Contents

When there is no God

Knock!

On the way deeper

How to deal with time

“Tell me Your name” (Genesis 32:29)

When there is no God

When starting conversations for beginners on the path of prayer, I want to make it very clear that I do not set out to academically explain or justify why we need to learn prayer; in these conversations I want to point out what anyone who wants to pray should know and what he can do. Since I am a beginner myself, I will assume that you are also beginners and we will try to start together. I am not addressing those who strive for mystical prayer or the highest levels of perfection – “prayer itself will pave the way” for them (St. Theophan the Recluse)

When God breaks through to us or we break through to God under some exceptional circumstances, when everyday life suddenly opens up to us with a depth that we have never noticed before, when in ourselves we discover the depth where prayer lives and from where it can fill the key – then there are no problems. When we experience God, we stand face to face with Him, we worship Him, we talk to Him. Therefore, one of the very important initial problems is the situation of a person when it seems to him that God is absent, and this is where I want to dwell now. This is not about some objective absence of God – God is never really absent – but about the feeling of absence that we have; we stand before God and shout into the empty sky, from where there is no answer; we turn in all directions – and there is no God. How to deal with this?

First of all, it is very important to remember that prayer is a meeting, it is a relationship, and a deep relationship into which neither we nor God can be forced. And the fact that God can make His presence obvious to us or leave us with a sense of His absence is already part of this living, real relationship. If it were possible to call God to a meeting mechanically, so to speak, to force Him to a meeting only because we have appointed this very moment for a meeting with Him, then there would be neither a meeting nor a relationship. So you can encounter fiction, a far-fetched image, various idols that you can put in front of you instead of God; but this cannot be done in relation to or in a relationship with the Living God, just as it is impossible in a relationship with a living person. Relationships should begin and develop in mutual freedom. If we are fair and look at these relationships as mutual, then it is clear that God has much more reason to be sad with us than we have reason to complain about Him. We complain that He does not make His presence evident in the few minutes we give Him throughout the day; but what can we say about the remaining twenty-three and a half hours, when God can knock on our door as much as He wants, and we answer: “Sorry, I’m busy,” or we don’t answer at all, because we don’t even hear Him knocking on the door of our heart, our mind, our consciousness or conscience, our life. So: we have no right to complain about the absence of God, because we ourselves are absent much more.

The second important circumstance is that meeting face to face with God is always a judgment for us. Having met God, whether in prayer, in contemplation or in contemplation, we can only be either justified or condemned in this meeting. I do not want to say that at this moment a sentence of final condemnation or eternal salvation is pronounced over us, but a meeting with God is always a critical moment, a crisis. “Crisis” is a Greek word and it means “judgment.” Meeting God face to face in prayer is a critical moment, and thank God that He does not always reveal Himself to us when we irresponsibly, carelessly seek a meeting with Him, because such a meeting may be beyond our strength. Remember how many times the Holy Scripture says that it is dangerous to come face to face with God, because God is power, God is truth, God is purity. And so, when we do not feel or experience God’s presence tangibly, our first movement should be gratitude. God is merciful; He does not come before the time; He gives us the opportunity to look back at ourselves, understand, and not seek His presence when it would be our judgment and condemnation.

I’ll give you an example. Many years ago a man came to me and began to ask: “Show me God!” I said that I could not do this, and added that even if I could, he would not have seen God. Because I thought then and now I think: in order to meet, to see God, we need to have something in common with Him, something that will give us eyes to see, and receptivity to catch, smell. This man then asked me why I thought so about him, and I invited him to think and say what place in the Gospel especially touches him, so that I could try to grasp what its conformity with God is. He said: “Yes, there is such a place: in the eighth chapter of the Gospel of John there is a story about a woman caught in adultery.” I replied, “Okay, this is one of the most beautiful and moving stories; now sit down and think: who are you in this scene? Are you on the Lord’s side and full of mercy, understanding and faith in this woman who is able to repent and become a new person? Or are you a woman who is convicted of adultery? Or one of the elders who, one by one, walked out because they knew their sins? Or one of the young people who hesitate and hesitate?” He thought and said: “No, I am the only one of the Jews who did not go out and begin to stone this woman.” Then I said: “Thank God that He does not allow you to meet face to face with Him now!”

This may be an extreme example, but doesn’t it often apply to us? It is not that we outright reject God’s words or His example; but we, albeit not so rudely, act like soldiers during the passion of Christ: we would like to close Christ’s eyes so that we could strike Him without hindrance, but He would not see us. Isn’t this what we do when we hide from God’s presence and act according to our own will, according to our moods and whims, contrary to what is the will of God? We try to put a veil over His eyes, but we only blind ourselves. How can we come into His presence at such moments? We can, of course – in repentance, with a contrite heart; but we cannot go expecting that we will immediately be received with love as His friends.

Remember various places in the Gospel: people of much greater spirit than we did not dare to accept Christ. Remember the centurion who asked Christ to heal his servant. Christ said: “I will come,” but the centurion replied: “No need – just say the word, and my servant will be healed” (Luke 7:2-8). Is this what we do? Do we turn to God, saying: “Do not make Your presence obvious, tangible for me; it is enough that You speak the word, and what must be done will be done; until I need more …” Or remember Peter in the boat after a big catch of fish: he fell to his knees and said: “Leave me, Lord, I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5:8). He asked the Lord to leave his boat because, perhaps for the first time, he experienced humility; and he experienced a feeling of humility, because he suddenly saw the greatness of Christ. Does this ever happen to us? When we read the Gospel and the irresistible beauty and glory of the image of Christ rises before us, when we pray and are overcome by a feeling of the greatness and holiness of God, do we ever say: “I am not worthy for You to come to me”?.. And what can we say about those cases when we must understand that He cannot come to us, because we are not there to receive Him; we want to receive something from Him, and not from Himself. Can this be called a relationship? Is this how we treat our friends? Do we seek what friendship gives, or do we love the friend himself? And to what extent is this true of the Lord?

Now let’s think about prayers, yours and mine; Let us remember how strong, ardent, and deep prayer can be when you pray for someone you love, or for something important to you. The heart is open, our whole being is collected and concentrated in prayer. Does this mean that the whole meaning of this prayer, all its power is in meeting with God? No; it only means that the subject of your prayer is important to you. Because when, after such fervent, deep, intense prayer for a loved one or about troubling circumstances, we move on to the next topic that does not affect us so deeply, and we cool down – what has changed? Has God grown cold or stepped aside? No, it simply means that the inspiration and intensity of our prayer were born not from God’s presence, not from my faith in Him, my longing for God, sensitivity to Him, but only from the fact that my heart aches for someone, about something – but not about God. How then can we be surprised that we do not feel God’s presence? It is not He who is absent, but we who are absent at such a “meeting”. It is not He, but our heart that grows cold because He does not mean that much to us.

Sometimes God is “absent” for another reason. As long as we are authentic, as long as we are ourselves, God can be present in the encounter and can do something for us. But as soon as we strain to be something other than what we really are, then nothing can be done or said for us; we become a fictitious, fictitious being, and God cannot do anything with such an unreal personality.

In order for us to pray, we must enter into a relationship that is defined as the Kingdom of God. We must realize and understand that He is God, that He is the King, and surrender, entrust ourselves to Him. We must always at least remember His will, even if we are not yet able to fulfill it. Otherwise, if we treat God like the rich young man who could not follow Christ because he was too rich, how can we then meet Him? How often, through prayer, through deep communication with God, for whom we yearn, we are simply looking for a little joy for ourselves; we are not ready to sell everything in order to buy a precious pearl in return. How then can we obtain this pearl? Are we looking for her?.. After all, something similar happens in human relationships: when a man or woman falls in love with someone, all other people no longer have the same meaning for him or her. This is expressed in the ancient saying: “When a young man has a bride, he is no longer surrounded by men and women, but simply by people.”

Isn’t this what can happen, isn’t this what should happen to all our wealth when we turn to God? Shouldn’t it become a kind of background, pale and gray, against which the only significant Personality will stand out in all relief? We would like to have one stroke of heavenly azure to complete the picture of our life, which has so many dark sides. God is ready to be outside of our life, He is ready to take upon Himself all of it completely, like a cross, but He is not ready to be just one of the circumstances in our life.

So, when we have come to the conclusion that God is absent, should we not ask ourselves the question – who do we blame for this? We always blame God – either we blame Him directly to his face, or we complain to others that He is absent, that He is never there when He is needed, that He does not respond when you turn to Him. Sometimes we are more “godly” – in quotes! – and we say: “God is testing my patience, my faith, my humility,” and we find many ways to turn God’s judgment about us to our advantage: “I am so patient that I can even tolerate God Himself!” Isn’t that right?

I remember when I was a young priest, I once preached a sermon, one of many I preached in the parish. After the service, a girl came up to me and said: “Father Anthony, you are probably a very bad person.” I replied: “Oh yes, but how did you know about this?” She explained: “You described our sins so well that, of course, you yourself committed them all.” Of course, the bad thoughts and bad states, the unsightly description of which I offer you here, are probably my own, but, perhaps, at least to some extent, they are also yours.

If we want to pray, we must first be convinced that we are sinners in need of salvation, that we are separated from God, that we cannot live without Him, and the only thing we can bring to Him is our desperate longing to become such as God would accept us, accept us in our repentance, accept us with mercy and love. And so prayer, from its very beginning, is our feasible ascent to God, the moment when we turn to God, not daring to come closer, knowing that if we meet Him too early, before His grace helps us meet Him, the meeting will be judgment. All we can do is turn to Him in the reverence, the awe and reverence that we are capable of, with all the attention and earnestness, and ask Him to do something with us that will enable us to meet Him face to face, not into judgment or condemnation, but into eternal life.

Here I would like to remind you of the parable of the publican and the Pharisee. The publican comes to the temple and stands behind, at the entrance. He knows that he stands condemned; he knows that in terms of justice there is no hope for him, because he is not involved in the Kingdom of God; he is outside the kingdom of truth and righteousness or the kingdom of love, because he does not belong to either the kingdom of righteousness or the kingdom of love. But in that cruel, ugly life of violence that is his life, he learned something that the righteous Pharisee had no idea about. He learned that in a world of competition, in a world of predatory relationships, cruelty and heartlessness, the only thing one can hope for is an intrusion of mercy, an intrusion of compassion, unexpected and incredible, which is not rooted either in the performance of duty or in the structure of natural relationships, and which would suspend the pattern of cruelty, violence and heartlessness in everyday life. The publican, being an extortionist, a usurer, a predator, knew from his own experience that there are moments when, without any reason – since it is not part of his worldview – he will suddenly forgive a debt because his heart trembled and became vulnerable; when, perhaps, he will not send someone to prison because a human face reminded him of something or the sound of a voice touched his heart. There is no logic in this; it is neither his way of thinking nor his usual way of acting. Here, in spite of everything and in spite of everything, something invades that he cannot resist; and he, too, probably knows how often he himself was saved from ultimate disaster by this invasion of the unexpected and incredible – mercy, compassion, forgiveness. And so he stands at the church lintel, knowing that the area inside the temple is the area of ​​​​the righteousness and love of God, which he does not belong to and where he cannot enter. But he knows from experience that the incredible comes true, and that’s when he says: “Have mercy! Break the laws of justice, break the laws of religion, mercifully come down to us, who have no right either to forgiveness or to enter this area.” And so I think that this is the starting point from which we must start again and again, constantly.

You probably remember the passage from the Apostle Paul where Christ tells him: “My power is made perfect in weakness…” (2 Cor. 12:9). This weakness is not the weakness that we discover when we sin and forget God, but the kind of weakness that means flexibility to the end, complete transparency, complete surrender of ourselves into the hands of God; Usually we try “to the best of our ability” and prevent God from demonstrating His power.

When a child is just beginning to learn to write and does not know what is expected of him, his hand is completely flexible and obediently controlled by his mother’s hand; as soon as he imagines that he understands and tries to “help,” everything goes awry: this is what I mean when I say that the power of God is made perfect in weakness. Or take a sail: the wind can fill it so that it carries the whole ship – just because the sail is flexible; if instead of a sail you put a strong board, then nothing will work… An iron glove is strong, but how little can be done with it; the surgeon’s glove is barely felt, barely noticeable, it doesn’t cost anything to tear it, but thanks to it, the doctor’s “smart” hand works miracles… And one of the things that God constantly tries to teach us instead of our imaginary and insignificant, anarchic “strength” is fragility, flexibility, complete surrender of oneself into the hands of God.

I’ll give you an example. Twenty-five years ago, a friend of mine, who had two children, died during the liberation of Paris. His children did not love me, they were jealous that their father had such a friend, but when their father died, they reached out to me – because I was a friend of their father… And so his daughter, a girl of about fifteen, came one day to my waiting room (I was a doctor before becoming a priest) and saw that next to the medical supplies on my table was the Gospel. With all the self-confidence of her youth, she said: “I don’t understand how an apparently educated person can believe in such nonsense.” I then asked her: “Have you read?” She replied: “No.” – “So remember: only very stupid people judge things they don’t know.” After that, she read the Gospel, and it captivated her so much that her whole life changed, because she began to pray, God allowed her to experience His presence, and she lived by it for some time. Then she fell ill with an incurable disease, and when I was already a priest in England, she sent me a letter where she said: “Since my body began to weaken and die out, my spirit is more alive than ever, and I feel God’s presence so easily and with such joy.” I wrote back to her: “Do not expect that this state will last; when your strength diminishes further, you will no longer be able to rush to God with your own impulse, and the time will come when it will seem to you that there is no access to God.” After some time, she wrote to me again: “Yes, you were right; I am now so weak that I cannot muster the strength to rush to God or even yearn for Him, and it is as if there is no God.” I then told her to try to do something differently: to learn humility in the true, deep sense of the word.

In Latin humilitas, humility comes from the word humus – “fertile earth”; and so, humility does not consist in, as we constantly do, “being poor,” and thinking and saying bad things about ourselves, and convincing others that our stilted manners are humility. Humility is the state of fertile soil; the earth is always under our feet, it is self-evident, it is forgotten; we walk along it and never remember it; it is open to everything, we throw garbage into it, everything that we don’t need. She is silent and accepts everything – she accepts both manure and waste creatively and turns them into living and life-giving wealth. She transforms decay itself into a new force of life; open to the rain, open to every seed, it bears fruit thirty, fifty, and a hundredfold.

And I advised this woman: “Learn to be the same before God: giving, not resisting, ready to accept from both people and God, no matter what they give.” And in fact, she had to endure a lot from people. After six months of her illness, her husband got tired of having a dying wife and left her: she had experienced rejection in abundance, but God also shone His light on her and sent refreshing rain. A little later she wrote: “I am completely exhausted. I do not have the strength to rush to God, but now God Himself comes to me.”

This story is not only an illustration, it emphasizes the main idea: this is the weakness in which God can show His power, and this is the situation when the absence of God turns into His presence. We cannot take possession of God by force; but if we stand like the publican or like this woman – beyond what is “right”, but within the limits where mercy reigns, we can meet God.

Now try to think through the “absence” of God, and understand with all your being that before knocking on the door (and this is not only the door of the Kingdom in a general sense, Christ actually says: “I am the door” (John 10:9)), we must realize that we are outside, outside. If we madly imagine that we are already in the Kingdom of God, then, of course, there is nowhere to knock, all that remains is to look around – where are the angels and saints and the abode intended for us? And when we see nothing but darkness or walls, we can quite rightly wonder how unattractive paradise is… We must realize that we are not yet in paradise, that we are still outside the Kingdom of God, and then ask ourselves: where is the door and how to knock on it?

Knock!

In the last conversation, I talked about how we perceive the absence of God – not His objective absence, but how we personally experience this state. And I said that until we realized that we are outside the Kingdom of God, and in order to be let in, we need to knock on the door, we can live for many years in the illusion that we are already there, and never reach those depths where the Kingdom of God is revealed in all its beauty, in all its truth, in all its glory.

And so, when I say that we are “outside,” I do not mean that we are simply and radically outside the Kingdom, as we could simply and radically be already within its borders. Here, I think, we can rather talk about gradual advancement from depth to depth or from height to height, so that at each stage we already possess some kind of wealth, some kind of depth – and at the same time we continue to yearn and strive further, for greater wealth and for greater depth. This is very important to remember, because even while we are still outside the Kingdom of God, we are already amazingly rich. God has given us so much: we are gifted mentally and emotionally, our lives are so full that it may seem to us that nothing more can be done, that we have reached completeness, wholeness, the limit of our search. But we must understand and we must remember that there is always something more. We can rejoice in the fact that no matter how poor we are, we are so rich, but at the same time strive for the true treasure of the Kingdom of God, not allowing ourselves to be carried away by what we already have, so as not to turn away from what is yet to come.

We must remember that everything we have has been given to us as a gift. The first beatitude speaks of beggary, and only if we live by this commandment can we enter the Kingdom of God. This commandment has a double meaning; on the one hand, it is obvious that, whether we like it or not, we have nothing that we could hold; we discover that we are nothing and have nothing: endless, gaping, hopeless poverty. We exist because God called us into being, brought us into being; we had nothing to do with it, it was not an act of our free will. We do not own life in such a way that someone could not take it away from us at any moment, and in this sense, everything that we are and everything that we have is short-lived. We have a body – but it will die; we have a mind – but it only takes a tiny vessel to burst in the brain for the greatest mind to fade away; We have a sensitive, living heart, but a moment comes when we would like to express all our sympathy, all our understanding to someone who needs it – but we only have a stone in our chest.

So in a sense we can say that we do not possess anything, because we are not free in anything that we have. And this could lead us not to the feeling that we belong to the Kingdom of God, and to joy about this, but to despair – if we did not remember that, although nothing is ours – so that it could not be taken away from us – we nevertheless have it all. We are rich, and everything we possess is a gift and evidence of the love of God and human love, everything is a continuous flow of Divine love; and because of this (and because we possess nothing) the love of God is manifested with constancy and completeness. And everything that we grab into our own hands in order to appropriate is thereby taken out of the realm of love. Yes, it becomes ours – but love is lost. And only those who give everything receive the experience of genuine, complete, final, inescapable spiritual poverty – and possess the love of God, expressed in all His gifts. One of our Russian theologians, Father Alexander Schmemann, said: “All the food of the world is the love of God made edible.” I think this is true; and the moment we try to get rich by holding something in our hands for safekeeping, we find ourselves a loser, because while we have nothing in our hands, we can take it or not take it, or do whatever we want with it.

This is the Kingdom of God: we feel that we are free from possession; and this freedom establishes us in a relationship where everything is human love and God’s love.

So if you think in these categories, you can transfer this to what I already talked about earlier. Yes, we are rich; but we should never be deluded by this wealth and imagine that it is possible to destroy old granaries, old barns and build new ones in order to put even more goods there (see Luke 12:16-22). You can’t hoard anything—nothing except the Kingdom of God itself. And then we can shake off one thing at a time so that we can move forward free—free from possession. Have you ever noticed that to be rich always means to be poor on some other level? It is enough for us to say: “Here is the watch – it is mine,” and clasp it in our fist, and we find ourselves the owners of the watch, but lose our hand. And if we close our minds on our property, if we close our hearts in order to protect and never lose what is stored in it, then it becomes as small as the thing on which we are closed.

If all this is true, then at the moment when we have sunk to the very bottom and there is nowhere to go further, when all our poverty gapes before us, then we are already on the edge of the Kingdom of God, we almost know that God is love and that He holds us with His love. And at this moment two possibilities open up simultaneously: we can begin to pray out of endless grief, deprivation, beggary, and we can rejoice that we are so gifted with the love of God. But this is only possible if we know both things experientially, because as long as we imagine that we are rich, we have nothing to thank God for, and we have no way of knowing that we are loved by Him. Our thanksgiving to God is too often gratitude “in general,” and the repentance we offer to God is often too general.

I experienced this once under very unromantic and unspiritual circumstances. Once, as a teenager, I was on my way to visit someone and carefully timed it in hopes of arriving in time for dinner: I thought that if I arrived on time, they wouldn’t keep me waiting in the next room, and they’d give me something to eat! But, as always happens in such cases, the train was late, and I arrived after lunch, hungry as a wolf. I was with a friend, and since we were really too hungry, we asked for something to eat. We were offered half a cucumber. We looked at this cucumber and at each other and thought: is this all that God sends us?!.. And then my friend said: “Let’s pray.” It flashed through my mind: what kind of cucumber is this?! My friend had more faith, he was more pious than I, and we said the Ninth Hour together, a few more prayers, then a prayer before eating; and all this time I could not tear my thoughts away from this half of the cucumber, a quarter of which would go to me. Then we broke this cucumber and ate it. And in my entire life I have never been so grateful to God for any amount of food. I ate it as one eats sacred food. I ate carefully so as not to miss a single moment of this pleasure of fresh cucumber, and when we had finished, I said without hesitation, “Now let us thank God,” and we prayed again in gratitude.

This is important because it is impossible to live a prayer life, it is impossible to move forward towards God, if we are not free from possession: both our hands must be open freely, our heart must be absolutely open – not like a wallet that we are afraid to leave open so that money does not fall out of it, but like a wallet open and empty – and the mind must be completely open, “empty” to the unknown and unexpected. This is how we are both rich and completely free from possession. And then we can say that we are still outside the Kingdom of God – but we are so rich; or inside it – and so free.

This happens, for example, when we fast. I am not talking about that fasting and abstinence that is focused only on the stomach, but about that sobriety that makes us capable – and even forces us – not to be enslaved by anything. For us, this is a question of our entire life attitude. First of all, this applies to the imagination, because sin begins in the imagination. One of the Orthodox writers of the 9th century said that sins of the flesh are sins that the spirit commits against the flesh. It is not the flesh that is responsible, and I think in this sense we must learn to control our imagination. Until the imagination takes possession of us, everything is outside of us; Once imagination is woven into things, we are already stuck to them. For example, you know that there is food: meat, vegetables, sweets, etc. You know that this is an objective fact. If you sit down and say, “I’m not very hungry, but there are so many tempting foods here, what do I want?” – then five minutes later you have already extended your tentacles to many things. You will be like Gulliver, tied to the ground by one hair, and another, and another; every hair is a trifle, and all the hairs together will keep you firmly tied to the earth. And once you’ve completely let your imagination run wild, things become much more difficult. In this sense, we need to be sober and fight for freedom. There is a very big difference between love and affection, between hunger and greed, between keen interest and curiosity, etc. Each of our natural tendencies has an evil-tainted counterpart; this is one of the paths to our enslavement. This is what I meant when I spoke of outstretched tentacles; they need to be removed and pulled back. If you didn’t say “no” in time, you can’t avoid the struggle. But then be merciless, because clarity of mind and independence are more precious than the satisfaction you get through enslavement.

And now, if what I said is true, then we must continue to knock on the door. And here some problems become especially acute. If we were talking about the door of this or that temple, then it would be simple: we would go and knock. But the trouble is that most often we don’t know where to knock. Often a person wants to pray, and the question arises: where is the focus of prayer? Where to turn your gaze, your heart?.. If you are a Muslim, then it is simple: you will turn to Mecca. But even then, turning to the East – what next? You cannot focus on anything less than God. Whenever you try to focus on an imaginary God or an imaginable God, you run the risk of placing an idol between yourself and the real God. This idea was expressed back in the 4th century by Saint Gregory the Theologian, who says that as soon as we put something visible in front of us – be it a crucifix, a throne, an icon – or an invisible image of God, as we imagine Him, or Christ, as we saw Him in images – and focus our attention on this, then we have put a barrier between ourselves and God, because with the image that we have created for ourselves, we have replaced the Person to whom we are addressing prayer. And this is what we need to do: having collected all our knowledge about God in order to appear in His presence, then remember that all my knowledge about Him is my past, it is, as it were, behind my back, and I myself stand face to face with God in all His complexity, in all His simplicity, so close and so incomprehensible. Only if we stand completely open to the unknown, will this unknown, this Unknown, be able to reveal itself to us as He Himself wants – to us, as we are today. In such openness of heart, in such openness of mind, we must stand before God, without trying to give Him some form or squeeze Him into concepts and images, and then knock.

Where?.. The Gospel tells us that the Kingdom of God is first within ourselves. If we cannot find the Kingdom of God within ourselves, if we cannot meet God inside, in our depths, then it is very unlikely that we will meet Him somewhere outside ourselves. When the first cosmonaut Gagarin returned from “space” and made his famous statement that he had not met God in heaven, one Moscow priest remarked that “if you have not met Him on earth, you will never see Him in heaven.” If I cannot contact God, under my own skin, so to speak, in the little world that I am, then it is very unlikely that even if I meet Him face to face, I will recognize Him. Saint John Chrysostom said: “Find the door of your heart, and you will see that it is the door to the Kingdom of God.” Therefore, you need to turn inside yourself, and not outside – but in a special way. This is not about resorting to introspection; I also do not mean that one should go inside using the methods of psychoanalysis or psychology. This is not a journey into the essence of my own self; this is the way through, through my “I”, in order to emerge from my own depths where God is, where God and we will meet.

So the question of nascent prayer has two aspects: first, going within, and second, how we say the words of prayer and where we direct them.

Now I will talk about the second one. In the direction of what, in the direction of Whom should I turn the edge of my prayer? Very often a person tries to shout into the sky and is surprised that the sky is empty and does not respond. But there will be no response there. In the 7th century, John Climacus wrote that prayer, the words of prayer, are like an arrow. But having an arrow is not enough; if you want to hit your target, you need a bow with a good string and a strong hand to draw it. If you have a good bow, but you do not know how to string it, your arrow will not fly far and will soon fall to the ground. If you do not send the arrow with a strong hand, the arrow will also not reach the target. Therefore, you need a bow, you need a bowstring, you need a hand, you need strength. If the words of prayer are an arrow, we must aim them at the very depths, where God dwells in us; we must turn our bow inward to strike ourselves to our very core. And we must also create all the necessary conditions so that the arrow can fly with force. Very often we are inattentive in prayer, our heart is not in it, and the life we ​​live does not serve as a support for prayer… This, if you like, is the analogy with a bow, string and strength.

There are times when you can try to break into the depths, calling on Him who is at the root and depth of every thing, but you will see quite clearly where you are going and where you are aiming your prayer: not back, not upward, but deeper and deeper, to every opposition that stands in the way, to every hidden trick and error, to everything that prevents you from penetrating into the very depths. And then prayer will become something completely feasible – although it will be harsh, intense and courageous work.

And so, first of all, we must choose prayer. This is a very important point; Just as it is important to use the right word in human relationships, it is just as important in prayer. Whatever prayer we choose, it should be meaningful to us and not make us feel awkward. I must admit that when I leaf through existing prayer books, I often feel uneasy. It seems to me that if God were really, specifically here, with me, I would not have dared to make such speeches about Himself before Him and tell Him about Him a lot of things that He knew long before I was even born. So, a choice is needed, because if you are ashamed of your prayer, then God will feel embarrassed from you and from the prayer too, and you will never be able to offer it to God with all your heart. And the first thing is to really find words of prayer that would be worthy of you and worthy of God. I say “worthy of you and worthy of God” because if they are good enough for you, then God may accept them, but if they are not good for you, then don’t bother God with them, He has heard many much better words. But there is no need to try to look for any special words; One of the dangers in prayer is trying to find words that are “on the level of God.” Unfortunately, since none of us are on the level of God, we fail at this and spend a lot of time looking for special words.

Without trying to cover everything in this area, I would like to give you a sample of the persuasiveness of prayer action or prayer words. In Jewish folklore there is a story about the life of Moses, and there is a wonderful passage in it. Moses met a shepherd in the desert. He spends the whole day with him and helps him milk the sheep, and in the evening he sees how the shepherd collected the best milk in a wooden bowl and placed it on a flat stone in the distance. Moses asks him why he is doing this, and the shepherd replies, “It’s God’s milk.” Moses is puzzled and asks what he means. And the shepherd answers: “I always collect the best of all the milk and bring it as a gift to God.” Moses, much more sophisticated in mind and refined than the shepherd with his naive faith, asks: “And God drinks milk?” “Yes,” the shepherd answers, “he drinks.” Feeling that it is necessary to enlighten the poor shepherd, Moses explains to him that God is a pure Spirit and does not drink milk; but the shepherd is sure that He drinks the milk. They have an argument, at the end of which Moses tells the shepherd to hide in the bushes and see if God really comes to drink milk, after which he retires into the desert to pray. The shepherd hid in the bushes, night has fallen, and in the moonlight the shepherd sees a fox running out of the desert, looks to the right, looks to the left and, running up to the bowl, quickly laps up the milk, and then runs away again into the desert. The next morning, Moses finds the shepherd sad and depressed. “What’s the matter?” – asks Moses. “You were right, God is pure Spirit and He doesn’t need my milk.” Moses is surprised and says: “You should rejoice, now you know more about God than you knew before!” “Yes,” says the shepherd, “but I lost the only way I could express my love to Him.” Then Moses sees something; he goes into the desert and begins to pray earnestly. At night, in a vision, God turns to him and says: “Moses, you were mistaken! Indeed, I am a pure Spirit. But I always accepted with gratitude the milk that the shepherd brought Me as a gift as an expression of his love; but since I, as a pure Spirit, do not need milk, I shared it with this fox, who loves milk very much.”

I have tried to point out, firstly, that prayer should be turned inward – not to a God in heaven, not to a distant God, but to a God who is closer to us than we ourselves realize; and secondly, that the first action of prayer is to choose words of which we are not ashamed, which fully express us and which are worthy of us; and then bring them to God with all the understanding we can muster. And we must put our whole heart into this prayer, into this recognition of Him as our God, into this act of tender love – an action that embraces our whole mind, our whole heart; and an action that is completely adequate to what we are.

Therefore, the first thing I suggest is that you first think about what words of prayer mean something to you that you can bring to God, whether these are your own words or those already spoken by someone. Think about how much they touch your heart, how much you are able to focus your thought on them – because if you cannot be attentive to the words you speak, why should God be attentive to them? How can He see in them an expression of love if you do not put your heart into them, if you only put into them a certain amount of politeness with a certain amount of absent-mindedness.

And then, if you learn to use the prayer that you have chosen, during periods when there is an opportunity to give all your attention to the Divine presence and offer this prayer to God, gradually the consciousness of God will grow so much that whether you are with people, whether you listen to them, talk or work in private – this consciousness is strong enough that even in public you will be able to pray. The analogies which our spiritual writers make are applicable on two levels: one is simpler and more direct and, it seems to me, expresses very well what they seek to make clear; the other is somewhat more elevated.

A simple and direct parallel is the statement of St. Theophan the Recluse, who says: “The consciousness of the presence of God should be as clear in us as a toothache.” When your teeth hurt, you don’t forget about it. You can talk, you can read, you can clean, you can sing, or you can do anything – the toothache is with you continuously, and you cannot escape its annoying presence. And he says that in the same way we must cultivate the pain of longing in our hearts. We are not talking about the physical heart, but about the fact that at that moment when we fell out of prayerful contact with God, such a “pain” would take root in our secret places, which would be a desperate longing for Him, a feeling that “here, I am alone; where is He?”

In a more elevated style, this means that when great joy, great sorrow or great suffering overtakes us, we do not forget about them throughout the day. We listen to what people tell us, do our work, read, do what is expected of us, and the pain of loss, the thrill of joy, the consciousness of exciting news do not leave us for a moment… The feeling of the presence of God should be the same. And if this feeling is just as clear, then you can pray while you are doing something else. You can pray when you are physically working, but you can also pray when you are in public, listening to something, talking about something, or busy with another person. But, as I have already said, this does not happen immediately, and I think that first we must, when circumstances permit, exercise ourselves in achieving prayerful attention and heartfelt contrition, because in prayer it is very easy to become distracted and slip out of sobriety into daydreams. Let us therefore begin to learn prayerful attention, perfect stability, standing in prayer and surrendering ourselves to God in moments when we are capable of this with an undivided mind and heart, and then we can try to do this in other circumstances.

We will get to this in the next chapter, using an example of how you can take one or two prayers and use them to break through to your own depths, to the place where God dwells. I will also try to explain how one can move inward, because this is a different kind of work. Don’t forget about the fox, it can be useful in your prayer life; and while we’re on the topic of foxes, if you want to know how to make friends with God, learn from another fox (from A. de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince) how to make friends with someone who is very sensitive, very vulnerable and very shy.

On the way deeper

I said that one of the problems that we all face and that we must solve is where to direct our prayer. And I suggested – on ourselves.
Only if the prayer you want to offer to God is meaningful and significant enough for yourself, will you be able to stand with it before the Lord. If you are not careful about the words you speak, if your own heart does not respond to them, or if your life is not directed in the same direction as your prayer, it will not ascend to God. Therefore, as I said, the first thing we need to do is to choose a prayer that we can say with all our heart, with all our mind, with all our will: a prayer that does not have to be an outstanding work of liturgical art, but must be truthful and no weaker than what you want to express. You must understand this prayer in all its richness and accuracy.

When choosing prayer words, you can do three things: you can pray in your own words – this is the prayer that springs from our own soul; you can pray with a short prayer formula – this kind of prayer, for all its brevity, is very intense and covers a very large area, their content is extremely ambiguous; You can use what are called, sometimes somewhat disparagingly, “ready-made prayers,” the range of which is from the most flat creations, when people try to invent prayers for all occasions, to the deepest experience of the saints, expressed in prayers that they did not invent, but which the Holy Spirit forged in their lives and hearts. I would like to say something about each of these types of prayer.

“Free”, “natural” prayer, prayer in one’s own words, is possible under two circumstances: either when we suddenly realized the presence of God, and this consciousness requires us to respond – with prayer, joy, all forms of response that we are capable of, being truly ourselves and standing before the Living God; or is it the same awareness of the mortal danger in which we find ourselves – and then, coming to God, we suddenly cry out of the depths of despair and loneliness, and also from the feeling that there is no hope of salvation unless God saves.

These two states represent two extreme poles: when we see our desperate situation, our godlessness, loneliness, melancholy – and are unable to break through them; or – the miracle that we suddenly find ourselves face to face with God, when we can pray spontaneously, and it does not particularly matter with what words. We can repeat over and over again “Joy, oh Joy!..”; we can say any words, because words have no meaning, they only support the mood, express absurdly, madly, our love or our despair. You probably remember the Gospel passage about the transfiguration, when Peter turned to Christ: “Shall we build three tents – one for You, one for Moses and one for Elijah?” And, according to the Gospel, he “knew not what he said” (cf. Mark 9:6), because he was beside himself; he found himself in the face of something so overwhelming that he simply said the first thing that came to mind, blurted out from an excess of feelings, expressing his state.

Therefore, if we imagine that we can pray in our own words throughout our lives, then this is a childish delusion. “Free” prayer must burst from our soul; we cannot simply turn on the tap and let it flow. There are no such treasures from which it can be drawn at any time. It wells up from the depths of our soul from amazement or from despair – but not from an intermediate state when we are not shocked either by God’s presence or by the horror of what we are and what our situation is. This means that trying to resort to free prayer during such periods is a completely illusory exercise. There are whole periods when you are neither at the bottom of the sea nor on the crest of a wave, and in order to pray you have to do something – and these are those periods when we cannot pray spontaneously, but we can pray out of conviction. This is very important because, when starting a life of prayer, many people think that they are not truthful enough if they do not experience with all the power the words and phrases that they utter – and this is not true. Sometimes you can be completely sincere in the clarity of your mind, in the directness of your will, although at one moment or another, words or even actions express what you are not experiencing right now.

The example that comes to my mind now is this: when you live with a family, work in a grueling job, you happen to return home physically exhausted. If at this moment your mother, sister, father or anyone else asks: “Do you love me?” – you will say: “Yes.” If a person insists: “Do you really love me right now, at this minute?” – then honestly you could say: “No, right now I feel nothing but pain in my back and exhaustion throughout my body.” But you will be absolutely right if you answer: “Yes, I love you!”, because you know that under the cover of weariness a living stream of love flows. And when Christ says: “he who loves Me will keep My commandments” (John 14:15), this does not mean: “If you love Me, you will move from one experience to another, from one delight to another, from one theological insight to another.” This means: “If you believe My words, then live according to what you have received,” and here accordingly, accordingly, it always means a little beyond our capabilities, a little more than we would do with our hunt.

Therefore, there is both a place and a necessity for prayer that is not in full swing, but is truly rooted in conviction: for this it is enough to turn to the huge variety of already existing prayers. We have a rich selection of prayers that were suffered by ascetics of the faith and born in them by the Holy Spirit. There are, for example, psalms, there are so many short and lengthy prayers in the liturgical treasury of all Churches from which we can draw. It is important to find and know a sufficient number of them in order to find the appropriate prayers at the right time. The point is to learn by heart a sufficient number of significant passages from the psalms or from the prayers of the saints; Each of us is more sensitive to one passage or another. Mark for yourself those passages that touch you deeply, that are meaningful to you, that express something – about sin, or about bliss in God, or about struggle – that you already know from experience. Learn these passages by heart, because some day, when you are so discouraged, so deeply despairing, that you cannot evoke in your soul anything personal, no personal words, you will find that these passages will float to the surface and appear to you as a gift from God, as a gift to the Church, as a gift of holiness, replenishing the decline of our strength. Then we really need the prayers that we have memorized so that they have become part of us.

In the Orthodox Church there are morning and evening prayers, which, in general, are longer than those used in the West. Reading these prayers takes about half an hour in the morning and half an hour in the evening. And people try to learn them by heart, so that they can draw from them at other times. However, it is not enough to simply memorize prayers; if our life is not prayer in action, if life and prayer are not completely intertwined, then prayer turns into a kind of polite madrigal, which we present to God in those moments when we find time for Him.

If you uttered this or that phrase in your morning prayers, then during the day you must justify this phrase with your life. Therefore, I think that in addition to memorizing the largest number of passages that are significant for you, you need to make it a rule, once you discover a phrase that amazes you with its meaning – whether when reading the Gospel, the New or Old Testament in general, among liturgical texts – try to fulfill it throughout the day steadily, for as long as possible. Maybe you think that you can take a phrase like this and “live” it for the whole day. But it’s very difficult. If you can stick to one phrase from one prayer religiously for an hour, then this is already a great success – but do it! For example: “I read the words “My heart is ready, ready, O God!” – and for half an hour I will live so that my heart is open to God and ready to fulfill His will.” Half an hour, no more – and then give yourself a break and move on to something else, because if you try to do one phrase, radical and difficult, you will end up simply saying: “I can’t do it anymore…” and quit the whole thing. But if you say: “Here, I have three or four phrases, prayer formulas for this day, and I will try to live one of them from the moment I say it in the morning until ten o’clock in the morning, then I will move on to the next, then to the next,” you will see that gradually all the words of the prayer, all the thoughts and feelings expressed by the saints in their prayers, will come to life in you, will begin to deeply permeate your will and transform both it and your body – because they are fulfilled commandments only with the participation of the body.

However, it may happen that you say: “I don’t really feel these words.” So, if these words express your basic, deep conviction, but you don’t feel anything at the moment, turn to God in repentance and tell Him: “This is my basic, deep Christian conviction, but look – I don’t respond to it at all!” And having said that, you may find that you suddenly begin to pray in your own words. You will be able to express to God your regret, your grief, your self-loathing – and your resolve will be restored to tell God the very truth and that your will is one with His will.

And finally, you can pray as constantly as possible, a prayer invocation that serves as a background, a support throughout the day and throughout life. Now I mean specifically Orthodox practice. This is what we call theJesus Prayer; this is a prayer that is focused on the name of Jesus: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. This is a prayer mainly of monks and nuns, but our laity also use it. This is a prayer of stability, because it is not “discursive” – in it we do not move from one thought to another; it is the prayer that brings us face to face with God in a profession of faith about Him and determines our own position. According to most Orthodox ascetics and mystics, this confession of faith summarizes the entire Gospel.

In this prayer, we, firstly, confess Christ – Lord, we confess His sovereign right over us, the fact that He is our Master and our God; this implies that our whole life is in His will and that we commit ourselves to His will and nothing else. Then, in the name Jesuswe confess the reality of the Incarnation and all that the Incarnation means. Next – Christ: this is the One in whom we see the Word of God incarnate, according to the Old and New Testaments, the Anointed One of God. Even further is the perfect confession of faith in Who He is: The Son of God. This is not only a confession of faith in Jesus Christ, for it is revealed in Trinity: He is the Son of the Father, and no one can recognize the incarnate Word of God in the Prophet of Galilee, except if the Holy Spirit teaches him to see, and understand, and worship Him; this is the fourth confession of faith, allowing us to stand before the face of God in righteousness and confess Him in the spirit. And finally,have mercy on us. Russian “Lord, have mercy” – translation of the Greek Kurie eleison.

I insist on the words that we use in prayer for the reason that, compared with antiquity, in all modern languages ​​words have acquired a narrower, more specialized meaning. Very often we use words of prayer that are immensely rich, but we do not notice this richness because we perceive the words at the level of their meaning in our everyday speech; and they could resonate deeply in our hearts if only we connected them with what we know on other levels.

I would like to illustrate this with an example that may shock classical scholars, since from a philological point of view it is somewhat dubious; but since it is based on a play on words that was used many centuries ago by the Greek Fathers of the Church, who knew their language and were not embarrassed by such a game, I will also use it. At one time or another in our lives, most of us utter and exclaim the words “Lord, have mercy!” (Greek Kurie eleison) or at least knows that such words exist. We, in general, know what meaning we put into them: this is a call to God for mercy, for mercy, for compassion, for tender care. What experts in ancient languages ​​could reproach me – and with me the Greek fathers – is that some fathers derive the word eleison from the same root as the Greek designation for “olive tree,” “olive,” “oil.” Let us, however, leave these debates to scientists and see what this term tells us in the context of Holy Scripture. When pronouncing Kurie eleison, Lord, have mercy –you can limit the meaning of these words to the fact that it is an appeal to God’s mercy “in general.” But this cannot satisfy us, because we cannot put the totality of our life into such “Lord, have mercy”; Moreover, in our everyday speech such words simply mean little. If we remember about the olive tree, “olive”, olive oil in the Old and New Testaments, we will find the following: the olive, a twig of an olive tree, is first mentioned at the end of the Flood, when a dove brings this twig to Noah. (And is this not the same dove that hovered over Christ on the day of His baptism?) This olive branch meant that the wrath of God was exhausted, that forgiveness was given as a gift, that a new time and a new path lay before us.

This is the first situation. However, we cannot always follow this path. It is not enough to simply have time and new opportunities; if we are sick in soul, if our will is broken, or if we are unable, whether mentally or physically, to discern the paths or follow them, we need healing. Therefore, let us remember the oil that the Good Samaritan poured on a man who had become a victim of robbers. The healing power of God gives us the opportunity to take advantage of the fact that God’s wrath has ceased, of what is offered to us as a gift, forgiveness, offered as a gift, time, space and eternity.

Another image is the anointing of priests and kings, who from among the people of Israel were called to stand on the threshold between the Divine world and the human world, between the unified and harmonious will of God and the motley, complicated – and sometimes tense and contradictory – human world. And in order to stand on this threshold, a person needs more than human abilities; he needs gifting from God. As a sign of this, anointing was performed on priests and kings. In the New Testament we are all priests and kings, we are all invested with a royal priesthood, and our calling, human and Christian, surpasses what man can achieve. We are called to become and be living members of the Body of Christ, temples on earth, pure and worthy of the Holy Spirit, partakers of the Divine nature. All this exceeds our human abilities, but at the same time, we must also be human in the full sense, in the deepest sense in which a Christian understands humanity in the image of the incarnate Son of God. This requires the grace and help of God, and all this is indicated by the same image of anointing.

If we think through the other words we use in prayer with the same simplicity (all you need is a dictionary, the Bible, and a little thoughtfulness), they will become remarkably rich in mental order. And then we can be more attentive to what we say; our prayer will not consist of empty words or words denoting something whose true meaning has been lost – and this happens all the time. And then, before saying “Lord, have mercy!” – “Lord, show me mercy and compassion; Lord, pour out Your love and affection on me,” we would be able to think through the situation in which we are now. Are we at the very depths of our fall? Are we faced with limitless possibilities and yet unable to do anything because we are so deeply wounded? Or have we received healing, but are faced with a calling so superior to us that we do not dare even dream about it?.. But this calling can only be realized if God gives us the strength to do so. This also involves careful immersion in words, such an approach to them that they become part of our emotions, so that all the intensity and depth of our personal life gathers and concentrates around them. But if the words we use do not acquire reality in the way we live, they will remain meaningless and lead to nothing: they will be like a bow without a string, from which it is impossible to shoot an arrow. It is completely pointless to ask God for something that we are not ready for ourselves. When we say: “Lord, deliver me from this or that temptation,” and at the same time we are looking for what tricks we can use to get to this temptation, hoping that now God is on guard and will pull us out of it by force, then we have little chance of success. God gives power, but we must use it ourselves. When we ask God in prayer to give us the strength to do something in His name, it does not mean that we are asking Him to do it for us, because we are too weak-willed to be willing to act ourselves.

There are plenty of examples in this regard in the lives of saints, and in the biography of the 16th-century Western saint, Philip Neri, just such a case occurs. Philip was of a rather hot temper, he quarreled easily, the brothers of the monastery had to endure a lot from his temper, and he, of course, got it too. One day he felt that this could not continue. Whether it was an outburst of virtue or whether he simply could no longer stand his fellow men – this Lifedoes not say. The fact is that he rushed into the chapel, fell on his knees in front of the image of Christ and prayed to spare him, Philip, from his temper. And then, full of hope, he walked out. The first person he met was his brother, who had never aroused any anger in him, but for the first time in his life this brother treated him captiously and with hostility. Philip flared up and, seething with anger, went further – and met another brother, who had always been a source of peace and joy for him. But even this one received him unkindly. Philip returned to the chapel and again threw himself at the feet of Christ: “Lord, I asked You to save me from my temper!” And the Lord answered: “Yes, Philip, that’s why I’m giving you as many opportunities as possible to unlearn it.”

I think it is very important to realize that this is what God will do with us; He will not go to the cross for us again and again, every day. At some point, we must take up our own cross and carry it. Each of us must take up our cross, and when we ask for something in prayer, it means that we ourselves take up the matter with all the strength, all the intelligence and all the inspiration that we can put into our action, with all the courage and all the energy that we have. In addition, we carry out the work with all the strength that God gives us. If we don’t do this, then our prayer is a waste of time. This means that the words “Lord, have mercy!” or any other words we utter should be directed at ourselves; our mind must be formed by words, conformed to them, must be in harmony with them, filled with them. Our heart must be imbued with them with complete conviction and express them with all the force of which we are capable; our will must take possession of them and turn them into action. Thus, prayer and action should become a twofold expression of a single standing before the face of God, and ourselves, and everything around us. Otherwise we are wasting our time. What is the point of telling God about something wrong, and when He gives us the strength to fight, sit and wait until He Himself does everything for us? What is the point of repeating words that have become so untenable, so meaningless that they serve only as a cobweb between us and God.

Therefore, find the exact, necessary words; find and attach all your attention to them: after all, these are words of truth, such words that God will hear, for they are true. Put your whole heart into them. Let these words come alive with mental understanding because they are true, and let them sink deep into the very depths of your heart.

And the words of prayer have this property that they always oblige. You can say the words of prayer only with the meaning that “if I speak, then I will do it when the opportunity arises.” When you say to God: “At any cost, at any cost, Lord, save me!”, you must remember that by doing this you are committing to mobilize all your will, because someday God will say: “This is the price that must be paid.” The ancient writers said: “Shed blood and receive the Spirit.” Here is the price. Leave everything and you will get heaven; leave enslavement – you will gain freedom. And just as your will is involved not only in the act of prayer, but also in all the consequences arising from it, so should the body be involved. Because a person is not just a soul associated with a body for some time; man is body and soul, one whole being. Therefore, in prayer there must be physical effort, physical attention, physical structure, the structure of how you pray. If food weighs you down too much and prevents you from praying, then this effort should include fasting. If you do this, this means that you are knocking on doors.

Now, if, armed with all these words, we are going to make our way inside, like drilling, making a way into the bowels of the earth in order to extract something from there to the surface, then we must be prepared to take risks: going into the depths is very difficult. It sounds simple; we all believe that we have depth, and the more you go into it, the more wonderful it becomes. But it’s not that simple. Yes, when we have gone deep enough, this is true; but the path is very similar to the stories about the search for the Holy Grail or the city of Kitezh. On the way we have to deal with all sorts of monsters, and these monsters are not demons at all, not our neighbors at all, but just ourselves. And this makes everything much less pleasant and much more difficult.

Usually greed, fear, curiosity force us to live outside. In his book L’homme, cet inconnu, Alexis Carrel, a French scientist who worked in America, says: “If we ask ourselves where the border of my personality is, we will see that the tongue of a gourmet, like a tentacle, reaches out to everything edible in the world; the eyes of the curious, like tentacles, are directed at everything around us; the ears of the curious are growing, trying to catch more and more.” And if we draw a picture of what we look like in such categories, we will see that our internal content is very small, because everything is turned outward. So the first thing to do is to unstick your tentacles from everything and take them inside. It is impossible to go deep when you are completely outside.

Give it a try and you’ll discover a number of other useful things along the way. For example, take time to be alone with yourself; close the door and for a while, when there is nothing else to do, “settle down” in your room. Say: “Now I’m with myself” and just sit like that, with yourself; after a very short time you will probably get bored. And this is very educational – it gives us the idea that if we feel this way after just ten minutes by ourselves, then it is no wonder that others get bored with us too! Why is this happening? Is it because we have almost nothing to feed our minds, our emotions, our lives? Because if you look closely at your life, you quickly discover that we rarely, rarely live from the inside out; We, as a rule, respond to a stimulus, to an impulse from the outside. In other words, we live a reflected life, we react. Something happened – and we respond; someone speaks and we respond. But when there is no incentive to think, speak or act, it turns out that there is very little within us that motivates us to act in any direction; and this is a very dramatic discovery. We are completely empty, we do not act from within ourselves, but take for our own life something that is actually fed to us from the outside; something happens and motivates us to take the next action. Rarely, rarely do we manage to live simply by the depth and richness that we believe exists within us.

There is a passage in Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers that describes my life very well and perhaps your life too. Pickwick goes to the club and hires a cab; Along the way, he asks the driver many questions and, among other things, asks: “How can such a pitiful and frail horse drag such a heavy and large carriage?” And the driver replies: “It’s not the horse, sir, it’s the wheels.” – “What do you want to say?” – asks Pickwick, and the coachman answers: “You see, our pair of wheels is wonderful. They are so well oiled that as soon as the horse starts, the wheels begin to turn, and the poor horse has to run for his own life.” Look at the way we live for the most part: we are not a horse that pulls a cart, we are a horse that escapes from the cart so as not to be crushed by it.

And because we don’t know how to act without external motivation, it turns out: we don’t know what to do with ourselves, and we become more and more boring. So first you need to learn to sit alone, not be afraid of getting bored and be able to draw appropriate conclusions from this.

Soon we become worse than bored, because this is not the kind of boredom when we can say: “I am an active person and am used to being useful to my neighbor; I am always busy doing good, and the state of weightlessness when I do nothing for others is a difficult test.” No, here we little by little discover something else. We’re bored; we try to get out of this boredom and turn inside ourselves to find something there that would dispel this boredom, and very soon we discover that there is nothing. Everything that we could think through, we have already thought through dozens of times; our entire stock of emotions is like the keyboard of a piano, which we have closed because we are not used to the piano playing by itself: we need someone else to play the keys. We are not used to “doing nothing,” and we become anxious, and anxiety develops into unbearable torment. If you have read the desert fathers, you may remember that there are times when they simply ran out of their cells screaming for help, hoping to meet something or someone – anything, whatever it was; The devil himself would be better than this emptiness of self-contemplation. Saint Theophan the Recluse says: “Most people are like wood shavings, coiled around their own emptiness.” If we have enough honesty, we must admit that this is a very adequate description of the state in which almost all of us find ourselves.

Here we must overcome our horror and say: “No, I will not give up, I will reach the point where this very torment will motivate me to do what good will is unable to achieve.” And indeed, a moment comes – a moment of despair, anxiety and horror, which makes us turn even deeper inside and cry out: “Lord, have mercy! Lord, I am perishing – save me!” We discover that there is nothing in us that can give life, or rather that there is life; everything that we called life, took for life, was outside, but there was nothing inside.

And we look at this abyss of non-existence and feel: the more we delve into it, the less remains of us. This is a dangerous moment, this is the moment when we need to stop, think, weigh everything. This is the moment when we have reached the first layer of depth, the one where the ability to knock on the door arises in us. At the level where we simply rested from our neighbor, before we began to get bored, at the level where we are simply bored, and then offended by the fact that we are bored, at the level where we fidget and worry, and then become confused, there is still no reason for us to call and cry out of despair, overwhelming our mind, our heart, our will and our body with the feeling that unless God comes, I am lost, there is no hope, for I I know that if I emerge from this abyss, I will again fall into the realm of ghostly, reflected life, but not real life. Here is the moment when we can begin to knock on the door that is still closed, but behind which lies hope, the hope that Bartimaeus, the blind man at the gates of Jericho, experienced from the depths of his utmost despair when Christ passed by.

We know from the Gospel that the blind Bartimaeus found himself a beggar on the road, without any hope; he lost all faith and all hope for human help and was forced to beg for food, hoping not so much for alms, which means merciful, affectionate care, but for a handout, when a coin is thrown without even seeing a person. And one day he, now having given up hope, completely blind and settled here in the dust, heard about a Man, about a new Prophet, who worked miracles throughout the Holy Land. If Bartimaeus had seen, he would probably have jumped up and ran across the whole country to find this Prophet; but he could not keep up with this wandering miracle worker. So he stayed where he was, and the knowledge that there was someone who might have healed him probably made his despair even more acute. And one day he hears a crowd passing along the road, a crowd that sounded somehow unusual. In all likelihood, as happens with the blind, he developed hearing and perception more sensitive than ours, because he asked: “Who is it that passes?” – and they told him: “Jesus of Nazareth.” And then Bartimaeus was overcome by both extreme despair and immeasurable hope. Immeasurable hope, because Christ passed within reach; but against the backdrop of the darkest despair, because in a few steps he will catch up with Bartimaeus, and in a few more steps he will pass by, and probably there will not be a second such case. And out of this desperate hope, Bartimaeus began to call and shout: “Jesus, Son of David! Have mercy on me!” (Mark 10:47). It was a cry of perfect confession of faith. At that moment, precisely because his despair was so deep, such a bold hope was born in him and healing, salvation, wholeness came to him: Christ heard him.

With complete, complete hope there is always some measure of despair associated with it. This is the moment when, having gone inside, we can pray; and then the words “Lord, have mercy!” already quite enough. Then there is no need for sophisticated speeches, which we often find in prayer books; It’s enough just to scream in despair: “Help!” – and you will be heard.

Very often, when we pray, we do not find enough tension, enough conviction, enough faith, because our despair is not deep enough. We want to have God, His presence, in addition to many other things; we want His help and at the same time we try to get help from wherever we can; we keep God in reserve as a last resort. We turn to the mighty of this world and the sons of men and say: “God, give them the strength to do this for me!”, and only very rarely do we turn away from the mighty of this world and the sons of men and say: “I won’t ask anyone for help, it’s better to help me yourself!” If our despair breaks out from sufficient depths, if what we ask for, what we shout for, is so essential that it expresses all the needs of our life, then we will find words for prayer and will be able to achieve the essence of prayer – a meeting with God.

And now about confusion; we can find the connection in the same story about Bartimaeus. He cried out – but what does the Gospel say about the people around him? They tried to silence him, and one can easily imagine those pious people – sighted, with a confident step, healthy – who surrounded Christ, talking about lofty matters, about the coming Kingdom of God and about the mysteries of the Holy Scriptures, people who turned to Bartimaeus and said: “Can’t you finally shut up? Eyes, your eyes – what are they, what meaning do they have when it comes to God?” Bartimaeus seemed to be out of context, demanding from God something that he desperately needed; and here a certain ceremony was taking place, and it disturbed its harmonious harmony: it must be driven away immediately! He needs to be silenced! But the Gospel also says that despite these people who shushed him, he continued to shout about his own, about what he needed so much; The more they quieted him, the more he screamed.

This is what I would like to convey to you. There is a Greek saint named Maximus, who as a young man once came to the temple and heard the words of the Apostolic Epistle: “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17). These words struck him so much that he thought that nothing else was needed except to fulfill this commandment. And he left the temple, went to the nearby hills and began to pray incessantly. He was a Greek peasant of the 4th century, knew the “Our Father” and several other prayers by heart. And,” he tells us, “he read the prayers one after another, repeating them over and over and over again. And he felt very good; he prayed, he was with God, inspired with jubilation, and everything seemed perfect to him – except that the sun was gradually setting, becoming colder and darker. And as it got dark, all sorts of alarming sounds began to be heard: the crunch of a branch under the paw of a wild animal, the cries of small animals that were torn apart by predators, the sparkling of their eyes, etc. And then Maxim felt that he was completely alone, a small defenseless creature in a world of danger, death, murder, and that there was no help for him if God did not come to the rescue. He no longer read the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed; he did exactly the same as Bartimaeus and began to shout: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me!” And so he screamed all night, because the animals and their sparkling eyes did not let him sleep. Then morning came, and he thought: “Now the animals are asleep, I can pray,” but then he felt that he was hungry. He decided to pick some berries for himself and went into the thickets, but realized that all those sparkling eyes and clawed paws were probably hiding somewhere in these bushes. And then he began to make his way very carefully and repeated at every step: “Lord, Jesus Christ, save me, help me, save me! God, help, protect me!” – and for every berry he collected there were several prayers.

Time passed, and after many years Maxim met a very old and experienced ascetic, who asked him how he learned to pray unceasingly. Maxim said: “I think that the demon taught me to pray unceasingly.” His interlocutor replied: “I think I understand what you mean, but I would like to make sure that I understand you correctly.” And then Maxim told him how he gradually got used to these rustles and day-night danger; but then he was attacked by temptations of the flesh, temptations of the mind, experiences, and later by more violent attacks from the enemy. And since then there was not a moment, either day or night, when he did not turn to God with a cry: “Have mercy, have mercy, help! Help, help!” And one day, many years later, the Lord appeared to him; and peace, peace, silence, silence descended on him. There was no fear left – no fear of the dark, no fear of the thickets, no fear of demons – the Lord took everything upon Himself. “By that time,” said Maxim, “I had learned that if the Lord does not come Himself, I am completely and hopelessly helpless; so even in silence, in peace and in joy, I continued to pray: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me!” Because I knew that only God’s mercy can give peace of heart, peace of mind, silence of the body and right will.”

So: Maxim learned to pray, not avoiding anxiety, but thanks to anxiety, and because his anxiety was real – there was a real danger behind it. If we realized that we are in much greater danger, that the devil is on the prowl, trying to catch and destroy us, that every human encounter is a judgment, a crisis, a situation in which we are all called either to accept Christ in the person we meet, or to be Christ’s messenger to him; if we understood that everything in life is saturated with meaning, then we would be able to shout and pray unceasingly, and anxiety, confusion would not be a hindrance, but precisely the circumstance that teaches us to pray when we are still too inexperienced to pray from the depths, without prompting, without incentive to pray.

How can we learn to pray in the conditions of the life we ​​live if we know nothing about prayer, have never prayed in our lives, or have prayed little? I have experienced this in a variety of settings: during my years as a medical professional, five years in the military, then as a priest, etc. – and it works! It turns out if you are simple and unpretentious enough to do the following.

When you wake up in the morning, the first thing you do is thank God for this, even if you are not particularly happy about the day ahead of you: “This is the day that the Lord has made: let us rejoice and be glad in this day!” (see Ps. 118:24). When this is done, give yourself time to realize the truth of what you have said and accept it personally; perhaps at the level of deep conviction, if not in the order of what we would call exultation. And then get up, wash your face, clean up, do what you usually need to do, and then return to God. Come to Him again with a twofold conviction: that you are God’s, and that this day is also God’s, also belongs to Him, and that it is completely new, completely untouched. It’s never been there before. Using Russian imagery, he is like a wide, unsullied snowy plain; no one has ever walked on it. This plain lies before you in virginity and purity.

What’s next? And then you ask God to bless this day, so that He Himself will bless and manage everything on this day. And then take what you said seriously, because very often we say: “Lord, bless!” – and having received the blessing, we act like the prodigal son: we collect our goods and go further away, to the side, to lead a riotous life.

So, on this day there is God’s blessing, it is God’s own day; and now let’s go into it. You enter the beginning of the day as God’s personal messenger; Whoever you meet, you meet him as God would meet him. You are set in this day to be the presence of the Lord, the presence of Christ, the presence of the Holy Spirit, the presence of the Gospel; this is your function this day. God never said that when you enter into a certain situation in His name, they will crucify Him again, and you will be resurrected. You must be ready to enter into any series of circumstances in the name of God and walk as the Son of God walked: humbly and humbly, in truth and in readiness to suffer persecution, etc.

When we fulfill God’s commandment, we usually expect to immediately see amazing results – we sometimes read about such cases in the lives of saints. For example: someone hit us on the cheek, we offer the other, but not expecting a new blow, but in anticipation that the other will exclaim: “Oh, what humility!” – and we are rewarded, and the other has found the salvation of his soul. But that doesn’t happen; retribution awaits you, and very often you receive a cruel blow. It is important that you are prepared for this. As for the day, if you realized and accepted that God blessed this day, that He overshadowed it with His hand, then every person you meet is a gift from God to you, every circumstance that presents itself is a gift from God to you, whether it is bitter or sweet, whether you like it or not. This is God’s own gift to you, and if you begin to accept it, then you can cope with any circumstances. But then we must face everything with readiness that anything can happen, pleasant or unpleasant; and if you, in the name of God, walk through the whole day, which you received fresh and new from His own hands, with God’s blessing to live it, then prayer and life can truly be turned into two sides of the same coin. Then you act and pray as if with one breath, because all the circumstances that follow one after another require the blessing of God.

Several years ago I spoke on this topic at a youth meeting in Teze, after which correspondence began with about thirty young men and women. One of them wrote to me once: “I tried to take your advice; I tried with all my energy; there was not a moment when I did not pray and act at the same time, prayed and acted; and now I cannot hear the very word “God”, I find such prayer unbearable.” And I then answered her: “Your digestion has deteriorated, you have eaten too much. In prayer you must adhere to common sense, just as in life you are guided by common sense. It is impossible, if you have never prayed in your life, to immediately begin with eighteen hours of continuous dialogue with God and prayer, while doing your job. But you can pick out one or two moments and put all your energy into them. Just turn your eyes to God, smile and begin. At other times you can tell God: “I just need to take a break, I don’t have the strength to be with You all the time,” which is true! You still cannot bear to be with God continuously; tell Him so. God knows this very well, no matter how you act. Step back for now, say: “Now I will rest; for a while I agree not to be too holy.”

So we can just relax and look at something that is also God’s – trees, houses – and after some time return to God again. You can search, but not forgetting about sobriety, because there is a sin that the Holy Fathers call spiritual greed: we want more and more God when we need a diet; I got a little – and that’s enough for now.

How to deal with time

In our busy age, the problem of how to manage time is very important. I’m not trying to convince you that you have plenty of time and can pray if you want; I want to talk about how to cope with time in the context of the tension, the pressure of life. I won’t give recipes on how to find time; I will only say that if you try and spend less of it, there will be more of it. If we collect together the grains of wasted time and from them, as it were, create moments of composure and prayer, we will find that there is quite a lot of time. If we remember the number of empty minutes during the day, when we do something solely because we are afraid of emptiness, afraid of being left alone with ourselves, then we will find that there are many short periods that could belong to us and God at the same time. But I want to talk about something that seems even more important to me, namely, how we can control time and stop it. We can pray to God only if we have established ourselves in a state of stability and inner peace, inner reconciliation in the face of God; it frees us from the sense of time: not the objective time we keep track of, but the subjective feeling that time is rushing and that we have no time left.

First of all, I would like to draw your attention to something that we all know and constantly discuss: there is no need to race against time to catch up with it; it does not run away from us, it flows towards us. Whether you are looking forward to the next minute or are completely unaware of it, it will come. The future, whatever you do in this regard, will become the present, and there is no need to jump from the present to the future; you can just wait for it to come. And in this sense, you can be completely stable and still move in time, because time itself moves. You know what happens when you sit in a car or on a train; sit, if you are not driving, lean back and look out the window; you can read, you can think, you can just relax; and the train moves, and at some point what was the future – whether the next station or your final stop – will become the present. And I think that’s very important. Here is a mistake we often make in our inner life: we imagine that if we hurry, we will get to the future faster – like a person who runs from the last carriage to the first, hoping to shorten the distance from London to Edinburgh. With this example you can see how absurd this is; but when we constantly strive to live an inch ahead of ourselves, we do not notice this absurdity. And at the same time, this is precisely what prevents us from being completely in the present moment – where, as I said, we can only be, because even if we imagine that we are ahead of time or ourselves, this is not so. The only thing that happens is that we are in a hurry – but that doesn’t make us move any faster.

You’ve probably seen it more than once: a man with two heavy suitcases is catching up with a bus; he is in a hurry with all his might, running as fast as his suitcases allow him, and with all his being he is not where he is. But you also know what happens when you walk on vacation: you walk at a brisk pace, you walk cheerfully and cheerfully; if age and health allow, you can even run – but there is no rush, because it is important to just run, and not run somewhere. We must learn the same thing in relation to prayer: to remain grounded in the present moment. Usually we think or behave as if the present is an imaginary, elusive line between the past and the future, and we roll from past to future, constantly crossing this border, like rolling an egg in a towel; it rolls continuously, it is not “located” anywhere at any moment, there is no present, because it is always in the future.

Not everyone is lucky enough to have a life-changing experience, but I would like to tell you in a few words about one of my experiences that was very useful to me.

In France, during the German occupation, I was part of the Resistance movement, and one day, as I was getting on the metro, the police grabbed me. This is one of my most interesting experiences. Leaving aside the romantic details of what happened and how it happened, I will translate this experience into more philosophical categories that have to do with time. And this is what happened: at that moment I had a past, I had a future, and I moved from one to the other, briskly walking along the subway stairs; and suddenly someone put their hand on my shoulder and said: “Stop, show me your papers.” And then several things happened. Firstly, I began to think very quickly, feel very intensely and became aware of the whole situation with relief, brightness, which I had never felt on the last steps of the Etoile metro station. Second: I suddenly realized that I had no past. After all, the real past was such that I would have been shot for it, so this past no longer existed. The false past that I would talk about also never existed, so I turned out to be like a lizard that was caught and ran away, throwing off its tail, so that where the tail was, the lizard was no longer there. Then (although at that moment I did not think through all this from the point of view of the philosophy of time) I gradually realized another very interesting thing: the future exists insofar as you can foresee what will happen next, a minute before it happens, or an inch before you reach it. And nothing happens because you have no idea what could happen, and you are like a person standing in a strange room in the dark. You stand – and there is only darkness around, pressing on your eyes: maybe there is nothing in front of you, or maybe there is infinity – everything is the same. You end exactly where the darkness begins. So I discovered that I had no future. It was then that it became clear to me that living either in the past or in the future was simply unrealistic. It turned out that I was squeezed into the present moment, and everything that could have been was concentrated in the present moment with an unusually invigorating intensity and brightness – which, ultimately, allowed me to remain free.

As for time, without going into details, I will say: there are moments in life when you feel that the present is here, the past is gone irrevocably and has meaning only to the extent that it has merged into the present, and the future is irrelevant, since it may or may not come. This happens, for example, when you have an accident, or in a moment of danger, when you need to act immediately – here you have no time to smoothly roll from the past to the future. You are then required to be so completely in the present that all your energy, your entire being, comes down to the word “now.” And then it is very interesting to discover that you are all in this “now”. You know about the thin, thin plane, which geometry teaches that has no thickness; This absolutely thicknessless geometric plane, which is the “present,” moves along the line of time, or rather, time runs under it and brings you “now” everything you will need in the future. We must learn this circumstance, and we must learn it in a more peaceful environment. I think we need to practice stopping time, standing in the present, in that “now”, which is my present and which is also the moment of the intersection of eternity with time.

What can be done for this? This is the first thing you can do when you have absolutely nothing to do, when there is nothing pulling you back or pushing you forward, and when you can use five minutes, three minutes or half an hour of leisure, to do nothing. You sit down and say: “I am sitting, I am not doing anything, I will not do anything for five minutes” – and then relax and during this period (you can stand it for two or three minutes to begin with) realize: “I am here, in the presence of God, in my own presence, in the presence of the surrounding furniture, quietly and silently, not moving anywhere.” And one more thing: you must decide that during these two or five minutes that you have assigned yourself to learn that the present exists, you will not be pulled out of them by a phone call, or a knock on the door, or a sudden burst of energy to immediately do something that you have been putting off “for later” for ten years. You sit down and say, “Here I am,” and there you are. If you practice this in empty moments of life, then when you have learned not to fidget internally, but to be completely calm and serene, stable and peaceful, extend these few minutes for a short time, and then a little more. Of course, there will come a moment when you need some kind of protection, because you can sit quietly for two minutes even if the phone is ringing or someone is knocking on the door, but fifteen minutes may be too long for both the phone and the person standing outside the door. Then tell yourself that if you were not at home, you would not open the door or answer the phone. Or if you have more determination or more confidence in what you are doing, you can do what my father did: he had a little note on the door that said, “Don’t bother knocking. I’m home, but I won’t answer.” It’s much more effective because people understand it right away; and if you say, “Please wait five minutes,” their kindness will usually wear off after two minutes.

After you have learned such stability, serenity, you will need to learn to stop time, not only when it drags on or still stands, but at moments when it rushes swiftly towards you and makes demands on you. It’s done like this. You are busy doing something useful; you feel that if you don’t do this, the world will go astray. If, then, at any moment you say, “I stop,” you will discover several things. Firstly, it turns out that the world has not gone off the rails and that God’s whole world is there – just imagine! – can wait five minutes while you are not doing it. This is important because we deceive ourselves by saying, “Well, I have to do this; this is a good deed, this is a duty, I can’t leave it undone.” You can, because in moments of pure laziness, you leave it undone for much longer than the five minutes you have now assigned yourself. So the first thing you do is say, “Whatever happens, I’m stopping here.” The simplest thing is to do this with an alarm clock. Set an alarm clock and say: “I work without looking back until it rings.” This is very important; one of the things we have to unlearn is looking at the clock. If you are walking somewhere and feel that you are late, you look at your watch. But while you’re checking your wristwatch, you can’t walk as fast as you would if you were just looking ahead. And if you know that you are seven minutes late, or five, or three, you are still late. So it’s better to leave early enough and arrive on time. And if you are already late, then go as quickly and cheerfully as you can; look at the clock when approaching the door so that you know what degree of remorse should be reflected on your face when it opens for you!.. So, when the alarm clock rang, you know that in the next five minutes the world will not exist and you will not move. This is God’s own time, and you settle into His time calmly, silently and quietly. You will see how difficult it is at first; It will seem to you that you absolutely need to, for example, finish writing a letter or finish reading a paragraph in a book. In fact, you will very soon discover that you can put it off for three, five, even ten minutes and nothing happens. And if what you are doing requires special attention, then you will see how much better and faster it can be done later, after these three, five or ten minutes.

I’ll give you one more example. When I was a new doctor, I felt it was very unfair to those waiting in the waiting room if I took too long with the person in my office. Therefore, on my first appointment, I tried to examine the patient as quickly as possible. And at the end of the hours of consultation, I discovered that I had no memory of the people I had received, because the entire time I was with the patient, I looked through him with a penetrating gaze into the waiting room and counted the number of those who were not yet with me. As a result, I had to ask the same question twice, and I had to repeat the entire examination twice, if not three times, and when I finished, I could not remember what I had done and what I had not done. Of course, not everyone is like me; you may be able to remember much better than me, but this is just an example of what can happen to at least one of you.

And then I thought that this was dishonest, and decided to act as if the person who was with me was the only one in the world. At the moment when the feeling “I need to hurry” arose, I would lean back in my chair and engage in a few minutes of simple conversation precisely in order to prevent myself from rushing. And within two days I discovered that I didn’t need to do anything like that. You can simply be completely focused on the person or task in front of you; and when you finish, it turns out that you spent half as much time as was required before, and at the same time heard and noticed everything.

I’ve given this advice many times since then to people in all sorts of backgrounds, and it helps. So if you practice first stopping the time that is not moving, and then the time that is rushing by, if you stop and say “no” to it, you will find that the moment you have overcome the inner tension, the inner “rumor,” the fidgeting and anxiety, time will flow quite smoothly. Can you imagine that only one minute passes in one minute? Because that’s exactly how it is. It’s strange, but it’s true, even if, judging by the way we behave, you might think that five minutes can fly by in thirty seconds. No, each minute is the same duration as the next one, each hour is equal to the next hour. Nothing catastrophic happens. You may ask: “Will I have time, will I have enough time for everything?” – and I will answer in very Russian: “If you don’t die before, then there’s enough time; and if you die before it’s done, then there’s no need to do it.” There is another proverb of this kind that you can remember for yourself in the future: “Don’t worry about death. When death comes, you are no more, and while you are here, there is no death”; it’s the same principle. Why worry about something that will resolve itself?

Having learned not to fidget, not to fuss, you can do anything at any pace, with any degree of attention and speed, and not feel like time is running away from you or being carried away. This is the feeling that I spoke about earlier – when you are on vacation and the whole vacation is still ahead of you; you can be fast or slow, without any sense of time, because you only do what you do, and there is no tension of purpose. And then you will see that you can pray in absolutely any environment, that there are no circumstances that can prevent you from praying. Prayer can be hindered by letting the whirlwind take over you, by letting the storm inside you instead of leaving it outside.

Remember the Gospel story about the storm on the Sea of ​​Galilee. Christ is sleeping in a boat, and bad weather is raging all around. At first the apostles struggle, struggle intensely and with hope for their lives. But at some point they lose heart, and the storm that was outside bursts inside – a hurricane is also raging inside them. Anxiety and death do not just swirl around them, they have burst into their souls. And the apostles turn to Christ and act as we often do with God: we turn our gaze to Him at a moment of tension and tragedy and are indignant that He is so calm. The Gospel account emphasizes this by saying that Christ slept with his head “on top”—the ultimate insult! They perish, but He is comfortable… We often experience exactly the same thing in relation to God: how dare He remain in His bliss, how dare He be in such peace when I am in trouble?.. And the disciples act as we often do. Instead of turning to God and saying: “You are peace itself, You are the Lord; say the word, and my servant will be healed; say the word, and everything will fall into place,” they unceremoniously push Him aside, wake him up and say: “Do you really not care that we are perishing?” In other words: “If you can’t do anything, then at least don’t sleep! If you are incapable of anything better, then at least suffer and die with us!” Christ responds to this; He stands up and says: “Oh, you of little faith!” And pushing them aside, he turns to the storm and, as if pouring His inner peace, His harmony and peace into the storm, says to it: “Be quiet, be silent!” – and everything calms down.

This we can do and should be able to do. But it requires systematic, intelligent training, just as we train to learn how to do other things. Learn to master time – and no matter what you do, no matter what the tension, in a storm and tragedy, or simply in the bustle in which we constantly live – you will be able to be calm, you will be able to stand motionless in the present moment, face to face with the Lord, in silence or with the word. If you use words, you can bring everything around you to God, all the surrounding storm. If you are silent, you can stand in that center of the cyclone, the hurricane, where peace reigns, allowing the storm to rage around you while you are where God is, at the only point of absolute stability. However, this point of absolute stability is not a point where nothing happens; having met at this point, all opposing tensions are balanced among themselves and held in the powerful hand of God.

True silence is something extremely intense, it has “thickness”, density, it is real, it is truly alive. I remember an episode from the life of the desert ascetics. One of the brothers was asked to say an edifying word in honor of the bishop who was to visit them. And the elder replied: “No, I won’t say anything; if my silence doesn’t tell him anything, then words won’t say anything.” We should try to find out about this kind of silence and try to learn it. How is this done? I will try to point you out with a parable or an image of bird watching.

If we want to watch birds wake up and come to life in a forest or field, we must, firstly, get up before them; we must be in a state of alert, alert attention, completely shaking off sleep before the first bird wakes and even before the birds know that morning has come. Then we need to go into a field or forest and sit there completely motionless, completely quietly – and at the same time without tension, so that no rustling can startle the lightly sleeping creatures around us, otherwise they will scatter or fly away to where we can neither hear nor see them. Bird watching presupposes, on the one hand, stillness, peace and quiet, and at the same time extreme sensitivity, because if you sit in a field, catching up on the dreams of your short night, then all the birds will fly away before you realize that the sun is burning your back. It is absolutely necessary to combine this intense sensitivity with stillness and lack of tension; this is contemplative preparation for contemplative silence. This is a very difficult balance to achieve between, on the one hand, alertness, which allows us to respond to whatever comes our way, with a completely open mind, free from all prejudice and expectation, and on the other hand, a still calm, which allows us to respond to what we encounter without projecting onto it a reflection of our own presence, which would be destructive.

About twenty-five years ago, shortly after I became a priest, I was sent to serve in a nursing home before Christmas. There was an old woman there who later died at the age of one hundred and two. She came up to me after the first service and said: “Father Anthony, I would like to get advice about prayer.” I suggested: “Then contact Father So-and-So!” She replied, “All these years I have been going to people who are supposed to know about prayer, and I have never received any good advice from them. And I thought that you, who probably don’t know anything yet, might just happen to say something useful.” It was a very encouraging start! I then asked her: “What is your problem?” And my old lady answered: “For fourteen years now I have been repeating the Jesus Prayer almost continuously and I have never felt God’s presence.” And then I really, out of simplicity, told her what I was thinking: “If you talk all the time, when will God insert a word?” She asked: “What should I do?” And I said: “After morning breakfast, go to your room, tidy it up, place the chair more comfortably, so that behind its back there are all the dark corners that an elderly woman always has in her room and where things are hidden from prying eyes. Light a lamp in front of the icon and then look around your room. Just sit, look around, and try to see where you live, because I’m sure if you’ve been praying for the last fourteen years, you haven’t noticed your room for a long time. And then take your knitting and knit for fifteen minutes before the face of God; but I forbid you to say even one word of prayer. Just knit and try to enjoy the silence of your room.”

She thought that this was not very pious advice, but decided to try it. After some time, she came to me and said: “You know, it’s working out!” I asked: “What happens?” – because I was very curious how my advice worked. And she says: “I did as you said: I got up, washed, cleaned my room, had breakfast, came back, made sure that there was nothing around that would irritate me, and then I settled into a chair and thought: Oh, how wonderful! I have fifteen minutes in front of me, during which I can do nothing – and not feel guilty about it!.. Then I looked around and really, for the first time in many years, I thought: what My room is cozy! The window looks out onto the garden, the room is comfortable, spacious enough for me and for the things that have accumulated over the years… And (she added) I felt such silence because the room was so peaceful. The clock ticked, but nothing disturbed the silence; its ticking only emphasized the surrounding peace. After a while, I remembered that I had to knit in front of God, and then I took up knitting, and felt the silence more and more. The knitting needles clinked against the arms of the chair, the clock ticked peacefully, there was nothing to worry about, no need to strain; and gradually I began to notice that this silence was not just the absence of noise, but (as she put it) “has density.” It did not consist of absence, emptiness, but there was the presence of something in it. The silence had density, content, and it began to flow into me. The surrounding silence began to fill me and merge with the silence within me.” And at the end she said something very beautiful, which I later came across in the French writer Georges Bernanos; she said: “I suddenly noticed that this silence is a presence; and at the core of this silence was the One who is Silence itself, Peace itself, Harmony itself.”

After that, she lived in the world for another ten years and said that she could always find silence when she herself was calm and quiet. This does not mean that she stopped praying, but that she was able to maintain this contemplative silence for some time; then her mind began to wander, and then she turned to verbal prayer until the mind became calm and steady again; and then from the words she again returned to her former silence. Very often this could happen to us, if instead of fussing and “doing” something, we could simply say: “I am in God’s presence. What a joy! Let me be silent…”

In the life of the French Catholic priest, the “Cure of Ars,” Jean-Marie Vianney, there is a story about how an old peasant sat motionless for hours in a church, doing nothing; and the priest asked him: “What are you doing here all this time?” And the old peasant replied: “I look at Him, He looks at me, and we feel so good together!”

This can only be achieved by learning to remain silent to some extent. Start with verbal silence, with the silence of emotions, with the silence of thought and calmness of the body. But it would be a mistake to imagine that we can start from the highest point, from the silence of the heart and mind. You need to start with the silence of the tongue, with the silence of the body – that is, learn to be still, to let go of tension, without falling into daydreaming and relaxation, but, in the words of one of the Russian saints, to be like a violin string, tuned so as to produce the right sound: not too tight to the point that it can burst, but not too loosely stretched when it will only buzz.

And starting with this, we need to learn to listen to the silence, to be in perfect peace; and perhaps, more often than we imagine, the word of the Book of Revelation will come true: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock” (Rev. 3:20).

In the next chapter we will look at the basic conditions of prayer, namely, how we can address God by name and be able to speak to Him accordingly.

“Tell me Your name” (Genesis 32:29)

In this chapter I want to say something about that moment when we are so determined that prayer really becomes possible and comes alive. From what I have already said and the constant background of premises, it is clear that prayer is a relationship, an encounter, a means and a path to a relationship with the Living God. At some point this relationship comes to life. And since this is a matter of relationships, I want to start with something that applies equally to prayer and human relationships.

Relationships become personal and vibrant when you begin to distinguish a person from the crowd; in other words, when this person becomes one of a kind, when he ceases to be a faceless anonymous person. Someone used the expression “anonymous society”, when instead of first and last name, properties and personality, we are defined by collective terms, such as “taxpayers”, etc. In relationships between people there is often an element of anonymity: “they”. We speak in the third person when we feel that one person can easily be replaced by another because the relationship is functional, not personal, and a given function can be filled by someone else; whereas this person cannot be replaced by anyone. In languages ​​other than English, I would say that relationships become real from the moment you start thinking about the person in terms of “you” instead of thinking of him in terms of “you”. This does not require a change of language, it is an internal change. You know very well, I am sure, that you can have an “I and you” or “I and it” relationship with someone.

So, prayer comes to life when, instead of thinking about a distant God – “He”, “Almighty”, etc., you begin to think about Him “in You”, when the relationship from the third person moves into the first and second person. Take for example the Book of Job, where there is conflict; take many other examples from Scripture and from life – from the lives of saints and from the lives of sinners – where there is tension and passionate opposition; it is always a personal thing. There is no prayer while the relationship is wary, restrained, cold, while there is ceremony between us and God, while we cannot talk to Him, while we need a long and complex series of words and actions. But there comes a moment when we suddenly break through all this and speak in the first and second person. We say “I” and expect God to be “You”. Not the plural polite “You”, but the one and only “You”.

There is one more thing in warm human relationships: this is when we grope, we look for what to call a person. I don’t mean a surname without any special meaning, but the moment when we begin to see how a person and a name are connected. You probably know how personal – in a positive, but also in a negative sense – a nickname can be. A nickname can crush you, erase you from life, destroy everything that exists between two people; but it can also be a name that is used only by two or a very small circle of people who are so deeply and closely connected with each other that this nickname is full of meaning for them, since it is extremely personal. In a sense, the more absurd it is, the more personal it is, because no one else but you would have come up with it.

There are also surnames. The surname often seems alien to us, some kind of general definition, like “humanity”: so many bear the same surname. And at the same time, if you look at the surname more carefully, in the order of human relationships, you can suddenly understand that the surname is a sign of community. From generation to generation, in the depths of history, people of our blood, whose life is in our bones, in our heredity, in our psyche, bore the same surname, and it connects us, going very far into the past, with generations of people and will probably connect us in the future with other generations, and through various ties of marriage and family it will weave a wide fabric of people deeply connected with each other. If, instead of thinking about the surname, we think about heredity, about genealogy – is this not what we find in the two Gospels in relation to Christ? Isn’t this exactly what His genealogy indicates: a connection from generation to generation of specific, real people? So the surname can be treated with great interest, because it contains our entire past in one word; and if you think about other people in such categories, then even the very last names can come to life. Unlike a nickname, which expresses the uniqueness of a person and the uniqueness of our relationship with him, a surname – through this unique person – suddenly connects us with the whole world of people.

There is also the name that is given to us at baptism: with this name God acquires a person for Himself. The name given at baptism connects a person with God, because, receiving it, a person dies with Christ and rises again with Him; but this name also connects us with a number of people who bore the same name, and above all with the man who made this pagan name a Christian name: with the first saint who brought this name into the Church.

We have one more name that we don’t know. Remember the passage from the Book of Revelation where it is said that in the coming kingdom everyone will receive a white stone, and on this stone is written his name, and this name is known only to God and the one who receives it. This is not a nickname, not a surname, not a name received at baptism, this is a name, a word, completely identical to us, coinciding with us, it is us. One could almost say that this is the word that God spoke when He willed us into being; it is us, and we are it. This name defines our absolute and unique uniqueness in relation to God. No one can know this name, just as no one, ultimately, can know us as God knows; and at the same time, everything else that can be known about us flows from this name.

You may be wondering why I pay so much attention to names. I do this because our prayer partly relates directly to God and constitutes our personal connection with Him, but partly prayer is our connection with the entire outside world; and praying for each other, praying for the whole world, we bring names to God and nothing more. But these names are either full of meaning or meaningless, depending on the circumstances, depending on whether we can or cannot realize the depth of what we are saying. If we call people God without understanding the given name, pronouncing it as a label that has no depth, then our relationship is very inexpensive; if we pronounce the name with some share of the content that I very briefly tried to outline, then our prayer not only brings a person to God as if on open palms, but also connects us with him with depth – not compassion, not love, but identity, community, solidarity of a completely different quality.

This is also true in the other direction. If we cannot find an exact name for God, then we do not have a free, real, joyful, open approach to Him. As long as we have to address God with formal names, such as “The Most High,” “Lord God,” marking, as it were, His category, making the address an anonymous, collective term, we cannot use this word as a personal name. But at some moments, among spiritual writers, for example, an appeal breaks through that has the quality of a nickname, a “nickname,” a word that no one else could pronounce under any circumstances, a word that stands on the verge of the possible and the impossible, and which is possible to pronounce only because there is a real relationship. Remember the psalm where, following more restrained forms of address, David suddenly bursts out: “You are my joy!” At this moment the entire psalm comes to life. Saying “O Thou our Lord,” “O Almighty!” etc., we seem to offer God facts about Himself; but when it burst out “You are my joy!” – this is a completely different matter. And when you can say to God: “Oh, Joy!” – or when you can say: “Oh, the pain of my life… Oh, You, Who are at the core of my life as a source of pain, as a problem, as a stumbling block…”, when you can turn to Him sharply, passionately – then a relationship of prayer has been established.

Therefore, it is very important for us to think and make sure whether in our experience there are such appeals that are applicable to God. In addition, appeals may change from time to time. At some times we respond more to one or another aspect of our relationship with God; in other periods – on other aspects, just as in the relationships of human friendship or love we do not choose one single treatment – there is a whole variety of shades and nuances. There is the title “Almighty”, there is “Creator”, there is “Provider”, there is “Wisdom”; but there is also a very simple name Jesusthat I would call a “Christian” name.

It may sound strange that Christ has a “Christian name,” but I hope you will understand what I mean. And this reminds me of an argument between one of my parishioners – she was a Christian – with her husband, who was not a Christian. For forty years of their life together, he tried to prove to her the worthlessness of Christianity, and one day, falling into despair, she told him: “How can you say that, when God Himself was first a Jew, and then became a Christian?!” And so, when I say that Jesus is a “Christian” name, it reminds me of such a very primitive approach, and at the same time, this is a human name, the first Christian name inscribed in the calendar of the Church. And if we remember this, if we understand the closeness this name establishes between Christ and us, then we will understand why generations of Christians valued this name so much. Most likely, not because the apostle Paul said that “at the name of Jesus every knee will bow” (Phil. 2:10), for although this is undoubtedly true, it is not what makes the name warm and sweet. Paul’s words could refer to such titles as “Almighty”, “Lord”, but the name Jesus is a living, real, personal name.

And you can find many other names. I am quite sure that if on some day you burst out “Oh, Joy!” or any similar exclamation, at that moment you have found your own relationship with God, different from the one you share with so many other people. I do not mean to say that one should not share the attitude that is common to all people. For God, we have words that belong to all of us, but there are also words that belong only to me or only to you, just as in human relationships there is a surname, there is a name given in baptism, there are nicknames. And it would be nice to have a name, a “nickname” with which you can call the Almighty God, which contains all the depth of your heart, all the warmth of which you are capable. This means: “In my uniqueness, this is how I perceive Your uniqueness.”

If, in the process of searching for where exactly you stand in relation to God, how alienated and distant you are, the time comes to knock, to go deeper and deeper within yourself, directing prayer towards yourself, to the point where there is a door, where to knock, where it can be opened – then the moment will come when the door will be open – but you must have a name for God. You must be able to speak a word that shows that it was you who sought Him, and not some interchangeable human being seeking an anonymous God.

In the process of searching, you will experience pain, longing, hope, expectation – the whole range of human emotions. God will be desired – and God will be a disappointment; He will be the one you yearn for – and the one you hate because He eludes you; the one whom you love more than anything in the world, without whom you cannot live – and whom you cannot forgive for not responding; and much more. And during this search, words will arise that you can turn to God from your own experience of searching for the city of Kitezh, words that belong to you personally. It may turn out that they coincide in many ways with words that were used by other people; but then they will cease to be anonymous words, they will be words that you share with other people, but which have truly become your own words. But do not use words from the general vocabulary, words that do not belong to you personally. When you hear the chain on the door jingle, when you feel the door opening, have your own words ready, call God by the name that He acquired and acquired for Himself in your own life. At this moment your meeting will take place. In the ever-deepening relationship that will continue to develop, you will have plenty of time to find other words with which you will cover up the words of rejection and horror. Like the martyrs spoken of in the Book of Revelation, you will say, “Thou hast been righteous in all Thy ways” (Rev. 15:3). And then these words will erase all words of bitterness, all appeals that sound cruel; but there will remain words, names that are personal, that belong specifically to you, and that will become a genuine relationship and a genuine means of being in a relationship with the Living God.

Everything I’ve said about learning to pray seems practical enough for me to try. It is quite obvious that there is much that needs to be said about the same, and much that needs to be said about other things, but here, try to act along the lines that I have suggested, and you will see that it is not a waste of time. Look for a name, and if you don’t find a name, then don’t be surprised that no one hears: you’re not calling.