed some of them shown on the screen (the main temple he visited survived, but the Yazidi town of Sinjar was annhilated, with all the men killed and the women and children sold into slavery), a visit to a traditional synagogue in Lithuania, a visit to the Alevis in Istanbul who have an identity crises as some identify as Sunni Muslims but others identify with the Ishikism movement, a grouping of indigenous Kurdish and Persian religions that also includes the Bektasi Sufis, the Yazidis, the Yarsanis (some of whom, unlike the Yazidis, because of their contempt for Islam, identify as worshippers of the Islamic conception of the devil; there is a probable connection between Yazidism and Yarsanism and a Syrian Christian heresy called Ophiteism, since the Peacock Angel has Christlike attributes and Yazidis at least reportedly practice baptism and the Eucharist in addition to their other rites such as circumcision and praying to the Sun and various peculiar rites in the temples; the Yazidis also sheltered Armenians during the Turkish Genocide and were allowed to settle in Armenia, where they are the largest ethnic minority.
Then, the very best part was his visit to Holy Savior’s Cathedral in Moscow, participating in a 36 hour vigil for the patronal feast of an Ethiopian Orthodox Church (Ethiopian services can be spectacularly long, and he had to take a nap in the BBC’s truck at one point), and to a baptism among the Sammi people (Lapplanders) at a Lutheran church in Norway, and a visit to one of the two ancient Benedictine monasteries damaged in the horrible earthquake recently, although he made it a bit depressing by going to the less traditionalist one which is suffering from a lack of vocations, implying they are dying out, ignoring the nearby ancient monastery that has the Tridentine mass and the old Benedictine Divine Office and has grown considerably in recent years.
The nadir of his trip included an attempted visit to some Aboriginal Australians to encounter the dreamtime religion, but he visited a group which had, glory to God, converted to Christianity and only practiced the ritual of exposing an infant to fragrant smoke on the belief that it promotes health, as opposed to religious reasons - that they no longer practiced dreamtime made me happy but made him sad, then a visit to some absurd witches in Sydney where he felt compelled to dance naked with them, and also other instances where he participated rather too much in occult religions and idolatry, and in some cases visited groups which are extremely obscure and also a drug cult in Brazil called Santo Daime, and some of these were pretty cringey, and at times one felt as though he had been conned into believing a particular sect was more important or authentic than it actually was. The worst moment however was when he danced through the streets of Moscow with some Hare Krishnas.
The series ended with him running back to his parish to resume his life as an Anglican service, perhaps implying that he did not find the grass on the other side of the fence to be greener, however, there are serious moral and ethical issues raised by the extent to which, in Extreme Pilgrim and especially Around The World in 80 Faiths, he actually participated in Pagan and occult and non-Christian worship rituals, as opposed to merely observing them. According to the canon law of the early church, any presbyter who prays even with heretics is to be deposed, and based on the fact that he did this about 74 times, since if I recall correctly he visited at most six non-heterodox Christian churches, while the ancient canons prohibited priests from being excommunicated in addition to being deposed for the same offense that would cause a layman to be excommunicated on the basis that the canon law of the early church prohibited punishing people twice for the same offense, since there were so many offenses committed if someone had done that in the early church, or in any Eastern or Oriental Orthodox church at present, or in one of the more traditional Anglican churches like the Church of Ghana, the Archdiocese of Sydney, or the Continuing Anglicans in the US, or the LCMS or especially WELS, or the SBC or PCA or OPC or the Assyrian Church of the East or the Ancient Church of the East or the Mar Thoma Syrian Church, a member of the Anglican communion (inexplicably, in his visit to India he neglected to visit any of the Christians, despite the fact that Christianity has been in India for about three times longer than Sikhism and has more members than Sikhism and Jainism combined, both of which he did visit, as well as Zoroastrianism where as anyone could have told him, he was unable to get good footage due to the secrecy of the Zoroastrians in India, unlike their Persian counterparts, who are quite open, and more endangered in terms of their declining numbers, although apparently not at risk from the Iranian government. It was all very cringey in that respect. And the cringe could have been avoided had he not actually participated in the services but focused on documenting them.
But really the fault as I see it lies with his bishop. By his own admission, in Extreme Pilgrim episode II, he rarely sees his bishop, whereas a typical Orthodox priest in the US is in routine contact with their bishop as episcopal approval is needed for all sorts of things, for example, getting approval for someone who is not clergy to enter the altar behind the iconostasis for various purposes, and ordaining boys as altar servers, which requires tonsuring, and in general most Orthodox parishes get a hierarchical divine liturgy on average once a year, and there are some retired bishops who serve as parish priests, since you can’t really retire as a bishop, since you are still a member of the monastery and all your property belongs to the church. Proper episcopal supervision would have told him to observe and document but not participate. That his bishop was not intimately involved really makes his bishop the person who I would regard as canonically culpable if the Church of England were to follow the canon laws of the Early Church, which I strongly believe it should, at least those of the first three ecumenical councils, the Council of Laodicea, parts of the Second Council of Nicaea, and some wise canons from the Council of Trullo, for example, the canon prohibiting priests from administering the financial affairs of their parishioners, which is a really good idea, and of course also the apostolic canons and those included in the Didache and/or the Didascalia.
I actually feel very sorry for Fr. Peter Owen Jones, because he was acutely traumatized by some of the experiences he had in the filing of Around the World in 80 Faiths, for example, he had to witness the sacrificial slaughter of a llama in Bolivia and even worse things in a pair of Voudon cults in Benin, and was traumatized by a UFO cult in Brasilia, among other deeply unpleasant moments he endured. More careful planning and a bishop who cared enough to tell him to not actually participate in the rituals of the non-Christian or heterodox religions would have spared him a lot of real spiritual stress.
Since that time he has done an interesting documentary called The Simple Life in which he spent some time attempting to live without money in contemporary Britain. I would greatly enjoy meeting him, and to be clear, I am not calling for him to be subjected to the canonical penalties that the early church might have, for various reasons, not the least of which being that the early church would likely have primarily held his bishop to account for the disasters, because just as the captain of a ship is responsible for the actions of his crew, the bishop is responsible for the conduct of his presbyters, deacons and other clergy.
