Conversation one * Conversation two * Conversation three

First conversation

There seems to be no need to talk about the necessity and benefits of prayer. Everything that we live by in this world – the books of the Holy Fathers, church services, even the Holy Scriptures – all this will cease in that world, only one thing will remain – prayer. Without prayer we cannot live spiritually. The Holy Fathers say that “prayer… is the abiding and union of a person with God”1; they call prayer the breath of spiritual life. Such is our prayer, such is our spiritual life. “Just as our body, after the removal of the soul,” says Abba Evagrius, “becomes dead and stinking, so the soul in which prayer does not work is dead and stinking. But that deprivation of prayer should be considered worse than any death, this is clearly taught to us by the prophet Daniel, who was ready to die rather than deprive himself of prayer at any hour. We must remember God more often than we breathe.”2

In the 28th word of his “Ladder,” John Climacus calls prayer “the mirror of spiritual growth,” and in another place he says: “Prayer will show your dispensation; for theologians claim that prayer is the mirror of the monk (being saved – O.S.)”3.

But the Holy Fathers constantly say that we need to learn to pray. Prayer is not only those joyful moments when, standing at it, we feel God, but also work.

Learning to pray – but isn’t prayer a gift from God? The Holy Fathers say that every virtue, including prayer, is, of course, a gift from God, but nevertheless we must apply our diligence to everything, we must learn to pray. Bishop Theophan has a brochure entitled “How to Learn to Pray.” After reading just this title, many can say: look at what a “craft” state Orthodoxy has reached. It may not only seem strange to many, but they will call it blasphemy against God – to pray when you don’t want to, when you’re not in the mood: how can I pray, what kind of prayer will it be? The experience of the holy fathers says that this is not so. “Be courageous in all cases, and God Himself will be your teacher in prayer… For it (prayer. – O.S.) in itself has a teacher – God, who teaches man reason, gives prayer to those who pray and blesses the lives of the righteous (cf. Ps. 93:10, 1 Sam. 2:9)”4. It will not be we ourselves who will teach ourselves prayer, not even the holy fathers, but God Himself will teach us.

What is prayer in the sense of our spiritual state? What is our mental state during the process of prayer? From this point of view, John Climacus divides prayer into three parts – the beginning, the middle and the perfect prayer: “The beginning of prayer is to drive away incoming thoughts at their very appearance; the middle of it is that the mind should be contained in the words (prayer – O.S.) that we pronounce or think; and the perfection of prayer is admiration to the Lord.”5 Don’t you all remember those moments when you first felt that you lifted your heart to God, that you were no longer alone? Don’t we, who are imperfect and have not yet achieved anything, have this admiration for the Lord, joy that God hears you? A person who has just begun to pray is given the banishment of thoughts, and also, to a certain extent, that joyful state that is given to those who are perfect. Thus, the Lord on Mount Tabor showed the apostles the joy of being with Him, the joy of prayer. They have not yet done anything to deserve it; they received it for nothing. The apostles were so filled with this joy that the most ardent of them, Peter, asked the Lord to delay these moments. But the Lord allowed them to experience this joy so that in the future, in moments of doubt and hesitation, they would already have it in their experience and would remember a different state that was once granted to them not according to their merits.

These same disciples were then with the Lord in the Garden of Gethsemane, after the farewell conversation, the Last Supper, immediately after He revealed to them what He had not yet revealed to them – and the Lord prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane until he sweated blood, prayed fervently, and this was His last prayer. But the disciples did not fulfill His last request – to stay awake with Him, they fell asleep. The same thing happens to us.

The Lord, through His ineffable mercy and, so to speak, “spiritual pedagogy,” allows us, beginners, to immediately feel the pinnacle of prayer, freely giving us the great joy of admiration for Him. But those first moments are becoming increasingly rare. The process of struggle for their acquisition begins, the path of testing. Peter, even having previously known this joy, renounced the Savior, but on his way of the cross he acquired it again. He felt the light of Tabor in its entirety when he was crucified with his head down and rejoiced when he saw Christ coming for his soul.

We also have to do this work. The Gospel is not only a Divine book, but also a human one; it also reveals human weaknesses. When the gift of God departs from us and “peace” enters our soul, clouding the joy of prayer, this happens because we ourselves have not yet done anything. God has touched us, but we have not yet worked on our own, and therefore the same thing happens to us as to Peter.

Speaking about the beginning of prayer, John Climacus does not mean these first joyful moments, but what follows them. When we stand for prayer and want to talk with God, often instead various thoughts come one after another (the Holy Fathers call this state “floating thoughts”), and it begins to seem to us that this is unacceptable and prayer should be stopped. But John Climacus thinks differently: “The beginning of prayer is to drive away incoming thoughts…”6 “Continuously fight against the soaring of your thoughts,” he writes, “and when the mind is scattered, gather it to yourself, for God does not seek prayer without soaring from new novices. Therefore, do not grieve when you are plundered by thoughts, but be complacent and constantly call your mind to attention; for it is characteristic of one angel to never be plundered by thoughts.”7

If the beginning of the prayer path involves the need to struggle with thoughts, without grieving and being complacent, then in the middle of it it is necessary to enclose the mind in the words of prayer. By the word “mind,” the holy fathers do not mean the intellect, but the very center of spiritual life, our entire inner being. If we read this or that prayer, for example: “Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us,” then our mind should lie precisely in these words.

You can make the following comparison: I’m riding in a carriage and talking to someone. The conversation fascinates me. Despite the fact that I hear extraneous sounds and conversations, the center of my attention is directed to the words that I and my interlocutor pronounce. But suddenly I begin to feel that I’m no longer listening well to what my interlocutor is saying, that I’m catching words from here and there, and then – that I’m just pretending that I’m talking to only one person. Likewise, in prayer we can be distracted by all sorts of thoughts, but we must try not to let our mind wander. Meanwhile, we often even leave prayer when other thoughts are imposed on us, we follow them and go wherever we go in our thoughts. Our mind then lies not in prayer, but in something completely different – and this is because we did not drive away thoughts at the very beginning.

And here is what John Climacus says: “Always try to return your wandering thought to yourself, or, better said, conclude it in the words of prayer. If, due to your infancy, she becomes tired and falls into amusement, then again lead her into the words of prayer; for impermanence is characteristic of our mind. But He who is able to establish everything can give constancy to our minds.”8

It is important for us to realize that the holy fathers also went through all this, that for them, perfection was not only a gift, but also the end of the path. For beginners, the third state of prayer is given freely at the first stage, so that they know where they are going and what they are fighting for.

Perfect prayer consists in the fact that words disappear completely, a person directly sees God, and his heart is caught up in Him. For holy ascetics, such prayer is a well-deserved gift. And outside of this there is no other way. John Climacus formulated better and more clearly than anyone else what prayer is, but in other holy fathers, for example in Symeon the New Theologian, we find quite similar thoughts. The Holy Fathers approach this issue from different sides, and it is felt that there are no contradictions between them. Prayer needs to be learned, and in the same sense as one generally learns any art or science.

The question arises whether we should pray according to patristic experience, with the prayers that the ascetics composed, or learn to compose them ourselves and begin this path anew.

It is already clear to us that those who want to fight for the Kingdom of Christ need to follow in their lives the experience of the holy fathers, learn from the experience left by their predecessors. This does not destroy one’s own creativity, but, on the contrary, it reveals it even more and makes it more perfect. That is why the Holy Church directs us to pray with the same prayers that the holy ascetics prayed. And even from the prayer experience of the holy fathers, she does not accept everything, choosing the best from the best. Thus, of the numerous prayers of Simeon the New Theologian, only two were taken for use.

For those who have at least some experience in the matter of prayer, it is clear why the holy fathers remind those who stand for prayer about the deeds of the evil one and command them to remain at it, despite all his tricks, despite all their absent-mindedness. And we, who generally devote little time to prayer, who always have no time, give up without a fight. It seems to us that when there is no desire, no motivation, there is no need to pray. “When you remain in prayer for a long time and do not see fruit, do not say: I have not gained anything. For the very stay in prayer is already an acquisition; and what good is greater than this, to cleave to the Lord and remain unceasingly in union with Him?”9

If we walk this path with humility, the Lord will “count” this scattered prayer to us. Only on our part we must make every effort. This is what the Optina elders Ambrose and Anatoly say. A beginner has no reason to even think about prayer without floating thoughts.

In the struggle for the Kingdom of God, the first place belongs not to virtue, but to prayer. What does a person strive for? He seeks connection with God. And if so, then everything must be based on prayer. Mark the Ascetic says that it is impossible for us to restore the image of God in ourselves except through the grace of God and faith, when a person with great humility abides with his mind in unceasing prayer.

We Russians are broad, impetuous natures, without restraint, ready to do anything on the spur of the moment. And we need to understand: prayer requires hard work.

Second conversation

The Holy Fathers instruct us: if you pray only when you get up to pray, then you are not praying at all. We must constantly abide and unite with God: “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17), says the apostle. And Saint Gregory Palamas exhorts us to apply this commandment not only to monks, but also to every Christian. “Let no one think, my Christian brothers, that only clergy and monks have the duty to pray constantly and always, and not the laity. No no; All of us Christians have a duty to always remain in prayer. For look what His Holiness Patriarch Philotheus of Constantinople writes in the life of Saint Gregory of Thessalonica:

This saint had a beloved friend, Job by name, a man of the simplest, but of many virtues, with whom once talking, the bishop said about prayer, that every Christian in general should always strive in prayer and pray unceasingly, as the Apostle Paul commands all Christians in general: “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17), – and as the prophet David says about himself, despite the fact that he was a king and had care for his whole kingdom: “I have seen the Lord before me” (Ps. 15:8), i.e. I always mentally see the Lord before me in my prayer. And Gregory the Theologian teaches all Christians and tells them that they should remember the name of God in prayer more often than inhale air. Speaking this and much more to his friend Job, the saint also added that, obeying the commandments of the saints, we must not only always pray ourselves, but also teach others the same, everyone in general: monks, and laymen, and wise, and simple, and husbands, and wives, and children, and encourage them to pray unceasingly.

Elder Job, who heard this, thought this was a new matter, and he began to argue, telling the saint that praying is always the work of only ascetics and monks, who live outside the world and its vanities, and not of the laity, who have so many worries and affairs. The saint brought new evidence in support of this truth and new irrefutable proofs of it, but Elder Job was not convinced by them either. Then Saint Gregory, avoiding verbosity and bickering, fell silent, after which everyone went to his cell.

When Job was then praying alone in his cell, an angel sent from God appeared to him, “Whoever desires to be saved by all man and to come into the understanding of truth” (1 Tim. 2:4), and reproaching him for why he argued with Saint Gregory and opposed the obvious cause on which the salvation of Christians depends, he told him on behalf of God to take heed to himself in advance and beware of doing anything contrary to this to anyone. soul-saving work and resist the will of God, even in your mind, so that you do not hold thoughts contrary to this and do not allow yourself to think differently from what Saint Gregory said. Then the simplest elder Job immediately hurried to Saint Gregory and, falling at his feet, asked for forgiveness for his contradiction and curiosity, and revealed to him everything that the angel of the Lord had said.

You see now, my brothers, how Christians in general have a duty, from the least to the greatest, to always pray the mental prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me!” so that their mind and their heart always have the skill to utter these sacred words. Be convinced how much this pleases God and how much great good comes from this, when He, out of His immeasurable love for mankind, sent a heavenly angel to announce to us, so that no one else would have any doubt about this.10

For the saints, unceasing prayer was the so-called mental activity. But this is the measure of the perfect, and we cannot even think about it. We need, first of all, to try to have a constant memory of God, and then we will see that the Lord is always with us, that it is not He who leaves us, but we who abandon and forget Him, remembering Him only when we need to get up for a prayer rule, for our morning or evening conversation with Him. But such a conversation will be possible only when we constantly remain and unite with Him at other times. The memory of God should also be accompanied by a short invocation, said from time to time: “Lord, have mercy,” “Lord, save,” or some other one, depending on who prefers which prayer.

What can help us in constant remembrance of God? The Holy Fathers say that prayer has silence as its mother. “Prudent silence is the mother of prayer…”11 We all often feel that we are exhausted because we have “blathered out” our soul, exhausted it with that “much talk” against which the holy fathers warn. In order to collect your soul and drive away thoughts, you must try to talk less, especially not to judge or over-judge, to say only what is necessary. Verbalism has the most harmful effect on prayer, “darkening it,” and “the lover of silence approaches God and, secretly conversing with Him, is enlightened by Him”12.

We already understand that we need to fight thoughts and return the mind to the words of prayer when we stand in prayer. But this applies not only to the prayer rule, to prayer as a conversation with God, but also to the constant feeling of our being with God, to the constant remembrance of Him. Otherwise, even with the prayer rule, we will not force our scattered mind to turn to God.

“If you constantly train your mind not to move away from you,” says St. John Climacus, “then it will be near you even during meals. If he wanders everywhere without restraint, he will never be with you.”13 So, we need to return our mind to God not only while standing in prayer, but to prepare for a conversation with Him all day, all our lives – and this in itself will be prayer. We should especially do this before our morning or evening prayer.

In addition to prudent silence, obedience also prepares us for prayer. Here is what the same John Climacus says about this: “I saw those shining in obedience and, if possible, not neglecting the memory of God, performed with the mind, who, having stood up for prayer, soon mastered the mind and shed streams of tears, because they were prepared by holy obedience.”14.

The holy fathers say about preparing to stand before God in prayer: “We, who are coming to appear before the King and God, to converse with Him, must not set out on this journey unprepared, so that He, from afar, seeing us who do not have the weapons and clothing that those who stand before the King should have, does not command His servants and servants to bind us and cast us far from His face, and our petitions tear it up and throw it in our faces”15.

Many of us begin to pray while finishing some task – combing our hair or washing our face, for example, as if not seeing any difference between a conversation with God and ordinary activities. Meanwhile, even with a change in physical state, a person does not remain unprepared: when going out into the cold, they put on a fur coat, in the heat – light clothes, etc. When we get up to pray, we want to immediately begin fighting for it. When we have not yet struggled to prepare for it, we have not expelled from our soul everything bad, everything worldly that is in it, and we want to present it together with the words of prayer before the face of God.

We often chat on the way to the temple and, entering it, continue this activity; if we go alone, then we think about our affairs and also do nothing to prepare for entering the temple. And if we still have many acquaintances here, conversations, trials and gossip will immediately begin, and the beginning of the service takes us by surprise (and it’s good if we come to the beginning), not having the weapons and attire that the upcoming Tsar should have.

“Behold, the Bridegroom comes at midnight, and blessed is the servant, who will be found vigilantly”16 – this applies not only to the Last Judgment, but also to our usual standing before God, when we have every opportunity to prepare and every time we do not do this. “Whoever, while engaged in any task, continues it even when the hour of prayer has come, is scolded by demons; for this is the intention of these thieves, to steal something else from us at one time.”17 “During prayer, do not even consider necessary spiritual things. If not, you will lose the best.”18

What is the most important thing in preparing for prayer, what should you pay the most attention to? “When you go to appear before the Lord, let the whole robe of your soul be woven from threads, or rather, from the pledge of unforgettable malice. If not, then you will not get any benefit from prayer.”19 This unmemorable malice must certainly be with us, otherwise nothing will come of our prayer. Meanwhile, we often begin prayer with anger at someone, and in this case our prayer is doomed to failure, “our petition will be torn apart.” This is our usual doing. The Holy Fathers call: “Rising from love of peace and lust, reject cares, put aside your thoughts, renounce your body; for prayer is nothing other than the alienation of the visible and invisible world”20. “Let us now put aside every care of this life,” says the Cherubic Song. “Let us put aside care”, i.e. Let’s forget about everything that we do in this life that is bad and evil. “Just as it is an abomination to an earthly king who, when standing before him, turns his face away from him and converses with the enemies of his ruler, so is he who stands before him in prayer and entertains unclean thoughts is an abomination to the Lord.”21 Take any prayer book: there, following the words “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,” it is suggested to abandon every thought, calm the soul and then only begin to pray.

But we must not only prepare for prayer, we must also protect ourselves after it. It usually seems to us: I prayed, did my job, and that’s it. But that’s not true. “Pay attention to yourself soberly after prayer, and you will see that crowds of demons, defeated by us, try after prayer to defile us with unclean dreams.”22 What most overcomes us after prayer is the passion of anger. “When you pray soberly, you will soon fight against anger; for our enemies usually do this.”23

Often, when a person comes home from church from communion, he suddenly quarrels with everyone. True, one can say: “a man’s enemies are his own household” (Matthew 10:36), although here not in the Gospel sense. This plunges many into despair: it doesn’t matter whether you prayed or didn’t pray – there’s no point in going to church. But this will not happen if you guard yourself after prayer, and especially guard yourself from anger. We must protect ourselves because the Lord, as John Climacus says, will ask us for the fruits of our prayer, and we will not have fruits if we do not protect ourselves.

So, working on prayer, we must:

1. Constantly remain with God through the acquisition of prudent silence and obedience.

2. When starting to pray, put aside all earthly cares and keep a mindless malice.

3. After prayer, protect yourself from anger and other passions, so as not to answer to the Lord for the loss of the fruits of prayer.

Conversation three

So far we have been talking about what could be called the “technique of prayer.” But what is prayer in its essence? Can’t I pray simply with the words with which my soul itself pours out and prays? Is prayer possible as my personal creativity? Do I really have to slavishly follow what is in prayer books and church hymns, really can’t create it myself? We understand this way of thinking. But like everything we talked about here, this question must also be sanctified by patristic experience.

Now in Moscow and throughout Rus’ there is a struggle for the “Living Church”. If we throw away all the political dirt, all the intrigues, then there is something pure there that attracts hearts there, because there are sincere people there too. Now they say that the Church “lies in paralysis”, that there is no living spirit in it. If we undertake the study of any science, we cannot study it from books alone, especially if this science is experimental. Otherwise, our studies will be unsuccessful. Any naturalist, physician or chemist will tell you this. But it’s like that everywhere.

You cannot study science the way of books; there is something in it that is subject to experimental verification. It’s the same in art. If any child prodigy tried to follow his own path in art, then every professor would advise him, first of all, to join the great experimental wealth of this field, and then, having conquered this soil, to create his own on it. It’s the same in religion.

Anyone who thinks that the entire patristic experience can be learned only from books, any elder will say, as Elder Leonid said, that these creations must be read “by deeds.” Our position is this: we are not even children, we are newborn guys who still don’t know how to crawl, we have not at all tested the paths of the holy fathers with our experience. We need to learn, but not just from books. These books are for the believer what the history of literature is for the student of literature. We must test every word here on our own experience, create the patristic experience for ourselves anew. Otherwise it will only be information. And so, with God, let’s pray. By accepting the patristic experience, we become warriors of the Kingdom of God and must fight, must work. One of the parts of this work is studying the word of God and working on oneself in connection with this. However, the most important thing is the destruction of the corruption of our soul. When we say that we need to protect ourselves from all thoughts (otherwise we cannot even pray), the question arises: is prayer something separate from the entire struggle for salvation, from everything else – the experience of the holy fathers? The soul reaches out to God to cleanse itself. Isaac the Syrian says that prayer is the mortification of concepts inherent in the will of carnal life. This is the task of our prayer – the mortification of not only sin in us, but also the very “concepts inherent in the will of carnal life.” Therefore, to patiently remain in prayer means to deny oneself. And constant stay in prayer is keeping the mind away from bad and impure thoughts. So we must learn to pray.

The Holy Fathers say that our dispensation is revealed in prayer – prayer is a mirror of spiritual growth. If I struggle with myself throughout my entire life and if I constantly strive to implement the patristic experience in my life and in this struggle, how can I bring into prayer, at the highest moment of this struggle, everything that is in my soul, with everything bad and unclean? Shouldn’t I join in the prayer of the perfect? Her words contain all the patristic ascetic experience that we are trying to put into practice. Having started to pray myself, to lift up my own soul, which has not yet been purified, to God every day, will I not become self-denial, but self-affirmation – affirmation of myself precisely in that “will of carnal life” that is required to be renounced? And such people not only do not renounce themselves, but also force themselves on others, trying to draw them along with them in impromptu prayer. Isn’t this the devil’s work? Can an untuned instrument make the right sounds?

For us, this issue should be illuminated by the experience of the holy fathers. They say that you should first learn to pray with the help of the prayer of the perfect, and then you can ask for your own. If the Church is the Body of Christ, then we cannot at all consider that we are constantly in the Church, because sin cuts us off from it, but we again join it through the sacraments of repentance and communion.

Entering the church, we hear a prayer written by one of the holy fathers (and not all the prayers of the holy fathers entered church use, but only the best of them), and we know that the only true members of the Body of Christ are the saints. Not only we, but also the Heavenly Church, and even mainly she, participate in church services, because who knows whether we are not cut off from the Church. The prayer of the perfect lifts us up, for it is a genuine spiritual experience, and it is in it that the spiritual structure of the souls of the saints is most revealed. From this it is clear that we must treat all this in the same way as a scientist treats what has been done before him in science. Only by perceiving all this and going through his experience can he continue to work successfully.

In the Church, in religion, the same law applies as in the rest of life. After all, praying the patristic prayer does not mean completely abandoning your own creativity, but you need to go through school. However, at school you can try your hand at yourself; school elevates us. There can be nothing outside this school. And if we apply the patristic experience in our lives, then how can we not apply it in prayer? When we talk about the patristic experience, we must first of all keep in mind the prayer experience of the ascetics, for in prayer lies and most of all the experience of the holy fathers is revealed. God helps us first of all through prayer. He Himself reveals Himself in it.

Prayer is the revelation of the soul itself. Our happiness is that we have the patristic prayer – the prayer of the true members of the Body of Christ: after all, when we pray with it, we pray with them. Church prayer is dear to us because in church we pray together with the Heavenly Church.

The Liturgy, the transubstantiation of the Gifts, is performed not according to the personal merit of the priest and the faithful present, but through the prayers of and for the members of the Heavenly Church. In the prayer pronounced by the priest: “We still offer this verbal service to You…” – the Church prays for all people, for sinners, and righteous, and saints, and concludes this prayer with the exclamation: “Fairly (let us pray – O.S.) for the Most Holy, Most Pure, Most Blessed, Glorious Lady of our Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary”24. Remember – “Let all human flesh be silent”25, “Now the powers of heaven serve with us invisibly”26? If we perceive church prayer this way, then it becomes clear why it is effective: here the holy saints of God pray with us. But even at home, when you pray alone and read the prayers of Basil the Great, Macarius the Great and other ascetics, you are still not alone, you are not praying alone – they are praying with you. This is a great happiness – after all, they are not on earth now, and we have the greatest grace to pray with them. Our usual attitude towards church prayer is the fruit of our intellectual superficiality in relation to the Church. “It wouldn’t hurt to send us all to school,” as Goethe’s Mephistopheles says, just not to the one he’s talking about, but to the patristic one. What revealed our inadequacy? We lost everything we had. The era of St. Sergius, the 15th and 16th centuries created Russian icon painting. But the 17th, 18th centuries and beyond are, in a certain sense, a decline. After all, there were many talented artists in the 19th century, but did any of them paint icons? They sometimes had paintings of religious content, but not icons. An icon is, first of all, a prayer.

Take the iconography of the Trinity Cathedral in St. Sergius Lavra. Prayer covers you as soon as you enter there, especially now that the vestments have been removed from the icons. I think that our era is not destined to become an era of new church creativity. Creativity, of course, is possible, but not now. God would allow us ourselves to join the church treasury created by the saints of God, make it the property of our own inner experience and preserve it for the future. We are destined to plow the soil, and others will sow.

* * *

Notes

Venerable John of Sinai. Ladder. Ed. 7. Holy Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, 1908 (hereinafter referred to as the Ladder). P.246. Word 28.1.

Evagrius. Instructions on asceticism, 8, 3 / Philokalia. T.1. M., 1895. P.606.

Ladder. P.252. Word 28, 34; hereinafter marked “O.S.” Father Sergius’ comments are given when quoting.

Right there. pp.255–256. Word 28, 64.

Right there. P.249. Word 28,19.

Right there. P.249. Word 28,19.

Right there. P.62. Word 4, 92.

Right there. P.249. Word 28.17.

Right there. P.251. Word. 28, 29.

From the life of St. Gregory Palamas / Philokalia. T.5. M., 1900. P.477–478.

Ladder. P.113. Word 11, 3.

Right there. P.114. Word 11, 5.

Right there. pp.249–250. Word 28, 27.

Right there. P.252. Word 28, 31.

Right there. P.247. Word 28, 3.

Troparion of the daily Midnight Office and Matins on Holy Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

Ladder. P.252. Word 28, 35.

Right there. C 255. Word 28, 59.

Right there. P.247. Word 28, 4.

Right there. pp.250–251. Word 28, 25.

Right there. P.254. Word 28, 54.

Right there. pp. 154–155. Word 20.19.

Right there. P.252. Word 28, 38.

From the prayer of the priest at the Liturgy of the Faithful.

Lenten Triodion. On Holy and Great Saturday at the liturgy instead of the Cherubic Song.

Cherubic Hymn at the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts.