Contents
Preface
The Essence of Prayer
Lord’s Prayer
Bartimaeus’ Prayer
Thought and Prayer
Unanswered prayers and petitions
Jesus Prayer
Labor prayer
Silent Prayer
Prayer for Beginners

Preface1

Prayer means personal relationships to me. I was not a believer, then I suddenly discovered God, and immediately He appeared before me as the highest value and the whole meaning of life, but at the same time as a person. I think that prayer means nothing to someone for whom there is no object of prayer. You cannot teach prayer to a person who has no sense of the Living God; you can teach him to behave exactly as if he believed, but it will not be a living movement, which is true prayer. Therefore, as an introduction to these conversations on prayer, I would specifically like to convey my conviction in the personal reality of such a God with whom a relationship can be established. Then I will ask the reader to regard God as a living person, as a neighbor, and to express this knowledge in the same categories in which he expresses his relationship with a brother or friend. I think this is the most important thing.

One of the reasons why prayer, public or private, seems so dead or so formal is that the act of worship in the heart that communes with God is too often missing. Every expression, verbal or in action, can be a help, but all this is only an expression of the main thing, namely, the deep silence of communication.

From the experience of human relationships, we all know that love and friendship are deep when we can remain silent with each other. If we need to talk to maintain contact, we must admit with confidence and sadness that the relationship is still superficial; therefore, if we want to prayerfully worship God, we must first of all learn to experience the joy of silent abiding with Him. It’s easier than it might seem at first; it takes a little time, a little trust and determination to start.

One day the “Cure of Ars,” a French saint of the early nineteenth century, asked an old peasant what he was doing, sitting for hours in church, apparently not even praying; the peasant replied: “I look at Him, He looks at me, and we feel good together.” This man learned to talk to God without disturbing the silence of intimacy with words. If we know how to do this, then we can use any form of prayer. If we want the prayer itself to consist in the words that we use, then we will become hopelessly tired of them, because without the depth of silence these words will be superficial and boring.

But how inspiring words can be when there is silence behind them, when they are filled with a right spirit:

“Lord, you open my mouth, and my mouth will declare your praise” (Ps. 50:17).

The essence of prayer

Almost from the very beginning, the Gospel of Matthew brings us face to face with the very essence of prayer. The Magi saw the long-awaited star; they immediately set off to find the King; they came to the manger, fell on their knees, bowed and brought gifts; they expressed prayer in its perfection, that is, in contemplation and reverent worship.

More or less popular literature on prayer often says that prayer is an exciting journey. You can often hear: “Learn to pray! Praying is so interesting, so exciting, it is the discovery of a new world, you will meet God, you will find the path to spiritual life.” In a sense this is, of course, true; but this forgets something much more serious: that prayer is a dangerous journey, and we cannot embark on it without risk. The Apostle Paul says that “it is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb. 10:31). Therefore, to consciously go out to meet the Living God means to go on a terrible journey: in a sense, every meeting with God is the Last Judgment. Whenever we appear in the presence of God, whether in the sacraments or in prayer, we are doing something very dangerous, because, according to the word of Scripture, God is fire. And unless we are ready to completely surrender ourselves to the divine flame and become a bush burning in the desert that burned without being consumed, this flame will scorch us, because the experience of prayer can only be known from the inside and cannot be trifled with.

Approaching God is always a discovery of both the beauty of God and the distance that lies between Him and us. “Distance” is an imprecise word, for it is not defined by the fact that God is holy and we are sinners. The distance is determined by the sinner’s relationship to God. We can approach God only if we do so with the consciousness that we are coming to judgment. If we come condemning ourselves; if we come because we love Him in spite of our own unfaithfulness; if we come to Him, loving Him more than the well-being in which He is not, then we are open to Him and He is open to us, and there is no distance; The Lord comes very close, in love and compassion. But if we stand before God in the armor of our pride, our self-confidence, if we stand before Him as if we have the right to it, if we stand and demand an answer from Him, then the distance separating the creation from the Creator becomes infinite. The English writer C. S. Lewis2 expresses the idea that in this sense, distance is relative: when Dennitsa appeared before God, asking Him, at that very moment when he asked his question not in order to humbly understand, but in order to force God to answer, he found himself at an infinite distance from God. God did not move, neither did Satan, but even without any movement they found themselves infinitely distant from each other.

Whenever we approach God, the contrast between what He is and what we are becomes terrifyingly clear. We may not be aware of this all the time that we live, as it were, away from God, all the time when His presence and His image remain dim in our thoughts and in our perception; but the closer we get to God, the sharper the contrast becomes. It is not the constant thought of one’s sins, but the vision of God’s holiness that allows the saints to recognize their sinfulness. When we look at ourselves without the fragrant background of God’s presence, sins and virtues seem to be something small and, in some sense, insignificant; Only against the background of the Divine presence do they appear in all relief and acquire all their depth and tragedy.

Whenever we approach God, we are faced with either life or death. This encounter is life if we come to Him in the proper spirit and are renewed by Him; it is destruction if we approach Him without a reverent spirit and a contrite heart; destruction if we bring pride or presumption. Therefore, before setting off on the so-called “exciting journey of prayer,” we must not forget for a moment that nothing more significant, more awe-inspiring, can happen than the meeting with God that we have entered into. We must realize that in this process we will lose life: the old Adam in us must die. We hold tightly to the old man, we fear for him, and it is so difficult not only at the beginning of the journey, but also years later, to feel that we are completely on the side of Christ, against the old Adam!

Prayer is a journey that brings not exciting experiences, but new responsibility. While we are in ignorance, nothing is asked of us, but as soon as we know something, we are responsible for how we use our knowledge. It may be given to us as a gift, but we are responsible for every particle of truth that we have learned, and once it becomes our own, we cannot leave it inactive, but must manifest it in our behavior. And in this sense, we are required to answer for every truth that we understand.

Only with a feeling of fear, reverence for God, and the deepest reverence can we begin to take the risk of prayer, and we must grow to it in our outer life as fully and definitely as possible. It is not enough to sit comfortably in a chair and say: “Here, I begin to worship God, in the face of God.” We must understand that if Christ were standing before us, we would behave differently, and we must learn to behave in the presence of the invisible Lord, as we would behave in the presence of the Lord who has become visible to us.

First of all, this presupposes a certain state of mind, which is reflected in the state of the body. If Christ were here, before us, and we stood completely transparent, mind and body, to His gaze, then we would experience reverence, fear of God, love, maybe even horror, but we would not behave as freely as we usually do. The modern world has lost the spirit of prayer to a large extent, and the discipline of the body has become something secondary in the minds of people, whereas it is far from secondary. We forget that we are not a soul living in a body, but a person consisting of body and soul, and that, according to the Apostle Paul, we are called to glorify God both in our bodies and in our souls; our bodies, like our souls, are called to the glory of the Kingdom of God (1 Cor. 6:20).

Too often prayer does not have such meaning in our lives that everything else falls aside to give way to it. For us prayer is an addition to many other things; we want God to be here not because there is no life without Him, not because He is the highest value, but because it would be so pleasant, in addition to all the great benefits of God, to also have His presence. He is an addition to our comfort. And when we look for Him in such a mood, we do not meet Him.

However, despite all that has been said, prayer, no matter how dangerous it may be, is still the best way to move forward to the fulfillment of our calling and to become fully human, that is, to enter into complete unity with God and ultimately become what the Apostle Peter calls “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4).

Love and friendship do not grow unless we are willing to sacrifice a lot for them; and in the same way, we must be ready to give up a lot in order to give first place to God. “Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God
with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all
according to your thoughts” (Luke 10:27). This seems to be a very simple commandment, and, however, there is much more content in these words than it seems at first glance. We all know what it means to love someone with all our hearts. We know how joyful it is not only to meet a loved one, but even just to think about him, what joy this gives. This is how we should try to love God, and every time His name is mentioned, it should fill our heart and soul with endless warmth. God should always be in our minds, when in fact we think of Him only occasionally.

As for loving God with all our strength, this is possible for us only if with conscious intention we reject from ourselves everything that is not God’s in us; by an effort of will we must constantly turn ourselves to God – both when we pray (then it is easier, because in prayer we are already focused on God), and when we do something (which requires training, because in this case we are focused on some material achievement, which we must devote to God with special effort).

The Magi have come a long way, and no one knows what difficulties they had to overcome. Each of us travels just like them. They carried gifts: gold for the King, incense for God and myrrh for the man who was about to suffer death. Where can we get gold, frankincense and myrrh – we who owe God for everything? We know that everything we have is given to us by God and is not even ours forever or securely. Everything can be taken from us except love, and this makes love the only thing we can give. Everything else – members of our body, mind, property – can be taken from us by force; but love – there is no way to get it from us unless we give it ourselves. In relation to our love, we are as free as we are not free in any of the other manifestations of our soul or body. And although at the core even love is a gift from God, because we ourselves cannot cause it in ourselves, however, when we have it, it is the only thing that we can refuse or that we can give. In “The Diary of a Country Priest,” J. Bernanos says that we can give God our pride: “Give your pride along with everything else, give it all.” Pride given in this way turns into a gift of love, and every gift of love is pleasing to God.

“Love your enemies,…bless those who hate you” (Matthew 5:44) is a commandment, the fulfillment of which may be more or less easy for us; but forgiving people who cause suffering to someone we love is a completely different matter. Here it may seem that you are committing betrayal. And yet, the greater our love for someone who suffers, the more we are able to share the suffering and forgive, and in this sense, the greatest love is achieved when we, together with Rabbi Egel Michael, can say: “I am my beloved,” “I and my beloved are one.” As long as we say “I” and “he,” we do not share suffering and cannot accept it. At the foot of the Cross, the Mother of God did not stand in tears, as is often depicted in Western painting; She achieved such complete unity with Her Son that She had nothing to resist. She went through the crucifixion with Christ; She experienced her own death. The Mother completed what she began on the day of the bringing of Christ to the temple, when She gave Her Son. Alone among all the sons of Israel, He was accepted as a blood sacrifice. And She, who brought Him then, accepted the consequences of the rite performed by Her, which became reality. And just as He was then one with Her, so now She was completely one with Him, and She had nothing to resist.

Through love we become one with the one we love, and love allows us to share without a trace not only suffering, but also our attitude towards suffering and those who cause it. It is impossible to imagine the Mother of God or the disciple John protesting against what was the clear will of the crucified Son of God. No one takes My life from Me, but I myself lay it down (John 10:18). He died voluntarily, by His consent, for the salvation of the world; His death was this salvation, and therefore those who believed in Him and wanted to be one with Him could share the suffering of His death, could go through the passions with Him, but could not reject them, could not turn against the crowd that crucified Christ, because this crucifixion was the will of Christ Himself.

We can resist someone’s suffering, we can rebel against someone’s death, either when the person himself, whether rightly or wrongly, opposes them, or when we do not share his intentions and his attitude towards suffering; but in this case, our love for this person is insufficient love and creates division. This is the kind of love that Peter showed when Christ, on the road to Jerusalem, told His disciples that he was going to die. “Peter, having called Him away, began to rebuke Him,” but Christ answered: “Get away from Me, Satan, because you think not about the things of God, but about the things of men” (Mark 8:32-33). We can imagine that the wife of the thief crucified to the left of Christ was full of the same protest against the death of her husband as he was; in this sense they were completely united, but both were wrong.

To share with Christ His suffering, crucifixion, death means to accept unconditionally all these events in the same mood as He, that is, to accept them voluntarily, to suffer together with the Man of Sorrows, to remain here in silence – the silence of Christ Himself, broken only by a few decisive words, in the silence of true communion; not in a pitying silence, but in a silence of compassion that makes us capable of growing into complete unity with the other, so that there is no longer one and the other, but one life and one death.

Throughout history, people have repeatedly witnessed persecution and were not afraid, but shared suffering without protest: for example, Sophia, the mother who stood next to each of her daughters, Faith, Hope and Love, inspiring them to death, or many other martyrs who helped each other but never turned against their tormentors. The spirit of martyrdom can be illustrated by a number of examples. The first example expresses the very spirit of martyrdom, its attitude: the spirit of love, which cannot be broken by suffering or injustice. The priest, who was imprisoned very young and was released as a broken man, was asked what was left of him, and he answered: “There was nothing left of me, they literally erased everything, only love remained.” Such words indicate the correct attitude of the speaker, and anyone who shares his tragedy with him must share his unshakable love.

Here is an example of a man who returned from Buchenwald, and when asked about himself, said that his suffering was nothing compared to his sorrow for the unfortunate German youths who could be so cruel, and that he found no peace thinking about the state of their souls. His concern was not for himself (and he spent four years there) and not for the countless people suffering and dying around him, but for his tormentors. Those who suffered were with Christ; those who showed cruelty did not.

The third example is a prayer written by a Jewish prisoner in a concentration camp:

Peace to all people of evil will! Let all revenge, all call for punishment and retribution cease… Crimes have filled the cup, the human mind is no longer able to contain them. Countless hosts of martyrs…

Therefore, do not place their suffering on the scales of Your justice. Lord, do not turn them against their tormentors with a terrible accusation in order to exact terrible retribution from them. Give them something different! Put on the scales, in defense of executioners, informers, traitors and all people of evil will – the courage, spiritual strength of the tortured, their humility, their high nobility, their constant internal struggle and invincible hope that dried up tears, their love, their tormented, broken hearts, remaining adamant and faithful in the face of death itself, even in moments of extreme weakness… Put all this, Lord, before Your eyes in forgiveness of sins as a ransom, for the sake of the triumph of righteousness, take into account good, not evil!

And may we remain in the memory of our enemies not as their victims, not as a terrible nightmare, not as ghosts relentlessly pursuing them, but as assistants in their struggle to eradicate the rampantness of their criminal passions. We don’t want anything more from them. And when all this is over, grant us to live as people among people, and may peace return to our tormented land – peace to people of good will and everyone else…

One Russian bishop said that for a Christian to die as a martyr is a special advantage, because no one except a martyr will be able to stand before the Last Judgment in the face of God’s Throne of Judgment and say: “According to Your word and example, I have forgiven; You have nothing more to exact from them.” This means that the one who suffered martyrdom in Christ, whose love did not waver in suffering, acquires the unconditional power of forgiveness over those who caused suffering. This also applies on a much more mundane level, on the level of everyday life; anyone who suffers the slightest injustice on the part of another can forgive or refuse forgiveness. But this is a double-edged sword; if we do not forgive, then we ourselves will not receive forgiveness.

French Roman Catholics, with their keen sense of justice and the glory of God, are clearly aware of the victory that Christ can win through the suffering of people: since 1797 there has been an Order of the Atonement, which, in constant adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, prays for the forgiveness of the crimes of the whole earth and the forgiveness of individual sinners through the prayers of their victims. The Order also sets itself the goal of cultivating the spirit of love in children and adults.

The story about the French general Maurice d’Elbe during the revolutionary wars is also typical. His soldiers grabbed several “blues” and were going to shoot them; the general was forced to yield, but insisted that the soldiers first read the Lord’s Prayer aloud, which they did; and when it came to the words “And forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors” (Matthew 6:12), they understood, wept and released the captives. Later, in 1794, General d’Elbe himself was shot by the Blues.

The French Jesuit Jean Danielou in his book “The Pagan Saints” writes that suffering is the connecting link between the righteous and sinners: the righteous who suffer suffering and the sinners who cause it. Without this link, they would be completely disconnected; the righteous and the sinners would remain on parallel lines that never intersect and could not meet. In this case, the righteous would have no power over sinners, because it is impossible to have a relationship with someone you do not meet.

Lord’s Prayer

The Lord’s Prayer, although it is so simple and used so often, is a big problem and a difficult prayer. This is the only prayer that the Lord gave. In a sense, this is not only a prayer, but also a way of life, set out in the form of a prayer: it is an image of the gradual ascent of the soul from slavery to freedom. The prayer is constructed with amazing precision. Just as the circles diverging from the fall of a pebble on the surface of a pond can be observed further and further to the shores, or in the opposite direction – from the shores to the source of movement, so the Lord’s Prayer can be analyzed, starting either from the first words or from the last. It is incomparably easier to begin by going from the outside to the center, although a different path is correct for Christ and the Church.

This is the prayer of sonship – “Our Father.” And although in a certain sense it can be pronounced by anyone who approaches the Lord, it quite accurately expresses the attitude only of those who are in the Church of God, who in Christ have found the way to their Father, because only through Christ and in Him do we become sons of God.

This teaching of spiritual life can be better understood when considered in parallel with the story of the Exodus and in the context of the Beatitudes. When we start with the last words of the prayer and go to the first, we see that this is a path of ascension: our starting point – at the end of the prayer – determines the state of captivity; The pinnacle of ascent—the first words of prayer—determines our state of sonship.

The people of God, who came to the land of Egypt free, gradually fell into a state of slavery. The conditions of his life constantly reminded him of his enslavement: the work became harder and harder, the situation more and more miserable; but this was not enough to make the Jews strive for true freedom. If a distressed state goes beyond some limits, it can lead to rebellion, violence, an attempt to get rid of a difficult, unbearable situation; but, in essence, neither rebellion nor flight makes us free, because freedom is, first of all, an internal state in relation to God, to oneself and to the world around us.

Each time the Jews tried to leave the country, new and increasingly difficult labor was imposed on them. When it was necessary to make bricks, they were denied the straw necessary for this, and Pharaoh said: “Let them go and gather straw for themselves” (Ex. 5:7). He wanted them to become so exhausted, so crushed by their hard work, that the thought of rebellion or deliverance would no longer enter their minds. In the same way, there is no hope for us while we are enslaved by the prince of this world, the devil, with all the forces that he has to capture human souls and bodies in order to keep them away from the Living God. Unless God Himself comes to free us, there will be no liberation, but eternal slavery; and the first words that we find in the Lord’s Prayer are precisely about this: “Deliver us from evil” (Matthew 6:13). Deliverance from the evil one is exactly what was done in the land of Egypt through Moses and what is accomplished in baptism by the power of God given to His Church. The Word of God sounds in this world, calling everyone to freedom, giving hope coming from heaven to those who have lost hope on earth. This word of God is preached and meets a response in the human soul, making a person a disciple of the Church: he stands at the entrance door, as if he had heard the call and came to listen (Rom. 10:17).

When a student decides to become a free person in the Kingdom of the Lord, the Church takes certain actions. What is the use of asking a slave, who is still in the power of his master, whether he wants to become free? He knows that if he dares to ask for the freedom offered, he will be severely punished as soon as he is left alone with his master again. Because of fear and the habit of slavery, a person cannot ask for freedom until he is freed from the power of the devil. Therefore, before anything is asked of the one who stands here with new hope of divine salvation, he is released from the power of Satan. This is the meaning of the incantatory prayers that are read at the beginning of the rite of baptism in both the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches. Only when a person has become free from the bonds of slavery is he asked whether he renounces the devil and whether he wants to unite with Christ. And only after a free answer the Church accepts him and makes him a member of the Body of Christ. The devil wants slaves, but God wants free people whose will would agree with His will. In the terminology of the Exodus, the “evil one” was Egypt, Pharaoh and everything connected with them, namely, food and preservation of life under the condition of slavish obedience. And for us, the act of prayer, which is a more significant, more final act of rebellion against slavery than an armed rebellion, is at the same time, as it were, a restoration of a sense of responsibility before God and kinship with Him.

So, the first point from which the Exodus begins – and we begin – is the awareness of our slavery and the fact that it is impossible to end it by rebellion or flight, for whether we flee or rebel, we continue to remain slaves, unless we change our entire attitude towards God and towards all the circumstances of life, as the first beatitude teaches us: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for of them is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3). In itself, beggary, the state of slavery is not a pass to the Kingdom of Heaven; a slave can be deprived not only of earthly blessings, but also of heavenly blessings; such beggary can be more depressing than simple deprivation of what we need for earthly life. Saint John Chrysostom says that he who has nothing is not as poor as he who wants what he does not have.

Poverty is not rooted in how much we covet what we cannot have. Thinking about our human existence, we can easily be convinced that we are extremely poor and destitute, for whatever we have is never ours, no matter how rich we may seem. When we try to grab onto something, we very soon become convinced that we cannot hold it. Our life is not rooted in anything other than the sovereign creative word of God, which called us out of a complete, radical absence into His presence. It is not in our power to maintain our life and health, or even our psychosomatic properties: it is enough for the smallest vessel to burst in the head for a person of great intelligence to turn into a feeble-minded old man. In the area of ​​our feelings, for various reasons that we are able or not able to explain, for example, from the flu or fatigue, we cannot, at the right moment, experience for another person the sympathy that we would so much like to find in ourselves; or we go to church and feel like stone. This is poverty in its purest form, but does it make us children of the Kingdom? No, because seeing with bitterness at every moment of life that everything eludes us, noticing only that we possess nothing, this does not make us joyful children of the Kingdom of God’s love, but we remain pitiful victims of circumstances over which we have no control and which we hate.

This brings us back to the words “poor in spirit” (Matt. 5:3). The poverty that opens the Kingdom of Heaven lies in the knowledge that if nothing of mine truly belongs to me, then all that I have is a gift of love, God’s or human love, and then everything changes completely. If we realize that we are not original and yet exist, then we can say that the unceasing action of God’s love is manifested here. If we see that no amount of effort can make our property what we only possess, then everything is God’s love, concretely manifested in every moment; and then poverty becomes a source of perfect joy, because everything we have is proof of love. We should never seek appropriation, because to call something “ours” rather than God’s immutable gift would be a deprivation, not a gain. If it is mine, it is alien to the relationship of mutual love; if it is God’s, and I possess it from day to day, from moment to moment, it is a ceaselessly renewed act of Divine love. And then we come to the joyful thought: “Thank God, this is not mine; if it were mine, it would be possession, but, alas, without love.” The structure of relationships to which this thought leads us is what the Gospel calls the Kingdom of God. Only those belong to the Kingdom who have everything from the King in a relationship of love and who do not strive to be rich, because to be rich means to be deprived of love and to be at the mercy of things. Once we discover God in this perspective, discover that everything is God and everything is from God, we begin to enter the Divine Kingdom and gain freedom.

It was only when the Jews, under the leadership of Moses and enlightened by him, realized that their state of slavery had something to do with God and was not merely a human matter, when they turned to God, when they returned to Kingdom relations, could anything change; and this is true of all of us, for only when we realize that we are dispossessed slaves, but also realize that this happens in Divine wisdom and that everything is in the power of God, can we turn to God and say: “Deliver us from evil” (Matthew 6:13).

Just as Moses called the Jews to leave Egypt, follow him in the darkness of the night, cross the Red Sea, so each individual person finds himself in the desert, where a new stage begins. He is free, but has not yet entered the glory of the Promised Land, because from Egypt he carried with him the soul of a slave, the habits of a slave, the temptations of a slave. And it takes incomparably more time to educate a free person than to realize one’s slave status. The slave spirit is still so familiar, its norms continue to exist and retain their enormous power: the slave has a place to lay his head, the slave is provided with food, the slave has a social – albeit low – position, he is protected because the owner is responsible for his existence. To be a slave, no matter how hard, humiliating and sorrowful it may be, is still some form of security, while the state of a free person is a state of extreme insecurity; we take our destiny into our own hands, and only when our freedom is rooted in God do we gain a different security, a confidence of a completely different order.

This feeling of insecurity and uncertainty is shown in the Book of Kings, in the story of how the Jews asked Samuel to give them a king. Throughout the centuries they were led by God, that is, people who in their holiness knew the ways of God; as Amos says (Amos 3:7), a prophet is one with whom God shares His thoughts. And so, in the time of Samuel, the Jews saw that to be only under God’s guidance means in an earthly sense complete unreliability, because then everything depends on holiness, on self-denial, on moral qualities that are difficult to acquire; and they turned to Samuel with a request to give them a king, because “we want to be like other nations,” we want the same reliability that other nations have.

Samuel does not want to agree, he sees that this is apostasy, but God tells him: “Listen to the voice of the people… for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me, so that I should not reign over them” (1 Samuel 8:7). Then follows a whole picture of what their life will be like: “These are the rights of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons, and put them in his chariots, and make them his horsemen, and they will run before his chariots… And he will take your daughters to make ointments, cook food and bake bread… But the people did not agree to listen to the voice of Samuel and said: no, let the king be over us.” (1 Samuel 8:11-19). They want to buy external well-being at the cost of freedom. But this is not what God wants for us. What happens here is exactly the opposite of the events of the Exodus: God’s will is that the security of slaves should be abandoned and replaced by the insecurity of free people in the making. This is difficult, because while we are in our formation, we still do not know how to be free and do not want to be slaves anymore. Remember what happened to the Jews in the desert, how often they regretted the time when they were in Egypt – slaves, but fed. How often they cried that now they had no shelter, no food, that they depended only on God’s will, on which they had not yet learned to fully rely: because God gives us grace, but leaves us to become a new creature ourselves.

Like the Jews in Egypt, we lived our entire lives as slaves; with our soul, our will, our whole being, we have not yet become truly free people: left to our own strengths, we can fall into temptation. And these words – “Lead us not into temptation” (Matthew 6:13), do not subject us to a severe test – should remind us of the forty years it took the Jews to cross the small space lying between the land of Egypt and the Promised Land. They walked for so long because every time they turned away from God, their path turned back from the Promised Land. The only way we can reach the Promised Land is to follow in the footsteps of the Lord. As soon as our heart turns back to the land of Egypt, we retrace our steps and lose our way. We have all been liberated by the grace of God, we are all on the right path, but who can say that he does not constantly return in his footsteps or does not turn away from the right path? “Lead us not into temptation” (Matthew 6:13), do not let us fall again into a state of slavery.

As soon as we realized our enslavement and from simple lamentations, feelings of misery came to a feeling of contrition of heart and poverty of spirit, our captivity in the land of Egypt receives an answer in the words of the following Beatitudes: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:4-5). This cry, generated by the fact that we have discovered the Kingdom, discovered our responsibility, the tragedy of our slave state, is a cry more bitter than that which is the lot of a simple slave. The slave cries about external circumstances; the same mourner, whom God calls blessed, does not complain – he is contrite in heart and realizes that his external slavery is an expression of something much more tragic: his internal enslavement, his separation from the closeness of God. And there is no way to get rid of this situation until meekness is achieved.

“Meekness” is a difficult word that has acquired a number of connotations. Since it is extremely rare in life, we cannot turn to our own experience and, remembering the meek people we know, find the key to understanding this word. In the English translation by J. B. Phillips we find: “Blessed are they who seek not to possess.” From the moment we stop striving to possess, we become free, because whatever we possess, we are in the power of it. We find another interpretation in the Slavic translation of the Greek word, meaning “tamed”, “tamed”. A tamed, tamed person or animal does not simply fear punishment and submit to the power of its owner; this process has gone further in him, he has acquired a new property, and this domestication frees him from violence and coercion.

On the threshold of our salvation from Egyptian slavery, the condition is that we become “tamed,” in other words, that in the situation in which we find ourselves, we recognize the depth, significance, and presence of the Divine will in it. And our deliverance must not be flight or rebellion, but a movement led by God, which begins with the Kingdom of Heaven within us and develops into the Kingdom on earth. This is a period of hesitation and internal struggle: “Do not lead us into temptation, Lord, protect us in the test, help us in the struggle that has begun for us.” And here we have reached the point where a shift becomes possible. Let’s go back to Exodus: the Jews realized that they were not only slaves, but also the people of God, who had fallen into enslavement due to their moral weakness. They had to take a risk because no one ever gets freedom from a slave owner, and they had to cross the Red Sea; but even beyond the Red Sea lay not yet the Promised Land, but a scorching desert, and they were aware of this and knew that they would have to cross it, struggling with enormous difficulties. We find ourselves in the same position when we decide to start a movement that will free us from slavery: we must realize that we will find ourselves under the onslaught of violence, seduction, internal enemies – our old habits and former thirst for well-being, and that nothing is offered to us except desert. There is a Promised Land ahead, but it is far ahead and we must accept the risk of the journey.

Between Egypt and the desert, between slavery and freedom, lies the dividing line: this is the moment when we act decisively and become new people, placing ourselves in completely new moral relations. In geographical terminology this is the Red Sea, in the words of the Lord’s Prayer it is “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive” (Matthew 6:12). “As we forgive” is the moment when we take our salvation into our own hands, for whatever God does depends on what we do; and this makes a huge difference in terms of our daily lives. If people leaving Egypt for the Promised Land take with them from the land of Egypt their fears, their grievances, their hatred, their complaints, they will be slaves in the Promised Land. They won’t even begin to become free. And that is why on the dividing line between the fiery trial and the temptation of old habits stands this immutable condition that God never relaxes: how you forgive. The measure with which you measure will be measured back to you (Luke 6:38); and as you forgive, you will also be forgiven; whatever you do not forgive will be held against you. This does not mean that God does not want to forgive; but if we come without forgiving, we nullify the mystery of love, we reject it, and we have no place in the Kingdom. We cannot move on unless we are forgiven, and we cannot be forgiven until we ourselves have forgiven everyone who has sinned against us. This is completely categorical and real and definite, and no one has the right to think that he is in the Kingdom of God, that he belongs to the Kingdom, if unforgiveness continues to live in his heart. Forgiveness of enemies is the first, most elementary characteristic of a Christian; Without this, we are not yet Christians at all, but we are still wandering in the scorching desert of Sinai.

But forgiveness is something very difficult for us. Forgiving at the moment of softening of the heart, in an emotional outburst, is relatively easy; Few people know how not to take forgiveness back. What we call forgiveness is often simply a test of the forgiven, and happiness if it is only a test and not rejection. We wait impatiently for signs of repentance; we want to be sure that the penitent is no longer the same as he was. But such a situation can last a lifetime, and our behavior is exactly the opposite of everything that the Gospel teaches and how it tells us to act. So, the law of forgiveness is not a small stream on the border between slavery and freedom: it has width and depth, it is the Red Sea. The Jews overcame it not on their own, not in ordinary boats built by human hands – the Red Sea parted by the power of God; God led them across the sea. But in order to be led by God, one must partake of God’s property – His ability to forgive. God “does not forget” in the sense that if we have ever done wrong, He will always, until we change, remember that we are weak and fragile; but He will never remember in terms of accusation or condemnation; it will never be held against us. The Lord Himself will bear our yoke with us and enter into our lives; and He will have to bear more, His cross will be heavier, He will go to Calvary again if we are unwilling or unable to do this.

In order to be able to utter the first phrase that we considered, “Deliver us from evil” (Matthew 6:13), requires such a revaluation of values ​​​​and such a new attitude towards everything that at first we can hardly pronounce it except in a cry, which is not yet corresponded to by the internal change of our being. We thirst, but this thirst cannot yet be quenched; asking God to protect us in a trial means asking for a radical change in our situation. But to be able to say: “Forgive as I forgive” (Matthew 6:12) is even more difficult; this is one of the greatest problems of life. So, unless you are willing to give up all feelings of resentment against those who were your masters or slave owners, you cannot go to the other side. If you are able to forgive, that is, leave all your slave psychology, all your greed, acquisitiveness and bitterness in the land of enslavement, you are able to cross to the other side. After this, you will find yourself in a scorching desert, because turning a slave into a free man takes time.

We are deprived of everything that we had when we were slaves in the land of Egypt: shelter, shelter, food; We have nothing but desert and God. The earth is no longer able to nourish us; we can no longer rely on natural food, so we pray: “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matt. 6:11). God gives it even when we go astray, because if He did not, we would die before reaching the borders of the Promised Land. Save our lives, God, give us time, be patient while we are mistaken, until we find the right path.

“Daily Bread” is one possible translation of the Greek text. This bread may be daily bread, but it may also be supernatural bread. The fathers and teachers of the Church, beginning with Origen and Tertullian, have always referred these words not only to our earthly needs, but also to the mysterious Eucharistic bread. And if we do not feed in a new way, mysteriously with this Divine Bread (for now our existence depends only on God), we will not survive (John 6:53). God sent manna to His people (Ex. 16:35) and gave them water from the rock struck by the rod of Moses (Num. 20:11). Both gifts are an image of Christ: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” This is a saying from the Old Testament (Deut. 8:3), which Christ brought to shame the devil. This “word” is not just a word, but first of all the Word, sounding eternally, always, the Word by which every creature is held, and then also the Word incarnate, Jesus of Nazareth; further, this is the bread of which manna was a prototype, the bread we receive in communion. The water that flowed and filled the streams and rivers according to the word of Moses is a prototype of the water that was promised to the Samaritan woman and the Blood of Christ, which is our life.

The Exodus, when viewed in the words of the Lord’s Prayer, is a complex picture; in the Beatitudes we find the same gradual progress: “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst for righteousness (Matt. 5:6), for they shall be filled; Blessed are the merciful (Matthew 5:7), for they will obtain mercy.” First, simply bodily hunger and thirst, the deprivation of everything that we possessed and which was a gift of unrighteousness, a gift of the earth, from the master, a seal of slavery, and then, just as the cry of the second beatitude increases the moment we turn to God, this thirst and hunger becomes a thirst for righteousness. A new dimension opens up before people, the dimension of thirst, an irresistible desire for what in one of the secret prayers of the Liturgy is defined as the “coming Kingdom” – when we thank God for giving us His Kingdom, for which we yearn. In the Liturgy, the Kingdom is already here, but in the journey through the desert it is ahead, still out of reach, it is only a beginning. It is within us as a certain attitude, an attitude, but certainly not as something that is already life that we can feed on and that can keep us alive. There is a bodily hunger that arises from our past and our present, and there is a spiritual hunger that arises from our future and our calling.

“Blessed are the merciful…” (Matthew 5:7). This journey is not made alone. In the story of the Exodus, all of God’s people set out together as one; in terms of the Lord’s Prayer and our calling, it is the Church, it is humanity, it is everyone who participates in the journey; and here it is infinitely important to learn one thing, namely, mercy towards the brothers traveling with us. If we are not ready to bear each other’s burdens, to bear each other’s full weight, to accept each other as Christ accepts us, in mercy, there is no way for us to cross the desert. This journey through scorching heat, in thirst and hunger, in the intense effort to become a new man, is a time of mercy, mutual merciful love; otherwise no one will come to the place where the law of God is proclaimed, where the tablets of the law are taught.

The thirst for righteousness and accomplishment are inseparable from charity towards companions who travel side by side through heat and suffering; and this thirst and hunger now take on a deeper meaning than the simple lack of food. When the Jews come to the foot of Sinai, they already have to some extent the ability to understand and be themselves; they have already been “tamed” and have become a single people, with a single consciousness, a single aspiration, a single intention. They are God’s people on their way to the Promised Land. Their hearts, which were darkened, became more transparent, purer. At the foot of the mountain they will be given, each according to his strengths and abilities, to somehow see God (for “blessed are the pure in heart” (Matthew 5:8), because they will see God), each in his own way, just as the disciples saw the transfigured Christ on Mount Tabor according to what they could accommodate.

Here a new tragedy occurs: Moses discovers that the Jews have betrayed their calling and breaks the tablets of the Law; those given to him subsequently are the same, but not the same; the difference may be indicated in the fact that when Moses brought the commandments the second time, his face shone so that no one could bear this radiance (Ex. 34:30); they could not bear to see the Lord revealed in all His glory and radiance. They are given what they can bear: it is the law written by Moses (Exodus 34:27), not the divine revelation of love “written by the finger of God” (Exodus 31:18). The law stands halfway between lawlessness and grace; Here three ascending steps can be clearly identified. In Genesis we see the frantic Lamech, who says that if he is offended, he will avenge himself seventy times seven (Gen. 4:24); when we come to Sinai, we are told: “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” (Matt. 5:38); and Christ says: “Forgive your brother seventy times seventy times” (Matthew 18:22). These are the three stages of human ascent from law to grace.

The nineteenth-century Russian theologian A. S. Khomyakov says that the will of God is destruction for demons, law for God’s servants and freedom for the sons of God. We see how true this is when we consider the gradual progress of the Jews from Egypt to the Promised Land. They came out as slaves who had just realized that they could become children of God; they had to outgrow the psychology of slaves and acquire the spirit and measure of the age of their sons; this happened gradually, in a long and extremely painful process. We see how they are slowly being built into a community of servants of God, a people who have recognized that their master is no longer Pharaoh, but the Lord of spirits, and that they must show Him loyalty and unconditional obedience; they could expect both punishment and reward from Him, knowing that He was leading them beyond what they knew into something that was their ultimate calling.

In the works of early Christian ascetics, the idea is often repeated that a person must go through these three stages – slave, mercenary and son. A slave is one who obeys out of fear, a hireling is one who obeys for pay, and a son is one who acts out of love. We can see in Exodus how God’s people gradually became more than slaves and hirelings, and, geographically speaking, the law is on the threshold of the Promised Land.

At this threshold, people discover, each to the best of their ability and depth of spirit, God’s will and God’s Providence, because the law can be viewed in different ways: if you approach it formally, phrase by phrase, it is a series of orders: “Do this, don’t do that”; this is the law in Old Testament thinking. But, on the other hand, if we look at it through the eyes of the New Testament, through the eyes of our human vocation, in the way that an increasing number of people were able to look at it in the times following the Exodus, we see that these different commandments, these commands merge into two commandments: love for God and love for man. The first four out of ten are love for God, expressed specifically; in the other six – love for a person, which has also become concrete, tangible, and feasible. The law is a discipline and a rule for one who is still in the making, who is still in the process of becoming a son, but it is already the law of the New Testament. The problem of the relationship between man and man and between man and God is the problem of establishing a divine peace, a peace in the name of God, a peace based not on mutual affection or sympathy, but on a more essential basis: our common Lord, our human solidarity and our closer ecclesiastical solidarity. Love for God and for people must first of all come down to establishing the right relationship – the right relationship with God, with people, and also with oneself.

We have seen that the categorical precondition for existence in the wilderness is mutual forgiveness; then we need to take the next step, and in Exodus we see an immutable law expressing the mind and will of God, and in the Lord’s Prayer the words “Thy will be done” (Matt. 6:10; Luke 11:2). “Thy will be done” is not a submissive willingness to endure God’s will, as we often perceive. This is the positive attitude of those who have passed through the wilderness, entered the Promised Land, who are ready to work so that the will of God will be real and present on earth as it is in heaven. The Apostle Paul says that we are “a colony of heaven” (Phil. 3:20, Moffat English translation). He means a group of people whose homeland is in heaven and who are on earth in order to conquer it for God and bring the Kingdom of God to at least a small part of the earth. This is a special conquest, consisting in persuading people to accept the kingdom of peace, to become subjects of the Chief of the world and to enter into harmony, which we call the Kingdom of God. And this conquest, this peacemaking, makes us sheep among wolves, the seed that the sower scattered and which must die in order to bear fruit and nourish others.

The words “Thy will be done” (Matt. 6:10; Luke 11:2), considered in this way, from within our sonship, are something completely different from the obedience – in submission or in resistance – that we saw at the beginning of the Exodus, when Moses tried to move his fellow tribesmen to the march to freedom. Now they, we have the mind of Christ, now we know the will of God, we are no longer slaves, but friends (John 15:15). This is not a relationship of vague benevolence, but something extremely deep that binds us together. This is the state in which we go to the Promised Land, when we say in a new way: “Thy will be done,” not as an alien will, not as a strong will and capable of breaking us, but as a will with which we have become completely in agreement. And we must, pronouncing these words, accept everything that is connected with the state of sonship with God, with the state of the members of a single body. Just as the Son of God came into the world to die for the salvation of the world, so we are chosen for the same thing; and at the cost, perhaps, of our own lives, we must bring peace around us and plant the Kingdom.

There is a difference between how we see God the King in the land of Egypt, in the scorching desert, or in the new conditions of the Promised Land. At the beginning His will will triumph one way or another, all resistance offered to it will be broken: obedience means submission. Then, in gradual teaching, it is revealed to us that this King is not a ruler, not an overseer of slaves, but a King of good will and that obedience to Him transforms everything; that we can be not just subjects, but His people, His active army. Finally, we discover the Tsar in the full meaning of this word, as Basil the Great said: “Every ruler can rule, but only the Tsar can die for his subjects.” Here there is such an identification of the King with his subjects, that is, with his Kingdom, that whatever happens to the Kingdom happens to the King; and this is not only identification, but also an act of love, taking the blow upon itself when the King takes the place of His subjects. The king becomes a man, God becomes incarnate. He enters into the historical destiny of humanity. He takes upon Himself flesh, which makes Him a part, a particle of the entire cosmos, with its tragedy caused by the human fall. He enters into human destiny, to its very depths, right up to judgment, unjust condemnation and death; He experiences the loss of God and therefore becomes capable of dying. The kingdom we are talking about in this petition is the kingdom of this King. If we are not with Him and with the whole spirit of His Kingdom, now understood in a new way, we are not able to be called children of God, nor to say “Thy kingdom come” (Matt. 6:10; Luke 11:2). But we must clearly realize that the Kingdom we are asking for is the Kingdom of the last Beatitudes: “Blessed are those who are persecuted…” “Blessed are you when they revile you and persecute you and say all kinds of evil against you unjustly for My sake” (Matt. 5:11). In order for the Kingdom to come, we must pay the price determined by these commandments. The kingdom we are talking about is the kingdom of love, and, at a superficial glance, it seems such a pleasure to get into it. But this is not “pleasure” at all, because love has acquired a tragic aspect; it means death for each of us, the complete extinction of our proud, egocentric “I”, and dying is not like flowers withering: it is dying a cruel death, the death of the cross.

Only in the Kingdom can the name of God be sanctified and glorified by us; because it is not by our words or gestures, even liturgical ones, that the glory of the name of God is given, but by the fact that we have become the Kingdom, which is the radiance and glory of our Creator and Savior. And this name is Love, One God in the Trinity.

As we now see, the Lord’s Prayer has an absolutely universal meaning and meaning, expressing – although in reverse order – the ascent of every soul from enslavement to sin to the fullness of life in God; This is not just a prayer, it is essentially a prayer of Christians. The first words – “Our Father” – are actually Christian. The Lord says in the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 11:27): “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son, and to whom the Son wants to reveal it.” To know one’s father in God in some general sense is given not only to Christians, but also to many: but to know in Him such a Father as Christ revealed to us is given only to Christians in Christ. In addition to biblical revelation, God appears to us as the Creator of all that exists. An attentive prayer life reveals to us that this is a merciful, loving, wise Creator; such a life can lead us to the point where we will, by analogy, speak of the Creator of all things as a father; He treats us the way a father treats his children.

Even before the revelation of Christ, we find in the Holy Scriptures an example of a man who, strictly speaking, was a pagan, but stood on the verge of this knowledge of God in the categories of sonship and fatherhood; this is Job. He is called a pagan because he does not belong to the family of Abraham, he is not an heir of the promises given to Abraham. Because of his dispute with God, he is one of the most striking figures in the Old Testament. The three people convincing him know God as their Master: God is right to do what He did to Job, God is right in whatever He does because He is Lord of all. But this is precisely what Job cannot accept, because he knows God differently. From his spiritual experience, he already knows that God is not just a ruler. He cannot accept that God has arbitrary power, that he is an omnipotent Being who can and has the right to do whatever He pleases. But because God has not yet said anything about Himself, all this is an area of ​​hope, a prophetic insight, and not the very revelation of God in His fatherhood.

When the Lord appears to Job and answers his questions, He speaks in terms of pagan revelation, for which the words of the psalm are typical: “The heavens declare the glory of God, but the firmament declares the work of His hands” (Ps. 18:2). Job understands because, as the Apostle Paul says after Jeremiah (Jer. 31:33), “the law of God is written in our hearts” (Rom. 2:15). God puts Job in front of the entire created world and reasons with him; then, even though Job appears to be in the wrong, God declares that he is more right than those who admonished him, than those who look to God as an earthly ruler. And although he lacks true knowledge of Divine fatherhood, he knows more about God than his friends. It can be said that in the Old Testament in Job we find the first prophetic vision of the fatherhood of God and that salvation of mankind, which can only be realized by someone who is equal to both God and man. When Job turns to God with reproof and says: “There is no mediator between us who can lay his hand on both of us” (Job 9:33), we see in him a man who has surpassed his contemporaries in understanding, but he does not yet have the basis for establishing his faith and his knowledge, because God has not yet spoken in Christ.

The mystery of sonship and the mystery of fatherhood are interconnected: you cannot know the father if you do not know the son, and you cannot know the son if you are not the father; knowledge from the outside is impossible. Our connection with God is based on an act of faith, complemented by God’s response, which makes this act of faith fruitful. We become members of Christ in an act of faith, the fullness of which God gives in baptism. In a way known only to God and to those who have been called and received renewal, we become by communion what Christ is by birth; Only by becoming members of Christ do we become sons of God. We must not forget that the fatherhood of God is more than a relationship of warm affection, it is something more real and something ultimately true. God in Christ becomes the Father of those who become members of the body of Christ, but it is not some vague sentimentality that binds us to Christ, but a feat that can last a lifetime and cost much more than we initially imagined.

The fact that Christ and we become one means that everything that relates to Christ also applies to us, and we can, in a way unknown to the rest of the world, call God our Father – no longer by analogy, no longer by anticipation or as prophecy, but just like Christ Himself. This is directly related to the Lord’s Prayer: on the one hand, everyone can use it, because it is a universal prayer, it is the ladder of our ascent to God; on the other hand, it is a very special and exclusive prayer – the prayer of those who in Christ are children of the eternal Father and can turn to Him as sons.

When this prayer is considered in its universal meaning, it is more convenient to study and analyze it as an ascension; but Christ did not give it in this form to those who are in Him and with Him – the children of God, because for them it is no longer a question of ascension; for them this is a given, the existing situation; we, in the Church, are children of God, and the first words: “Our Father” (Matt. 6:9; Luke 11:2), affirm this fact and oblige us to take the place that we should occupy. It is useless to say that we are unworthy of this title. We accepted it, and it is ours. We may be prodigal children, and we will have to answer for it, but it is clear that no force can turn us back into what we ceased to be. When the prodigal son returned to his father and wanted to say: “I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me one of your hired servants” (Luke 15:19), his father allowed him to speak his first words: “I have sinned against heaven and before you and am no longer worthy to be called your son” (Luke 15:18–19), but here he interrupted him. Yes, he is unworthy, but he is a son, despite his unworthiness. You cannot stop being a member of your family, no matter what you do worthy or unworthy. Whatever we are, whatever our life, no matter how unworthy we are to be called sons of God or to call God our Father, we have nowhere to go. This is inalienable. He is our Father and we are responsible for the relationship of sonship. He created us as His children, and only by denying our birthright do we become prodigal sons. Imagine that the prodigal son did not return, but stayed and got married in a foreign land – the child born from this marriage will be organically connected with the father of the prodigal. If the child were to return to his father’s homeland, he would be accepted as a member of the family; if he had not returned, he would have been responsible for this, as well as for the fact that he chose to remain a stranger to his father’s family.

For the children of many generations, baptism is the return to the Father’s house. And we baptize a child in the same way as we treat a baby born sick. It’s another matter if later he begins to incorrectly think that it would be better for him to maintain his illness, to be useless to society and freed from the burden of social responsibilities. By baptizing an infant, the Church heals him in order to make him a responsible member of the only real society. Rejecting one’s own baptism is tantamount to rejecting healing. In baptism we not only become healthy, but we are also organically made members of the Body of Christ.

At this stage, calling God “Our Father” (Matt. 6:9; Luke 11:2), we ascend to Zion, to the top of the mountain, and at the top of the mountain we find the Father, Divine love, the revelation of the Trinity; and right there, behind the walls, there is a small hill, which we call Golgotha, where history and eternity merge together. Here we can turn around and look back. It is from here that a Christian should begin his Christian life, having completed his ascent, and begin to say the Lord’s Prayer in the sequence in which the Lord gives it to us, as the prayer of the Only Begotten Son, as the prayer of the Church, the prayer of each of us in our community with everyone, as the prayer of the one who is a son in the Son. And only then can we begin to descend from the mountain, step by step, towards those who are still on the way or who have not even begun to walk.

Bartimaeus’ Prayer

The incident of Bartimaeus, as told in Mark (Mark 10:46-52), helps us understand a number of issues related to prayer.

“They come to Jericho. And when He was leaving Jericho with His disciples and a multitude of people, Bartimaeus, the son of Timaeus, a blind man, sat by the road, begging alms. Hearing that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout and say: Jesus, Son of David! have mercy on me. Many people forced him to remain silent; but he began to shout even more: Son of David! have mercy on me. Jesus stopped and told him to call him. They call the blind man and tell him: don’t be afraid, get up, he’s calling you. He took off his outer garment, stood up and came to Jesus. Answering him, Jesus asked: What do you want from Me? The blind man said to Him: Teacher! so that I can see the light. Jesus said to him: Go, your faith has saved you. And he immediately received his sight and followed Jesus along the road.”

This man, Bartimaeus, was apparently not young; for many years he had been sitting at the Jericho Gate, receiving food from the mercy or indifferent prosperity of passers-by. During his life he probably tried every possible remedy and every possible path to a cure. It is possible that as a child he was brought to the temple and there prayers and sacrifices were made for him. He visited everyone who could heal either with the gift of healing or with the help of knowledge. He undoubtedly struggled to see the light, and was invariably disappointed. All human remedies were tried, but he remained blind. Perhaps in the preceding months he had heard that a young preacher had appeared in Galilee, a man who loved the people, a merciful man, a holy man of God, a man who could heal and perform miracles. And perhaps he often thought that if he could, he would try to meet Him; but Christ did not remain in one place and there was little hope that the blind man would find his way to Him. And so, with this spark of hope, which made his despair even deeper and even more acute, he sat at the Jericho Gate.

One day a crowd passed by, a larger crowd than usual, a noisy oriental crowd; the blind man heard and asked who it was coming, and when he was told that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to call. That spark of hope that remained in his soul instantly turned into a flame, into a hot fire of hope. Jesus, whom he could never have met, passed along his road. He walked, and with each step he became closer and closer, and then each step would push Him further and further away, irrevocably; and the blind man began to shout: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.” This was the most perfect confession of faith for that time. He recognized Him as the Son of David, the Messiah; he could not yet call Him the Son of God, because even the disciples did not yet know this; but he recognized in Him the One Who was expected. And then something happened that constantly happens in our lives: he was told to shut up.

How often does it happen that when, after many years of searching and lonely struggle, we suddenly turn to God with a cry, many voices, external and internal, try to stop our prayer. Is it worth praying? How many years have you been struggling and God doesn’t pay any attention to it? Will He pay attention now? Why pray? Return to your hopelessness, you are blind, and blind forever. But the stronger the resistance, the more obvious it is that help is very close. The devil never attacks us so fiercely as when we are very close to the end of the struggle, and we could have saved ourselves, but often this does not happen because we retreat at the last moment. “Enough, stop,” says the devil, “this is too much, this is more than you can bear, you need to put an end to this immediately, don’t wait: you can’t bear it anymore.” And then we commit suicide: physically, morally, spiritually; we give up the fight and accept death – a minute before help would be given and we would be saved.

You should never listen to these voices; the louder they shout, the stronger our resolve must be; we must be ready to cry out as long as necessary and as loudly as Bartimaeus. Jesus Christ passed by, his last hope passed by, but the people surrounding Christ were indifferent or tried to silence him. His grief and suffering were completely inappropriate. Those who perhaps needed Christ less, but who surrounded Him, wanted Him to deal with them. Why on earth would this poor blind man bother them? But Bartimaeus knew that there was no more hope for him if this last one also left. This depth of hopelessness was the source from which faith gushed out, a prayer full of such conviction and persistence that it broke through all barriers – one of those prayers that shoot into the sky like an arrow, according to the words of John Climacus. And because Bartimaeus’s despair was so deep, he did not listen to the voices ordering him to be silent, to sit quietly; The more they tried to prevent him from coming to Christ, the louder he shouted: “Son of David, have mercy on me!” Christ stopped, said to be brought to Him, and performed a miracle.

In our practical approach to prayer, we can learn from Bartimaeus that when we turn to God with our whole hearts, God always hears us. Usually, when we realize that we can no longer rely on what we used to consider reliable around us, we are not yet ready to give up these things. We can see that there is no hope as long as human, earthly means are used. We strive for something, try to see the light and constantly fail; it is agony and hopelessness, and if we stop here it means failure. But if at this moment we turn to God, knowing that only God remains, and say: “I believe in You and in Your hands I commit my soul and body, my whole life,” then despair led to faith.

Despair leads to a new spiritual life when we have the courage to go deeper and further, with the consciousness that we despaired not of the final victory, but of the means we used to achieve it. Then we start on solid ground in a completely new way. God can return us to one of the means that we have already tried, but which now, with Him, we will be able to use successfully. Real cooperation between God and man is always necessary, and then God will give intelligence, wisdom and strength to do what is necessary and achieve the right goal.

Thought and Prayer

In practice, thought of God and prayer are often confused, but there is no danger in this if thought of God develops into prayer. The danger arises only when prayer degenerates into meditation. Thought on God means, first of all, reflection – reflection, the subject of which is God. If, while reflecting, we gradually become more and more deeply imbued with the spirit of prayerful worship of God, if the presence of God becomes reliable and we see that we really are with God, and if from meditation we gradually move on to prayer, everything is correct; but the reverse process must never be allowed, and in this sense there is a clear difference between thought of God and prayer.

The main difference between thinking about God and our usual disordered thinking is clarity and harmony: thinking about God should be an ascetic exercise in sober mind. About how people usually think, Theophan the Recluse says that thoughts rush around in our heads like a flock of midges, monotonously, chaotically, stupidly and fruitlessly.

The first thing we should learn, no matter what subject we choose to think about, is to follow a certain line. As soon as we begin to think about God, about divine things, about everything that makes up the life of the soul, side thoughts arise; from all sides we see so many possibilities, so much interesting and meaningful; but we must, having chosen a subject of reflection, abandon everything except the chosen topic. This is the only way to keep the flow of thoughts in one direction so that they can go deeper.

The goal of God-thinking is not an academic exercise of thought; it should not be a purely intellectual pursuit or a beautiful but fruitless flight of thought; it must be a work of purposeful reflection, carried out under the guidance of God and directed towards God, and its fruit must be conclusions about how we should live. From the very beginning it is necessary to realize that the beneficial exercise in God-thinking has been that which helps us to live in more definite and concrete accordance with the Gospel.

Each of us is immune to some problems and open to others; when we are not yet accustomed to thinking, it is better to start with something that is alive for us: with those sayings that attract us, from which “our heart burns within us” (Luke 24:32), or, conversely, with what we rebel against, which we cannot accept; in the Gospel we find both.

Whatever we take – a single verse, some commandment, an event from the life of Christ, we must first of all determine its true, objective content. This is very important, because the goal of thinking about God is not to build a fantastic construction, but to understand a certain truth. The truth is here, it is given to us, it is God’s truth, and God-thinking should become a bridge between our misunderstanding and revealed truth. In this way we can educate our minds and gradually learn to have “the mind of Christ,” according to the words of the Apostle Paul (1 Cor. 2:16).

Understanding the true meaning of a text is not always as easy as it seems; There are places that are very easy, but there are also places where formulations are used that are addressed simultaneously to the simplest human experience and at the same time to the deepest, diverse religious experience. For example, the expression “Bride of the Lamb” (Rev. 21:9) can only be understood if we know what Scripture means by the word “Lamb,” otherwise it becomes completely meaningless and will be misunderstood.

The bride is the experience of the earth, the experience of man in the most sacred, in the deepest, most subtle thing that is in him. The bride is the one who managed, turned out to be capable of loving the groom so much that she forgets and leaves everything else, in order to cleave to him, in order to follow him wherever he goes. Turning to the word “bride” first in the Old Testament and then in the book of Revelation, we see that such is the spirit of the Church in relation to the Bridegroom – Christ; but this Bridegroom Christ is designated by the tragic word: “Lamb of God” (John 1:29). We find this expression against the background of all the Old Testament sacrifices, all the prophetic images of the Lamb slain for the salvation of the world, the Man of Sorrows from Isaiah’s prophecy. And so, combining these two concepts, we get their full meaning and significance. If we go only from our human experience, the mystery of the path that the Bride will take will remain undeciphered. Yes, she will go wherever the Groom goes; but where is the Bridegroom going? What will this Bride be like? And we, precisely because the word “lamb” rests on the entire tradition of Israel, know that this is the Lamb of the slaughter, the slain Lamb, and that the path of the Bride through the whole world, through all destiny, the whole history of the earth goes through the humiliation of Bethlehem, through the life of absolute, boundless solidarity of God with His creation, and goes further, through Gethsemane and Golgotha, to the Resurrection…

There are other kinds of words which we can understand correctly only if we do not take into account the special or technical meaning which they have acquired. One of these words is “spirit”. For a Christian, “spirit” is a kind of technical term; it is either the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, or one of the constituent parts of the human being – body and soul. But such an understanding does not always express with all the simplicity and breadth what the compilers of the Gospel wanted to convey; the word has become so specialized that it has lost touch with its root. Sometimes the definition of a word in the dictionary helps to understand the text and its meaning. You can look up the word “spirit” or any other word in the dictionary, and it will immediately seem simple and concrete, although over time, as a result of the work of theologians, it may have acquired a deeper meaning. But we must never begin with a deeper meaning before we find a simple, concrete meaning that was clear to everyone at the time when Christ spoke to the people around Him.

There are things that we can understand only in the light of the teachings of the Church: Holy Scripture should be understood by the mind of the Church, the mind of Christ, because the Church does not change; in her inner experience she continues to live the same life as she lived in the first century; and the words spoken in the Church by Paul, Peter, Basil or others always retain their meaning. Thus, after a preliminary perception in our own, modern language, we must turn to what the Church understands by this word; only then can we be sure of the meaning of a given text and have the right to begin to think and draw conclusions. Once we have found the meaning of the text, we should see if it, in its utmost simplicity, already gives us specific advice or even a direct command. Since the purpose of thinking about God, understanding the Holy Scriptures, is to fulfill the will of God, we must draw practical conclusions and act in accordance with them. When the meaning has been revealed to us, when God has told us something in this phrase, we must delve into the essence and see what we can do, just as we do when a good idea comes to our mind; Having realized that this or that is correct, we immediately begin to think about how to include it in our life, how to do it, under what circumstances, in what way. It is not enough to understand what can be done and start excitedly telling your friends about it; we need to start doing this. The Egyptian saint Paul the Simple once heard Anthony the Great read the first verse of the first psalm: “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked” (Ps. 1:1) and immediately Paul went into the desert. Only about thirty years later, when Anthony met him again, St. Paul said to him with deep humility: “I have spent all this time trying to become a man who never walks in the counsel of the wicked.” To achieve perfection there is no need to understand much; what is needed is to spend thirty years trying to understand what this new man is and to become him.

Often we will look at one or two points and skip ahead; this is wrong, because, as we have just seen, it takes a long time to learn concentration, to become what the fathers call an attentive person, one who is able to delve into a thought so long and deeply that nothing is left out of it. All spiritual writers of the past and today will tell you: take a text, meditate on it, hour after hour, day after day, until you have exhausted all your possibilities, both mental and emotional, and until, by carefully reading and rereading this text, you come to a new attitude towards life. Very often, the thought of God consists only of delving into the text, repeating again and again these words of God addressed to us, in order to become so close to them, to absorb them so much into ourselves that gradually we and these words become one. And in this process, even if it seems to us that mentally we have not been particularly enriched in anything, we change.

We very often have time that can be used for reflection; There are so many cases in our daily life when we have nothing to do but wait, and if we are disciplined – and this also forms part of our spiritual education – we will be able to quickly concentrate and immediately fix our attention on the subject of our reflection, our thought of God. We must learn this by forcing our thoughts to gather in one focus, disconnecting from everything else. At first, extraneous thoughts will intrude, but if we consistently push them away every time, they will eventually leave us alone. And only when, through training, exercise, skill, we become able to concentrate deeply and quickly, we will be able to continue living in a state of concentration, no matter what we do. However, noticing the presence of extraneous thoughts means already achieving a certain degree of composure. We can be in a crowd, be among people, and at the same time remain completely alone, so that our surroundings do not affect us; It is up to us to allow or not to allow what is happening outside of us to become an event in our inner life. If we allow this, our attention will wander; if we do not allow it, then we can remain in the presence of God in complete solitude and composure, no matter what happens around us. Al Absiha has a story about this kind of concentration: the household of one Muslim had to maintain respectful silence when a guest came, but everyone knew that they could make as much noise as they wanted while the head of the family was praying, because at that time he could not hear anything; Once it even happened that he was not prevented by a fire that broke out in his house.

It happens that we are in a society of people absorbed in a heated and hopeless argument. We cannot leave without causing even more chaos, but what we can do is turn off mentally, turn to Christ and say: “I know you are here – help!” And just stay with Christ. If this did not sound so absurd, one could say: make Christ present in the midst of the dispute. Objectively, He is always present, but there is a difference between an objective presence and one when, by an act of faith, we introduce Him into a certain situation. There is nothing you can do except sit aside and just be with Christ and let others do the talking. His presence will do more than anything we could say. And so, remaining calmly and silently with Christ, we will suddenly notice that from time to time we can say something significant that would be impossible in the heat of argument.

In parallel with mental discipline, we must learn to have a peaceful body. The body responds to all our mental activity, and, on the other hand, our bodily state to a certain extent determines the type and nature of our mental activity. In his advice to those wishing to begin spiritual life, Theophan the Recluse says that one of the indispensable conditions for success is to never allow bodily softening; be like a violin string tuned to a certain note, without relaxation or overexertion; keep your body straight, shoulders back, head position free, keep all muscles tense towards your heart.

Much has been written and said about how you can use your body to develop your ability to pay attention; but on a public level, Feofan’s advice seems simple, precise and practical. We must learn to be collected without tension. We must control our body so that it does not interfere with our composure, but contributes to it.

Thought on God is the activity of thought, while prayer is the rejection of all thought. According to the teachings of the Eastern Fathers, even pious thoughts and the deepest and most sublime theological reasoning, if they arise during prayer, should be treated as a temptation and driven away; for, say the Fathers, it is foolish to think about God and forget that you are in His presence. All spiritual teachers of Orthodoxy warn us against replacing this meeting with God with reflections about Him. Prayer in its essence is standing before God face to face, with a conscious desire to be collected and completely calm and attentive in His presence; it means standing with an undivided mind, an undivided heart and an undivided will in the presence of the Lord; and it’s not easy. Whatever our training gives us, there always remains a certain vulnerability: non-separation can only be achieved by those for whom the love of God is everything, who have broken all ties, who have given themselves entirely to God; then there is no longer any personal effort, but only the action of the radiant grace of God.

God must always be the focus of our attention, for our concentration can be replaced in a variety of ways: when our prayer is caused by deep sorrow, it seems to us that our whole being has turned to prayer, and we imagine that we are in a state of deep, genuine prayerful concentration, but this is not true, because the focus of our attention was not God; they were the subject of our prayer. When we are emotionally affected, no extraneous thoughts arise because we are completely absorbed in what we are praying for; and it is only when we move on to pray for another person or another need that our attention suddenly wanders; this means that it was not the thought of God, not the feeling of His presence that was the reason for such concentration, but our human participation. This does not mean that human involvement is unimportant, but it does mean that the thought of a friend can do more than the thought of God. And this is very serious.

One of the reasons we find it so difficult to be mindful is that our act of faith, when we affirm “God is here,” means too little to us. We are mentally aware that God is here, but we do not respond to this physically in such a way that all our forces, thoughts, feelings and will are concentrated and gathered in one focus, so that we pay full attention. If we prepare for prayer through a process of imagination—“Christ is here, this is what He is like, this is what I know about Him, this is what He means to me…”—then the richer the image, the less real the presence. We may get some help from this for some emotional focus, but it is not God’s presence, not the real, objective presence of God.

The Early Fathers and the entire Orthodox tradition teach us that we must, through an effort of will, concentrate on the spoken words of prayer. We must say them carefully, essentially, without trying to evoke any emotional state and leaving it to God to awaken in us such a response as we are capable of.

St. John Climacus offers a simple way to learn to focus. He says: choose a prayer, “Our Father” or any other, stand before God, become aware of where you are and what you are doing, and carefully say the words of the prayer. After a while, you will notice that your thoughts are wandering, then begin to pray again with the words that you last uttered carefully. You may have to do this ten, twenty, or fifty times; maybe during the time allotted for prayer you can say only three petitions and will not move further; but in this struggle you will be able to concentrate on the words, so that you bring to God seriously, soberly, reverently the words of prayer in which consciousness participates, and not an offering that is not yours, because your consciousness did not participate in it.

John Climacus also advises reading the prayer we have chosen slowly, evenly, slowly enough to enclose attention in the words, but not so slowly that this exercise becomes boring; and do this without trying to experience any feelings, because our goal is a relationship with God: when coming to God, we should never try to squeeze any emotions out of our hearts; prayer is a statement, everything else depends on God.

With this method of teaching prayer, a certain time is allotted, and if the prayer is attentive, then the length of this time does not matter. If you were to read three pages of a prayer rule, and half an hour later you find that you are still reading the first twelve words, this will certainly make you feel discouraged; so it is best to have a specific time and stick to it. You know how much time you have, and you have prayer material that you should use; if you struggle seriously, you will very soon notice that attention has become submissive, for attention is much more amenable to the influence of the will than we think; and when we know for sure that there is nothing else left, it should be twenty minutes, not a quarter of an hour, then we simply continue to fight hard. Saint John Climacus trained dozens of monks using just this simple method: strictly defined time and merciless attention – nothing more.

The external beauty of worship should not carry us away to the point of forgetting that in Orthodoxy sobriety is a very essential property of prayer. In “Frank Tales of a Wanderer,” a village priest gives very important advice about prayer: if you want your prayer to be pure, correct and joyful, choose some short prayer, consisting of not many but strong words, and repeat it often, for a long time. Then you will find consolation in prayer. The same idea can be found in the “Letters of Brother Lawrence”: “I do not advise you to talk too much in prayer, since verbosity and long speeches often lead to absent-mindedness.”4

Father John of Kronstadt was asked how priests, despite all their experience, are absent-minded and allow extraneous thoughts even during the celebration of the liturgy. The answer was: “Because of our lack of faith.” We do not have enough faith, if we understand faith along with the Apostle Paul as “the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). But it would be a mistake to think that all dissipative thoughts come from our own depths: it is our incessant inner anxiety coming to the surface, the very thoughts that usually fill our lives; and the only way to finally get rid of unworthy thoughts is to radically change our entire attitude towards life. And again, as Brother Lawrence writes in the eighth letter, “the only way to easily collect your mind during prayer and keep it more calm is to not allow it to wander at other times; you must keep it strictly in the presence of God, and, having been accustomed to think about God often, you will find it easy to keep your mind calm during prayer, or at least to bring it back from its wanderings.”

As long as we are deeply affected by all the trifles of everyday life, we will not be able to pray with all our hearts; they will always color the flow of our thoughts. The same must be said about our daily relationships with people: these relationships should not consist only of idle chatter, but be based on what is essential in each of us, otherwise we may not be able to rise to another level when we turn to God. We must eradicate everything insignificant and petty in ourselves and in our relationships with people and focus on what we can take with us into eternity.

It is impossible to become a different person immediately from the moment we begin to pray. But by carefully observing your thoughts, you can gradually learn to discern their value. During prayer, those thoughts in which we are immersed in our daily life uncontrollably break through. Prayer, for its part, changes and enriches our daily lives, becoming the basis for new and authentic relationships with God and the people around us.

In our struggle for prayer, emotions have almost nothing to do with the matter: we must bring to God a complete, firm determination to be faithful to Him and aspiration for God to live in us. We must remember that the fruits of prayer are not this or that emotional state, but a profound change in our entire being. Our goal is to become able to stand before God, focus on His presence, turning all our needs to Him, and receive from Him strength, strength so that the will of God is fulfilled in us. The fulfillment of God’s will in us is the only goal of prayer, as well as the criterion of true prayer. It is not the mystical feelings that we may experience, nor the emotional experiences that constitute the dignity of prayer. Theophan the Recluse says: are you asking yourself, did I pray well today? Do not try to find out how deep your feelings were or how deep you were in understanding the things of the divine. Ask yourself: “Am I doing God’s will better than before?” And if you can answer “yes,” the prayer has borne fruit; if not, it has not borne fruit, no matter how much understanding and feeling you gain from the time spent in the presence of God.

Composure, whether in contemplation or prayer, can only be achieved through an effort of will. Our spiritual life rests on our faith and determination, and every unexpected joy is a gift from God. When the Monk Seraphim of Sarov was asked why some people remain sinners and never reform, while others become saints and live in God, he answered: it’s all a matter of determination.

Our actions must be determined by an act of will, which usually turns out to be the opposite of what we strive for; this will, based on our faith, constantly collides with our other will – instinctive. We have two wills: one is conscious, which we possess to a greater or lesser extent, consisting in the ability to force ourselves to act in accordance with our beliefs; the second is something completely different in us, these are the drives, demands, passionate desires of our entire nature, very often contrary to the first will. The Apostle Paul speaks of two laws opposing one another (Rom. 7:23). He speaks of the old and new Adam in us, who are at war with each other. We know that one must die in order for the other to live, and we must understand that our spiritual life, the life of our entire human being, will not be complete until these two wills agree with each other. It is not enough to strive for the victory of good will over evil; evil will, that is, the attractions of our fallen nature, must be completely, albeit gradually, transformed into aspiration, attraction to God, thirst for God. It’s a hard fight, but it’s worth it.

Spiritual life, Christian life, is not about developing a strong will that can force us to do what we do not want. In some sense, of course, learning to do the right thing when we want to do something completely different is an achievement, but it is still a small achievement. A mature spiritual life is a life when our conscious will is in agreement with the words of God, when, with the help of God’s grace, it has transformed and changed our nature so deeply that our entire human being has become one will. We must begin by subordinating and bending our will into obedience to the commandments of Christ, accepting them objectively and fulfilling them absolutely precisely, even when they diverge from what we know about life. By an act of faith, in spite of all evidence, we must agree that Christ is right. Experience teaches us that some things do not seem to happen as they should happen according to the Gospel; but God says that it is so, which means it must be so. It should also be remembered that, while fulfilling the will of God in such an objective sense, we should not do it “tentatively”, intending to test it to see what happens – because then nothing happens. Experience shows that when we receive a slap in the face, we want to take revenge; Christ says: “turn the other cheek.” And when we finally decide to turn the other cheek, we actually expect to conquer the enemy and earn his admiration. But if instead we receive another slap in the face, we are usually very surprised or indignant, as if God had involved us in a completely impossible task.

We must outgrow this attitude, be ready to do God’s will and pay for it in full. If we are not willing to pay, we are only wasting our time. Then we must take the next step and understand that doing so is not enough, because we must not force ourselves into Christianity by drill, but must becomeChristians; in the process of doing God’s will, we must learn to understand God’s intentions. Christ revealed His intentions to us, and it is no coincidence that in the Gospel of John He no longer calls us slaves, but friends, because a slave does not know the intentions of his master, but He told us everything (John 15:15). In fulfilling the will of God, we must learn to understand what this fulfillment means, so that in our thoughts and will, in all our attitude towards life, we become co-workers with Christ (1 Cor. 3:9). And in such like-mindedness with Him, we will gradually become internally what we are trying to be externally.

We see that we cannot deeply participate in the life of God unless we change radically. It is therefore necessary to go to God in order for Him to transform and change us, and that is why we must first of all ask for conversion. Conversion (Latin: conversio) means a turn, a change of mind. The Greek word metanoia means change of mind. Conversion in the sense of conversio means that instead of wasting our lives looking in all directions, we will stick to one single direction. This means turning away from many things that were of value to us only because they were pleasant or useful to us. Conversion manifests itself primarily in a change in our scale of values: when God is at the center of everything, everything else takes on new places, receives new depth. Everything that is God, everything that belongs to Him is positive and real. Everything outside of Him has no value or meaning. But a simple change in perspective on things cannot yet be called conversion. We may change our views and go no further; this must necessarily be followed by an act of will, and if our will does not move and does not change its direction, turning to God, then there is no conversion; without this there is only an incipient, but dormant and inactive change in us. It is clear that it is not enough to look in the right direction and not move. Remorse cannot be mistaken for repentance; remorse is not about feeling “terribly sorry” for past wrongdoings: it is an active, positive state of moving in the right direction. This is shown very clearly in the parable of the two sons whom their father sent to work in his vineyard. One said “I’m going” and didn’t go. The other answered “I won’t go,” but then he was ashamed and went to work (Matt. 21:28–30). This was genuine repentance, and we should never delude ourselves into imagining that regretting our past is an act of repentance. Of course, this is part of it, but repentance remains lifeless and fruitless until it leads us to fulfill the will of the Father. We tend to think that it should come down to wonderful feelings, and very often we are satisfied with emotions instead of genuine, deep inner change.

How often, having offended someone and realizing that we were wrong, we go to the offended person and talk about our repentance and after excited explanations, tears, forgiveness and touching words, we leave with the feeling that we did everything possible. We cried together, we made up, and now everything is okay. But this is by no means true. We simply enjoyed our virtues, and another person, perhaps kind-hearted and easily moved, responded to our emotional scene. This is anything but conversion. No one asks us to shed tears and seek a touching meeting with the victim of our cruelty, even if that victim is God. What is expected of us is something completely different: that, having realized that we are wrong, we correct it.

But the appeal does not end there; it must lead us further, along a path that will make us different. Conversion begins, but never ends. It is an incremental process in which we become more and more what we ought to be until, after the day of judgment, the categories of fall, conversion, and righteousness disappear and are replaced by new categories of new life. Christ says: “Behold, I make all things new” (Rev. 21:5).

You can pray anywhere and everywhere, but there are places where prayer finds a natural atmosphere for it; these places are temples, in fulfillment of the promise: “I will make them glad in My house of prayer” (Is. 56:7).

After the temple is consecrated, it becomes the dwelling place of God. God is present here differently than in the rest of the world. He is present in the world as a stranger, as a wanderer, passing from door to door, not having where to lay his head; He comes as the Lord of the world, rejected by the world, driven out of His kingdom and returned to it to save His people. In the temple He is at His home; He is not only the Creator and Lord by right, but here He is recognized as the Creator and Lord. Outside the temple He acts when He can and as He can; inside the temple He is in all His power and strength, and it is up to us to come to Him.

When we build a temple or set aside a special place for prayer, we are doing something far beyond the apparent meaning of this fact. The entire earth, created by God, has become an arena of human sin: the devil is at work here, there is a constant struggle here; there is no place on this earth that is not stained with blood, suffering or sin. By choosing a small space on it, calling upon it in sacred rites that impart grace, the power of God Himself to bless this place, cleansing it from the presence of an evil spirit and singling it out so that it could be the footstool of God on earth, we are again winning for God a piece of this dishonored land. We can say that the temple is the place where the Kingdom of God opens and manifests itself in power. When we enter a temple, we must be aware that we are entering sacred ground, a place that belongs to God, and conduct ourselves in accordance with this consciousness.

The icons that we see on the walls of the temple are not just images or paintings; an icon is the focus of a real presence. Saint John Chrysostom advises us, before starting to pray, to stand in front of the icon and close our eyes. He says: “close your eyes,” because it is not in looking at the icon, not in using it as a visual aid that we receive help for prayer from it. It is not a substantialessential presence in the sense that bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ. In this sense, the icon is not Christ; but there is a mysterious connection between Him and the icon. By the power of grace, the icon participates in something that can best be defined in the words of Gregory Palamas as the energy of Christ, as the active power of Christ acting for our salvation.

Painting an icon is an act of worship. The board is specially selected and consecrated, the colors are consecrated, the person who is going to paint the icon prepares for this by fasting, confession, and communion. While working, he leads a particularly abstinent lifestyle; at the end of it, the icon is blessed with holy water and anointed with myrrh (this last part of the consecration is now, unfortunately, often omitted). Thus, by the power of the Holy Spirit, the icon becomes something more than a painting. It is saturated with presence, imbued with the grace of the Spirit and in the mystery of the communion of saints and cosmic unity is connected with the saint whom it depicts. The saint’s involvement in the icon cannot be identified or even compared with the presence of Christ in the Holy Gifts; and yet the icon is the focus of real presence, as the Church knows and teaches from experience. An icon is not a likeness, but a symbol. By the power and wisdom of God, some icons are singled out as miraculous. Standing in front of them, you feel how they themselves turn to you.

One priest served in the church where the famous miraculous icon of the Mother of God is located, and deeply felt her effective participation in the service. Over many centuries the icon became very dark; from the place where he stood, he could not distinguish her features and continued to serve with his eyes closed. Suddenly he felt that the Mother of God in the icon seemed to be forcing him to pray, directing his prayers, influencing his mind. He felt the power emanating from the icon, which filled the temple with prayer and collected scattered thoughts. It was almost a physical presence, it was a living personality, demanding with authority.

Unanswered Prayers and Petitions

In the story of the Canaanite woman (Matt. 15:22-28) we see how Christ, at least at first, refuses to answer the prayer; this is an example of prayer subjected to an extremely difficult test. The woman is asking for something completely fair, she comes with full faith and does not even say “if you can,” she simply comes confident that Christ can, that He will, and that her child will be healed. And the answer to all this faith is “no.” It’s not that the prayer was unworthy or the faith was insufficient, it’s just that the petitioner is not one of those people to whom Christ came: Christ came for the Jews, and she is a pagan; He didn’t come for her. But she insists, saying: “Yes, I am not one of those, but even dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” And she stands, believing in the love of God, despite what God says, believing with such humility, despite His arguments. She does not even appeal to the love of God, she only refers to its manifestation in everyday life: I do not have the right to whole bread, give me just a few crumbs… Christ’s clear and categorical refusal tested her faith, and her prayer was fulfilled.

How often do we pray to God, saying: “God, if…, if You will…, if You are able…,” like the father who said to Christ: “Your disciples were not able to heal my son, but if you can, do anything” (Mark 9:18-22). Christ responds to this with another “if”: “if you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes” (Mark 9:23). Then the man says: “I believe, Lord! help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24). One “if” depends on the other, because where there is no faith, there is no possibility for God to enter a specific situation.

The fact that a person turns to God already seems to speak about his faith; but this is true only to a certain extent; we believe and do not believe at the same time, and faith shows its measure in overcoming our own doubts. When we say, “Yes, I doubt, but I trust in the love of God more than I trust my own doubts,” then God is able to act. But if our faith lives by law and not by grace, if we believe that the world as we know it, with its mechanical laws, is a machine, because God willed it to be nothing more than a machine, then there is no place for God. However, the experience of the heart, as well as modern science, teaches us that there is no such thing as an absolute law, which people believed in in the nineteenth century. Every time the Kingdom of God is created again by faith, the opportunity opens up for the laws of the Kingdom to operate, and God can enter a certain situation – enter with His wisdom, His ability to make good out of evil, without, however, turning the whole world upside down. Our “if” refers not so much to the power of God as to His love and His care for us; God’s answer, “if you can believe in My love, all things are possible,” means that a miracle cannot happen unless the Kingdom of God is present—even if only in the beginning.

A miracle is not a violation of the laws of the fallen world, but the restoration of the laws of the Kingdom of God; a miracle happens if we believe that the law does not depend on the power of God, but on His love. Even though we know that God is omnipotent, as long as we think that He doesn’t care about us, a miracle is impossible; to create a miracle would then mean for God to commit violence against our will, but God does not do this, because at the very basis of His attitude towards the world, even the fallen one, lies absolute respect for human freedom and rights. The moment when we say: “I believe and that is why I turn to You,” means: “I believe that You will want this, that there is love in You, that You really care about every particular case.” When there is this seed of faith, the right relationship is established, and then a miracle becomes possible.

In addition to such “ifs”, which are generated by our doubt in the love of God and are therefore incorrect, there is also a completely legitimate category of “ifs”. We can say: “I ask this if it is in accordance with Your will, or if it is for good, or if there is no secret evil thought in me when I ask for it,” etc. All these “ifs” are more than legal, since they indicate a lack of confidence in oneself; and every petitionary prayer must be accompanied by such a “if” clause.

Since the Church is a continuation of Christ’s presence in time and space, every Christian prayer must be Christ’s prayer, although this presupposes a purity of heart that we do not have. The prayers of the Church are Christ’s prayers, especially the Eucharistic canon, which is all Christ’s prayer; but any other prayer in which we ask for something related to a specific situation is always conditioned by such an “if”. In most cases, we do not know what Christ would pray for in a given situation; therefore we add “if,” which means that, as far as we can see, as far as we know God’s will, we would desire this very thing to happen in order to fulfill His will. But “if” also means: “I put into these words my desire that the best may happen, and therefore You can change this request of mine as You want, accepting my intention, my desire that Your will be done, even if I unreasonably express how I would like it to be done” (Rom. 8:26). When, for example, we pray for someone’s recovery or return from a journey at a certain moment for some reason that seems significant to us, our real intention is the good of that person; but we do not have clairvoyance on this matter, and our calculations and plans may be erroneous. “If” means: “As far as I can judge what is right, let it be so; but if I am wrong, then accept not my word, but my intention.” Elder Ambrose of Optina had such insight that allowed him to see the true good of a person. One day, the monastery icon painter received a large sum of money and was preparing to go home. He probably prayed to set off on the road immediately; but the elder deliberately detained the artist for three days and thus saved his life, since one of the workers planned to kill him and rob him. When he left, the villain had already left his ambush, and only many years later the painter learned from what danger the old man had saved him.

Sometimes we pray for a person we love and who needs something, but we cannot help him. Very often we don’t know what exactly is needed, we don’t find the words to help, even the one we love most. Sometimes we know that nothing can be done except remain silent, although we are ready to give our lives just to help. In such a state of spirit, we can turn to God, surrender everything to Him and say: “God, You know everything, and Your love is perfect; take this life into Your hand, do what I long to do, but cannot.” And since prayer is a guarantee, we cannot truly pray for those whom we ourselves are not ready to help. Following Isaiah, we must be ready to hear the word of the Lord: “Whom shall I send? and who will go for Us? – and answer: “Here am I, send me” (Is. 6:8).

Many people are embarrassed by the thought of praying for the dead; they wonder what the purpose of this prayer is, what we hope to achieve with it. Can the fate of the dead change because they are prayed for? Can prayer convince God to be unfair and give them what they do not deserve?

If you believe that praying for the living helps them, why don’t you think it is possible to pray for the dead? Life is one, for, as the Evangelist Luke says, “God… is not the God of the dead, but of the living” (Luke 20:38). Death is not the end, but a certain stage in human destiny, and this destiny does not freeze like stone at the moment of death. The love that our prayers express cannot be in vain; if love has power on earth, but has no power after death, this tragically contradicts the word of Scripture that “love is strong as death” (Song 8:6), and the experience of the Church, which testifies that love is stronger than death, for Christ conquered death in His love for the human race. It is wrong to think that a person’s connection with life on earth ends at the moment of his death. Throughout his life, a person sows seeds. These seeds germinate in the souls of other people, influence their destiny, and the fruit born from these seeds truly belongs not only to those who brought it, but also to those who sowed it. Written or spoken words that change a person’s life or the destinies of mankind – the words of preachers, philosophers, poets or political figures – remain the responsibility of those to whom they belong, responsibility for both bad and good consequences. The fate of these people inevitably depends on the influence they have on those who live after them.

The influence of each person’s life continues until the Last Judgment, and the eternal, final fate of a person is determined not only by the short time that he lived on earth, but also by the results of his life, its good or bad consequences. Those who, like fertile soil, accepted the sown seed, can influence the fate of the departed, prayerfully asking God to bless the person who transformed, changed their lives, and gave meaning to their existence. By turning to God in an act of unceasing love, fidelity and gratitude, they enter that eternal Kingdom for which there are no boundaries of time, and can influence the fate and condition of the departed. We do not ask God for injustice; we ask Him not just to forgive a person despite all the bad he has done, but to bless him for the good that he has done, as evidenced by other lives.

Our prayer is an act of gratitude and love insofar as our life is a continuation of something that that person lived. We do not ask God to be unjust, nor do we imagine that we have more compassion and love than He does; we do not ask Him to be more merciful than He would have been without our request, but we bring new testimony to the court of God and pray that this testimony will be accepted and God’s blessing will fall abundantly on the one who meant so much in our lives. And this is important to understand: the purpose of such a prayer is not to convince God of something, but to bring evidence that this person did not live fruitlessly: without loving and without awakening love.

Anyone who in any way has been a source of love has protection before the judgment of God; but those who remain have a duty to bear witness to what he has done for them. Here again, it’s not just a matter of goodwill or emotion. Saint Isaac the Syrian says: do not reduce your prayer to words, make your whole life a prayer to God. Therefore, if we want to pray for our departed, our life must confirm the prayer. It is not enough to awaken certain feelings for them from time to time and then ask God to do something for them. It is important that every seed of goodness, truth, holiness that they sow bear fruit, because then we can stand before God and say: he sowed goodness, he had qualities in him that prompted me to act righteously, and this piece of goodness is not mine, but his, and, in a sense, it is his glory and redemption.

The Orthodox Church has very specific views on death and burial. The funeral service begins with the words “Blessed be our God…”; you need to understand how much this means, because these words are spoken in spite of death, in spite of bereavement, in spite of suffering. The service is built on the basis of Matins – the service of doxology and light; loved ones stand with burning candles in their hands, a symbol of resurrection. The main idea of ​​the service is that we really face death, but death no longer frightens us when we look at it through the Resurrection of Christ.

At the same time, the service conveys the duality of death, its two sides. It is impossible to accept death, it is monstrous; we are created to live; and yet in a world made monstrous by human sin, death is the only way out. If our world of sin were fixed as unchangeable and eternal, it would be hell; death is the only thing that allows the earth, along with suffering and sin, to escape from this hell.

The Church sees both sides; Saint John of Damascus wrote about this with extreme, naked realism, because a Christian cannot fall into romanticism when it comes to death. To die means to die, and in this sense, when speaking about the cross, we must remember that it is an instrument of death. Death is death with all its tragic ugliness and monstrosity, and yet, ultimately, death is the only thing that gives us hope. On the one hand, we long to live; on the other hand, if we long enough to live, we long to die, because in this limited world the fullness of life is impossible. Undoubtedly, death is corruption, but corruption, which, in combination with the grace of God, leads to a measure of life that we would never otherwise have had. “Death is gain,” says the Apostle Paul (Phil. 1:21), for while living in the body, we are separated from Christ. When a certain measure of life is fulfilled – regardless of the time lived – we must throw off this limited life in order to enter the unlimited life.

The Orthodox funeral service is emphatically centered around the open casket because the Church continues to see man in his wholeness, as body and soul, for which she cares equally. The body is prepared for burial; the body is not a worn-out garment, discarded in order for the soul to be freed, as supposedly pious people like to say. The body for a Christian is something much more; nothing can happen to the soul in which the body does not also take part. The perception of this world – and not only it, but also the divine world, partially occurs through the body. Each sacrament is a gift of God, communicated to the soul through physical actions; baptismal waters, oil of confirmation, bread and wine of communion – everything is taken from the material world. We cannot do anything good or bad except in union with the body. The body does not exist only for the soul to be born, mature and then leave, leaving it; from the first day to the last, the body was a co-worker with the soul in everything and, together with the soul, constitutes a complete person. It forever remains as if marked with the stamp of the soul and the common life they spent together. Connected with the soul, the body is also connected through the sacraments with Jesus Christ Himself. We partake of His Blood and Body, and thus the body, by its own right, is united with the divine world with which it comes into contact.

A body without a soul is just a corpse and has no relation to what is being discussed here, and a soul without a body, even the soul of a saint going “straight to heaven,” does not yet experience that bliss to which man is called at the end of time, when the glory of God will shine in soul and body.

As Saint Isaac the Syrian says, even eternal bliss cannot be forced on a person without the consent of the body. This statement about the importance of the body is especially striking from St. Isaac, one of the greatest ascetics, one of those about whom others could say that he spent his entire life killing his body. But, according to the expression of the Apostle Paul, the ascetics killed the “sinful body” (Rom. 6:6) in order to reap eternity from corruption, and did not kill the body in order for the soul to be freed from captivity.

Therefore, a dead body is the subject of the care of the Church, even if it is the body of a sinner; and all the attention we pay to him during his lifetime cannot compare with the reverence shown in the funeral service.

In the same way, the body is connected with the soul in the life of prayer. Every perversion, every excess, every vulgarity to which we ourselves subject the whole body humiliates one of the members of this community so as to harm the other. This can be expressed differently: the humiliation to which we are subjected from the outside can be overcome by prayer; the humiliations to which we subject ourselves destroy prayer.

The distinctive feature of Christian prayer is that it is the prayer of Christ, offered to His Father from generation to generation, all in new and new circumstances, by those who, by grace and communion, are the presence of Christ in this world; it is an ongoing, unceasing prayer to God that God’s will be done, that everything will happen according to His wise and loving plan. This means that our prayer life is at the same time a struggle against everything that is not Christ. We prepare the ground for our prayer every time we throw off something that is not Christ’s, that is unworthy of Him; and only the prayer of one who, like the Apostle Paul, can say: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20) is genuine Christian prayer.

However, instead of praying for God’s will to be done, we often try to convince God to arrange everything the way we want. Can such a prayer not be disgraced? No matter how well we pray, we must realize at every moment that we may be mistaken in our best feelings and thoughts. No matter how sincere, no matter how truthful our intentions may be, no matter how perfect they may seem to us, every prayer can at some point go the wrong way, and therefore, when we have told God everything we intended, we must add, like Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane: “Nevertheless not as I will, but as You will” (Matthew 26:39). With the same attitude, we can resort to the intercession of saints: we bring them our good intentions, but leave them to formulate our desires in accordance with the will of God, which is known to them.

“Ask, and it will be given to you” (Matthew 7:7). These words are a stumbling block for the Christian consciousness; we can neither accept them nor reject them. To reject them would be to reject God’s infinite goodness, but we are not yet sufficiently Christian to accept them. We know that a father will not give a stone instead of bread (Matthew 7:9), but we do not look at ourselves as children who are not aware of their true needs and do not know what is good for them and what is bad. Meanwhile, this is precisely the explanation why so many prayers remain unanswered. It can also be found in the words of St. John Chrysostom: “Do not be upset if you do not immediately receive what you ask for: God wants to give you greater good through your constancy in prayer.”

“Perhaps God’s silence is just a tragic aspect of our own deafness?”5

“Truly I also tell you that if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by My Father in heaven” (Matthew 18:19). This statement is sometimes used as a stone to be thrown at Christians, because very often several people pray earnestly together for something and yet do not receive what they ask for. But the objections collapse as soon as we understand that this “together” was purely earthly, agreement was a mere coalition, not unity, and the belief that God could do whatever He wanted was understood as the friends who consoled Job understood it.

The apparent untruth of the words “whatever you ask in prayer, in faith, you will receive” (Matthew 21:22) finds an answer in the Gethsemane prayer of Christ, and also partly in the Apostle Paul (Heb. 11:36–40): “Others experienced mockery and beatings, as well as chains and prison, were stoned, sawn in pieces, tortured, died by the sword, wandered in mantles and goatskins, enduring shortcomings, sorrows, bitterness; those whom the whole world was not worthy of wandered through deserts and mountains, through caves and gorges of the earth. And all these, who testified in faith, did not receive what was promised, because God had provided something better for us, so that they would not reach perfection without us.”

Without a doubt, in all these circumstances these people prayed a lot – they prayed, perhaps, not for deliverance, for they were ready to lay down their lives for God, but for help; and yet they were not given all that they could have expected. When God sees that we have enough faith to withstand His silence or to accept torment – moral or physical – for the greater completeness of the accomplishment of His Kingdom, He can remain silent, and the answer to prayer will be given only in the end, but in a completely different way than we expected.

The Apostle Paul says (Heb. 5:7) that the prayer of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane was heard and God raised Him from the dead. He is not talking here about the immediate response of God, who could carry the cup past, which is what Christ prayed for, but about the fact that God gave Christ the power to accept His will, to suffer, to do His work, and it was the absoluteness of His faith that made it possible for God to say “no.” But this same absoluteness of Christ’s faith made it possible that the world was saved.

Many of our prayers are petitionary prayers, and people tend to think that petition is the lowest level of prayer; then comes thanksgiving, then doxology. In fact, gratitude and praise are expressions of less deep relationships. At our level of half-faith, it is easier to praise or thank God than to trust Him enough to ask Him for something in faith. Even semi-believing people can turn to God with gratitude when something pleasant happens to them; and there are moments of elation when everyone is able to sing to God. But it is much more difficult to have such undivided faith as to ask God with all your heart and all your mind with complete trust. We should not look down on prayers of supplication, because the ability to offer them is a test of the reality of our faith.

When the mother of the sons of Zebedee came to ask Christ for the two best places in heaven for her sons, she came with full faith that the Lord could give what she asked; but she thought that Christ had the power to fulfill her request simply by the owner’s right to do as He wanted, and this did not correspond to His teaching: “My judgment is righteous; For I do not seek My will, but the will of the Father who sent Me” (John 5:30). The mother of the sons of Zebedee expected that the Lord, of His own will, would fulfill her desire and show her special mercy because she was the first to come to ask for it. Christ’s refusal emphasized that what the mother was asking for would be a position based on pride, while the entire Kingdom is based on humility. The mother’s prayer was determined by the Old Testament attitude towards the coming of the Messiah.

Jesus Prayer

Those who have read A Pilgrim’s Candid Tales are familiar with the expression “Jesus Prayer.” This is the name of the short prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” repeated incessantly. “Tales of the Pilgrim” is a story about a man who wanted to learn to pray without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5:17). But since the man whose experience is conveyed in this book was a wanderer, many of his psychological characteristics, as well as the way in which he learned prayer and how he used it, are determined precisely by his way of life, and this makes the book less generally valid than it might have been; and yet it is the best introduction to this prayer, which represents one of the greatest treasures of the Orthodox Church.

This prayer is deeply rooted in the spirit of the Gospel, and it is not in vain that the great teachers of Orthodoxy have always emphasized that the Jesus Prayer contains the entire essence of the Gospel. That is why only those who belong to the Gospel, who are truly members of the Church of Christ, can pray the Jesus Prayer in its entirety.

The whole Gospel message, and moreover, the whole reality of the Gospel, lies in the name, in the person of Jesus. If you take the first part of the prayer, you will see how it expresses our faith in the Lord: “Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” In the very heart of prayer we find the name of Jesus; it is the name before whom “every knee shall bow” (Isa. 45:23), and when we pronounce it we affirm the historical event of the Incarnation. We affirm that God, the Word of God, co-eternal with the Father, became man and that in His person the fullness of the Godhead dwelt among us bodily (Col. 2:9).

In order to see in the Galilean, in the prophet of Israel, the incarnate Word of God, God who became man, we must be led by the Spirit, for both the Incarnation of Christ and the fact that He is Lord is revealed to us only by the Spirit of God. We call Him Christ and thereby affirm that the Old Testament prophecies were fulfilled in Him. By saying that Jesus is the Christ, we acknowledge that the entire history of the Old Testament is ours, that we accept it as the truth of God. We call Him the Son of God, for we know that the Messiah for whom the Jews were waiting, the man whom Bartimaeus called the Son of David, is the incarnate Son of God. These words briefly contain everything we know, everything we believe about Jesus Christ on the basis of the Old and New Testaments and the centuries-old experience of the Church. In these few words we make a full and complete confession of our faith.

But it is not enough to confess your faith in this way, it is not enough to believe. Demons also believe and tremble (James 2:19). Faith is not enough for salvation to be realized; it must lead to a right relationship with God; So, having confessed in all its fullness, accurately and clearly, our faith in Christ as Lord and as a person, faith in His historicity and Divinity, we place ourselves before Him face to face in the right consciousness: “Have mercy on me, a sinner!”

This word – “have mercy” – is used in all Christian Churches, and in Orthodoxy it is the people’s response to petitions pronounced by the priest. The Greek word we find in the Gospels and early liturgies is (elehson) “eleison,” the same root as (elaion) “eleon,” meaning the olive tree and its oil. If we go through the entire Old and New Testament, looking for all the passages connected with this basic concept, we will find it in a whole variety of parables and events that allow us to fully understand the meaning of the word. We find the image of an olive tree in the book of Genesis. After the flood, Noah sent birds to find out if there was dry land, and one of them, a dove – and not coincidentally, a dove – returned with a small olive branch. This branch was the news for Noah and everyone who was with him in the ark that the wrath of God had ceased and that God was giving man the opportunity to start all over again. All who are in the ark can settle again on solid ground, try to live in a new way and never again, if they can, be subject to the wrath of God.

In the New Testament parable of the Good Samaritan, olive oil is poured to relieve pain and heal wounds. In the anointing of kings and priests in the Old Testament, oil is again poured on their heads as a sign of the grace of God that descends and pours out on them (Ps. 133:2), giving them new strength to do what is beyond human ability. The king must stand on the threshold between the will of people and the will of God, he is called to lead his people to fulfill God’s will; the priest also stands on this threshold to proclaim the will of God and even more: to act for God, to proclaim God’s commandments and to carry out God’s decisions.

The oil speaks, first of all, about the cessation of God’s wrath, about the peace that God offers to people who have sinned against Him; it speaks, further, of God healing us so that we can live and become what we are called to be; and since He knows that we are not able by our own strength to fulfill either His will or the laws of our created nature, He abundantly pours out His grace upon us (Rom. 5:20). He gives us strength to do things we could not do otherwise.

The words “mercy” and “mercy” in Slavic are of the same root as words expressing tenderness and tenderness; and when we say these words – elehson, have mercy on us, “have mercy,” we ask God not only to deliver us from His wrath, but we ask for love.

If we return to the words of the Jesus Prayer – “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” we will see that the first words accurately and fully express the gospel faith in Christ, the historical embodiment of the Word of God; and the end of the prayer expresses all the multifaceted richness of the relationship of love that exists between God and His creation.

The Jesus Prayer is known to many Orthodox Christians as a prayer rule or as an addition to it, as one of the forms of worship, an opportunity for instant prayerful concentration, available at any moment, under any circumstances.

Many have written about the physical aspects of prayer, breathing exercises, attention to the beating of the heart, and a variety of other, less significant features. The Philokalia is full of detailed instructions on heartfelt prayer, even with references to techniques developed by Sufism. Ancient and modern Fathers dealt with this topic and always came to the same conclusion: one should never undertake physical exercises without the strict guidance of a spiritual father.

But what is available to everyone, what is given by God, is prayer itself, the repetition of words without any physical effort, even without moving the tongue, prayer, which must be used systematically in order to achieve internal transformation. More than any other prayer, the Jesus Prayer aims to place us in God’s presence without any thought other than the awareness of the miracle that we are here and God is with us, because when we pray the Jesus Prayer, there is nothing and no one but God and us.

The Jesus Prayer is used in two ways: it is the same act of worship of God as any other prayer, and at the ascetic level it is a focus that gathers attention together and allows it to be kept in the presence of God.

This prayer is a very kind companion, friendly, always close and completely personal, despite the apparent monotony of its repetition. In joy or sorrow, when it becomes familiar, it is a force that revitalizes the soul, always a ready response to any call from God. The words of Saint Simeon the New Theologian are applicable to its entire effect on us: “The rest of what happens with this, you will find out later.”

Labor prayer

When we have the right attitude, when the heart is full of reverence, when “the mouth speaks out of the abundance of the heart” (Luke 6:45), then prayer is not a problem, we freely speak to God the words that are closest to us. But if we left our prayer life to the whims of our moods, we would probably pray fervently and sincerely from time to time, but for long periods we would lose all prayerful contact with God. A great temptation is to postpone prayer until the moment when a living feeling for God awakens in us, and to consider any prayer and any appeal to God at another time as insincere. We all know from experience that there are many feelings living within us that do not manifest themselves at every moment of our life; illness or grief obscures them from our consciousness. Even when we love deeply, there are times when we do not feel it and yet we know that love lives within us. The same thing happens with our attitude towards God; For various reasons, internal or external, it is sometimes difficult for us to realize that we believe, hope, that we really love God. At such moments, we must act guided not by feeling, but by knowledge. We must believe in what is in us, even if we do not see it in ourselves at the moment. We must remember that love is alive, although it does not fill our heart with joy or inspiration. And we must stand before God, remembering that He always loves, is always present, despite the fact that we do not feel it now.

When we are cold and dry, when it seems to us that our prayer is insincere and we perform it only according to the routine – what should we do? Isn’t it better to stop praying until prayer comes alive again? But how do we know when the time has come? There is a great danger in being seduced by the desire for perfection in prayer when we are still so far from it. When prayer is dry, instead of retreating, we should make an act of greater faith and continue. We must say to God: “I am exhausted, I cannot really pray; accept, Lord, this sad voice and words of prayer and help me.” Let us bring quantity in our prayer if we are unable to bring quality. Of course, it is better to say only two words “Our Father…” with all the depth of their understanding than to repeat the Lord’s Prayer twelve times; but this is precisely what we are sometimes incapable of. “Quantitative” prayer does not mean saying more words than usual; this means maintaining your usual prayer rule, accepting the fact that it is just a certain number of repeated words and nothing more. As the Fathers say, the Holy Spirit is always present where there is prayer, and, according to the Apostle Paul, “no one can call Jesus Lord except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor. 12:3). When the time comes, the Holy Spirit will fill faithful and patient prayer with the meaning and depth of new life. When we stand before God in such moments of despondency or abandonment, we must use an effort of will, we must pray out of conviction, if not out of feeling; to pray with faith – which we know we have, with reason, if not with a fiery heart.

At such moments, prayer sounds completely different, but for us, not for God; as Juliana of Norich says, “pray inwardly, even though you think that it does not bring you comfort, for it is useful, although you feel nothing, although you see nothing, and even think that you cannot pray. For in dryness and poverty, in sickness and weakness, your prayer is very pleasant to Me, even if you think that it does not bring you comfort, – and such is all your prayer in My eyes, done with faith” (“Cloud of the Unknowable”).

In such dry periods, when prayer becomes an effort, our main support is fidelity and determination; by an act of will in which both are combined, without paying attention to our feelings, we force ourselves to stand before God and talk to Him, simply because He is our God and we are His creation. Whatever we feel at one time or another, our position does not change: God remains our Creator, our Redeemer, our Lord; He is the One to whom we go, the One we long for, and the only One who can give us completeness.

Sometimes we think that we are unworthy to pray and do not even have the right to pray; This, again, is a temptation. Every drop of water, no matter where it comes from – from a puddle or from the ocean – is purified through the process of evaporation; so is every prayer that ascends to God. The more abandoned we feel, the more necessary it is to pray; this is what Father John of Kronstadt probably experienced one day when he was praying and the devil looked at him and muttered: “Hypocrite, how dare you pray with your vile mind, full of the thoughts that I see in it?” – and answered: “It is precisely because my mind is full of thoughts that are disgusting to me and with which I struggle, that I pray to God.”

Whether it is the Jesus Prayer or any other prayer used by the Church, people often say: what right do I have to use it? Can I pronounce these words as if they were my own? When we use prayers that were written by saints, devotees of prayer, and are the fruit of their experience, we can be sure that if we are attentive enough, the words of the prayer will become our own, we will get used to the feeling that gave birth to them, and they will transform us by the grace of God, responding to our efforts. With the Jesus Prayer, the matter is, in a sense, simpler, because the worse our condition, the easier it is for us to understand that, standing before God, we can only say one thing: “have mercy!”

More often than we perhaps admit to ourselves, we pray in the hope of a mysterious insight, in the hope that something will happen to us, in the hope of experiencing some exciting experience. This is a mistake, the same mistake that we sometimes make in our relationships with people and which can almost completely destroy these relationships: we approach a person and expect a certain kind of response in advance; when there is no answer or the answer is not what we expected, we become disappointed or push away the answer. In the same way, when we pray, we must remember that the Lord God, who allows us freely into His presence, is Himself free in relation to us; this does not mean that the freedom He manifests is arbitrary, just as we are sometimes kind and sometimes rude, depending on our mood; but this means that He is not obliged to reveal Himself to us just because we have come and look in His direction. It is very important to remember that both God and we are free to come or go; and this freedom is of the greatest importance, because it is a sign of genuine relationships.

She is a young hopelessly ill woman, after a long period of prayerful life, when God was infinitely close and tangible, suddenly lost all contact with Him. But stronger than the grief over the loss of God, there was in her fear of the temptation to save herself from this absence of God by building for herself a false His presence, for the true absence of God and His true presence are equally proof of His reality and the concreteness of the relationship with Him, which is assumed in prayer.

So we must be ready to offer our prayer and accept whatever God gives. This is the basic principle of ascetic life. In the struggle to keep ourselves turned to God, in the struggle against everything that is opaque in us that prevents us from looking towards God, we can be neither completely active nor passive. We cannot be active in the sense that no matter how much we fuss, we cannot by our efforts either climb to heaven or bring God down from heaven. But we cannot simply be passive and sit back; true relationships would not exist if we were merely passively exposed to Him. Ascetic behavior consists of vigilance – the vigilance of a warrior who stands in the night as quietly as he can, with as much attention and as sensitively as possible, in order to react correctly and quickly to whatever happens. In a sense he is inactive because he stands and does nothing; on the other hand, he is intensely active because he is alert and completely collected. He listens carefully and peers, ready for anything.

This is an exact replica of the inner life. We must stand in the presence of God in complete silence and composure, in sensitive attention, without moving. We may wait for hours or even longer, but there will come a time when our tireless attention will be rewarded and something will happen. But, again, if we are alert and vigilant, then we are ready for everything that may come our way, without expecting one specific thing. We must be ready to accept from God everything that He will give us to experience. If we have prayed for some time and felt some warmth, then when we come to God the next day, we are very easily tempted to expect the same thing. If we once prayed to God warmly or with tears, with contrition of heart or in joy, then when we come to God again, we expect to experience the same thing and very often we miss new contact with God only because we strive to relive what we have already experienced.

God’s approach to us can be expressed in very different ways: it can be joy, it can be trembling, it can be heartfelt contrition or something else. We must remember: what we meet today will be unknown to us, for God as we knew Him yesterday is not the same as He can reveal Himself to us tomorrow.

Silent Prayer

Prayer is, first of all, a meeting with God. Sometimes we sense God’s presence, most often dimly; but there are times when we can place ourselves before God only by an act of faith, without feeling His presence at all. It is not the degree of our perception that makes this meeting possible and fruitful: other conditions must be met, and the main one is that the praying person is real. Living in society, we allow the most diverse facets of our personality to manifest themselves. Each of us is one person under some circumstances and completely different under others: domineering in conditions where he is the boss, completely submissive at home, and again completely different among friends. Each self is multisyllabic, but none of these false faces, or those which are partly false and partly genuine, is our true self sufficiently to stand on our behalf in the presence of God. This weakens our prayer and creates division of mind, heart and will. As Polonius says in Hamlet: “Be true to yourself; then, as morning follows night, so will loyalty to all follow.”

It is not easy to find your true self among these various faces and outside of them. We are so unaccustomed to being ourselves in any deep and authentic sense that it seems almost impossible for us to understand where to begin our search. However, we all know that there are times when we are closer than usual to our true self; these moments should be noticed and carefully analyzed in order to at least approximately reveal what we really are. It is usually so difficult for us to discover the truth about ourselves because of our vanity, both vanity itself and the way it determines our behavior. Vanity consists in being exalted in something that has no value, and depending in your judgment about yourself, and therefore in your entire attitude towards life, on the opinions of people, which should not have such weight for us. Vanity is a state of dependence on people’s reactions to our personality.

Vanity is the first enemy that should be fought, although, as the Fathers say, it is also the last one that can be defeated. We find an example of vanity defeated in the story of Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1-10), and it can teach us a lot. Zacchaeus was a wealthy man of high social standing; he was an official of the Roman Empire, a tax collector, and should have behaved according to his position. He was a prominent citizen in his town; a view of things that could be expressed in the words “what will people say?” could have kept him from meeting Christ. But when Zacchaeus heard that Christ was passing through Jericho, he irresistibly wanted to see Him, and he forgot that he might seem funny – and this for us is worse than many evils; and this respectable citizen ran and climbed a tree! The whole crowd could see him, and no doubt many laughed. But so strong was his desire to see Jesus that he forgot to think what others would say; for a short time he stopped depending on the opinions of others and at that moment was completely himself; it was Zacchaeus the man, not Zacchaeus the tax collector or Zacchaeus the rich man or Zacchaeus the citizen.

Humiliation is one way we can unlearn vanity, but if humiliation is not willingly accepted, it can only increase resentment and make us even more dependent on other people’s opinions. The statements about vanity by John Climacus and Isaac the Syrian seem to contradict each other: one says that vanity can be avoided only through pride; the other is that the path lies through humility. Both say this in context and not as an absolute truth; but these judgments allow us to see what both extremes have in common, namely: whether we become proud or humble, we no longer pay attention to human opinion, in both cases we simply do not notice it. There is an example in the life of Abba Dorotheus that illustrates the first point.

Approaching the monastery over which he had charge, Abba Dorotheos saw several brothers mocking a very young monk, who was completely not paying attention to them, and was amazed at the young man’s equanimity. Dorotheus had extensive experience of the difficulties of spiritual struggle, and this seemed somewhat suspicious to him. He asked the monk how he managed to achieve such dispassion at such a young age. The answer was: “Why would I pay attention to barking dogs? I do not notice them; I recognize God alone as my judge.” This is an example of how pride can make us independent of other people’s opinions. Pride is a position when we put ourselves at the center of everything, make ourselves the criterion of truth, good and evil, the true value of things, and then we are free from other people’s judgments, and also free from vanity. But only absolute pride can destroy vanity completely, and absolute pride, fortunately, is beyond our human capabilities.

Another way is humility. At its core, humility is the position of one who always stands before the judgment of God. This is the position of one who is like the dust of the earth. The Latin word humilitas – humility – comes from humus – fertile earth. The fertile land lies unnoticed by anyone, as something taken for granted; it is under everyone’s feet, everyone can trample on it; she is silent, inconspicuous, dark and, however, is always ready to accept the seed, give it flesh and life. The lower, the more fertile, because the soil becomes truly fertile when it accepts everything that the earth rejects. She lies so low that nothing can pollute, humiliate, degrade her; she took the last place, there was nowhere to go lower. In such a situation, nothing can disturb spiritual clarity, peace and joy.

There are moments that pull us out of the state of dependence on other people’s reactions to us; these are moments of deep grief or also genuine, overwhelming joy. When King David danced before the Ark of the Covenant (2 Samuel 6:14), many, like Saul’s daughter Michal, thought that the king was behaving very indecently. They probably smiled or looked away in confusion. But he was too overwhelmed with joy to notice it. The same thing happens in grief: when it is genuine and deep, a person becomes genuine; posing, conscious and unconscious, is forgotten, and this is what is so precious in grief – both in our own and in others.

The difficulty is that when we are authentic, because we are in joy or sorrow, we are not inclined and unable to observe ourselves, to notice those features of our personality that appear at this time. But there is a moment when we are still imbued with sufficiently deep feeling to be genuine, but have already come so far from the state of ecstasy of joy or grief that we are struck by the contrast between what we are at this moment and what we usually are; then we clearly see our depth and our superficiality. If we are attentive, if we do not pass thoughtlessly from one state of mind and heart to another, forgetting everything as it passes, we can gradually learn to preserve those characteristic features of our true self that have appeared for a moment.

Many spiritual writers say that we should try to find Christ within ourselves. Christ is a perfect, completely authentic man, and we can begin to discover what is authentic in us by revealing what is akin to Him in us. There are places in the Gospel against which we rebel, and others from which our hearts burn within us (Luke 24:32). If we mark those places that cause indignation in us, and those that we accept with all our hearts as true, we will already discover two extremes in ourselves; in short – the Antichrist and Christ in himself. We must take into account both categories and focus on those places that are close to our hearts, because we can be sure that at least at this one point we are akin to Christ, that this point at which a person is no longer – not in all its fullness, of course, but at least in the beginning – a genuine person, the image of Christ. It is not enough, however, for this or that passage of the Gospel to excite us emotionally or to arouse the complete agreement of our mind – we must embody the words of Christ within ourselves. We may be affected by something and yet we may give up everything we thought and felt at the first opportunity that presents itself to us for the practical application of the truth we have discovered.

There are times when we are disposed to make peace with our enemies; but if a person refuses to meet us halfway, our peacemaking mood quickly gives way to a warlike one. This happened with Miusov in Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov”. He had just been rude and intolerant with those around him, then regained his self-esteem, starting all over again, but the unexpected impudence of Fyodor Pavlovich again changed his feelings, and “Peter Alexandrovich went from the most complacent mood immediately to the most ferocious. Everything that had died down in his heart and calmed down, at once resurrected and rose.”

It is not enough to be amazed by the places that seem so true to us; there must be a struggle to be in every moment of our life what we are in the best moments, and then we will gradually throw off everything superficial and become more real and truer; just as Christ is truth itself and reality itself, so we will become more and more what Christ is. The point is not to outwardly imitate Christ, but to inwardly be what He is. Imitation of Christ is not an outward copying of His behavior or His life; it is a difficult and complex struggle.

This is the difference between the Old and New Testaments. The commandments of the Old Testament were the rules of life, and whoever strictly followed these rules became righteous; however, he could not extract eternal life from them. The commandments of the New Testament, on the contrary, never make a person righteous. Christ once said to His disciples: “When you have done all that was commanded you, say: We are slaves, worthless, because we have done what we had to do” (Luke 17:10). But when we fulfill the commandments of Christ not simply as rules of conduct, but because the will of God has permeated our heart, or even when we simply force our evil will to fulfill them externally and stand in repentance, knowing that there is nothing in us except this external compulsion, we gradually grow in the knowledge of God – internal, and not intellectual, not rationalistic or academic.

A person who has become real and true can stand before God and offer prayer with absolute attention, in the unity of mind, heart and will, when the body is in complete harmony with the movements of the soul. But until we have reached such perfection, we can still stand in the presence of God, conscious that we are partly real and partly unreal, and offer Him all that we can, but in repentance – confessing that we are still so unreal and so incapable of wholeness. At no point in our life, neither when we are still completely far from internal unity, nor when we are already on the way to it, are we deprived of the opportunity to stand before God. But instead of standing in complete unity, which gives our prayer impetus and strength, we can stand in our weakness, recognizing it and being willing to bear its consequences.

One of the Optina elders, Ambrose, once said that there are two categories of people who will be saved: those who sin and are strong enough to repent, and those who are too weak even to truly repent, but are ready to patiently, humbly and gratefully bear the full weight of the consequences of their sins; in their humility they are pleasing to God.

God is always true, always He Himself, and if we could stand before Him as He is, face to face, and perceive His objective reality, everything would be simpler; but we manage to subjectively obscure this truth, this reality before which we stand, and replace the true God with a pale image of Him, worse, with a God who is unreal because of our one-sided and wretched idea of ​​Him.

When we are about to meet someone, the authenticity of the meeting depends not only on what we are and what the other is, but also largely on the preconceived idea that we have created for ourselves about the other person. In this case, we are not talking to a real person, but to an image of him that we have created for ourselves, and the victim of this bias usually has to make great efforts to break through this image and establish a genuine relationship.

Each of us has a preconceived idea of ​​God; no matter how sublime, beautiful and even true this idea may be in its component parts, if we are not careful, it will stand between us and the true God and can simply turn into an idol before which we pray and which will obscure the true God from us. This, in particular, happens when we turn to God with any request or prayer for someone; then we come to God not as someone with whom we want to share our difficulties, in whose love we believe and from whom we expect a solution; but we come wanting to see God in a certain aspect, and we direct our prayers not to God, but to the concept of God that suits us at the moment.

We should not come to God to experience certain emotions or to experience mystical experiences. We must come to God simply to be in His presence, and if He chooses to make His presence felt to us, blessed is God, but if He wants us to experience His real absence, then blessed is God, because, as we have seen, He is free to draw near or not to draw near to us. He is as free as we are. If we do not come into the presence of God, it means that we are busy with something that attracts us more than Him; if He does not make His presence obvious, it is so that we learn something new about Him or about ourselves. But the absence of God, which we can experience in our prayers, the feeling that He is not here, is also one of the aspects of the relationship with Him, and a very valuable aspect.

We can experience the feeling of God’s absence according to His will; He may want us to yearn for Him and to know how precious His presence is, giving us an experience of what ultimate loneliness is. But often our experience of God’s absence is the result of the fact that we ourselves do not give ourselves the opportunity to feel His presence. One woman, who had been practicing the Jesus Prayer for fourteen years, complained that she never had the feeling that God was here. But when it was pointed out to her that in her prayer she herself spoke without stopping, she agreed to stand before God in silence for several days. And when she did this, she felt that God was here, that the silence that surrounded her was not emptiness, not the absence of noise or movement, but that this silence was intense; it was something not negative, but positive; it was a presence – the presence of God, who made Himself known to her, creating the same silence in her. And then she discovered that prayer resumed in her by itself, but it was no longer that verbal noise that prevented God from revealing Himself.

If we were humble or at least reasonable, we would not expect that since we decided to pray, we would immediately recognize the experience of St. Juan de la Cruz, St. Teresa or St. Seraphim of Sarov. However, we do not always long to experience what the saints experienced; often we just want to relive what we ourselves have experienced before; but if we focus on previous experience, it can close out from us those new experiences that should naturally follow. Whatever we experience belongs to the past and is connected with what we were yesterday, not with what we are today. We pray not in order to experience this or that experience that delights us, but in order to meet God, with all the possible consequences of this meeting; or to bring Him what we wanted to bring and leave Him to do with it whatever He Himself wants.

We must also remember that we must always approach God with the consciousness that we do not know Him. We must approach the incomprehensible, mysterious God, Who reveals Himself as He wills; whenever we come to Him, we are before a God whom we do not yet know. We must be open to every manifestation of His Person and His presence.

We can know much about God from our own experience, from the experience of others, from the writings of saints and the teachings of the Church, from the testimony of Holy Scripture; we can know Him as good, humble, know that He is a scorching fire, that He is our Judge, that He is our Savior, and much more; but we must remember that at any time He may reveal Himself as we have never known Him, even within these general categories. We must stand reverently before Him and be ready to meet the One we will meet—a God we already know, or a God we don’t even recognize. He may give us some understanding of what He is, and it will be completely different from what we expected. We hope to meet a meek, compassionate, loving Jesus, but we meet God, who judges and condemns us and does not allow us close in our present state. Or we come in repentance expecting to be rejected and are met with compassion. At every stage, God is partly known and partly unknown to us. He reveals Himself – and to this extent we know Him, but we will never know Him completely; there will always remain a divine mystery, a heart of mystery, into which we will never be able to penetrate.

Knowledge of God can be given and received only in communion with God, only if we share with God what He is, to the extent that He associates us with Himself. Buddhist thought illustrates this with the story of the salt doll.

The salt doll, after a long journey over land, came to the sea and discovered something that it had never seen before, and could not understand what it was. She stood on solid ground, a dense little doll of salt, and saw that there was another ground, mobile, unfaithful, noisy, strange and unknown. She asked the sea: “Who are you?” And it said: “I am the sea.” The doll asked: “What is the sea?” And the answer was: “It’s me.” Then the doll said: “I can’t understand, but I would like to; but how?” The sea replied: “Touch me.” The doll timidly put its foot forward, touched the water and experienced a strange impression, as if something had begun to become knowable. She took her foot out of the water and saw that she had no toes; frightened, she said: “Where are my fingers, what have you done to me?” And the sea said: “You gave something in order to understand.” Gradually, the water washed away the particles of her salt from the doll, and the doll went further and further into the sea, and at every moment she had the feeling that she was learning more and more, but still could not say what the sea was. She went deeper and deeper and dissolved more and more, repeating: “But what is the sea?” Finally, the last wave dissolved its remains, and the doll said: “It’s me!” She knew the sea, but not the water.

Without drawing an absolute parallel between the Buddhist doll and the Christian knowledge of God, we can find a lot of truth in this little story. Saint Maximus gives the example of a red-hot sword: the sword does not know where the fire ends, and the fire does not know where the sword begins, so it is possible, Maxim says, to cut with fire and burn with iron. The doll learned what the sea was when, with all its smallness, it became the expanse of the sea. This is what happens to us when we enter into the knowledge of God: we do not contain God within ourselves, but we ourselves are contained in Him, and in this meeting with God we become ourselves, finding peace in His infinity.

Saint Athanasius the Great says that man’s ascent to deification begins from the moment of his creation. From the very beginning, God gives us uncreated grace so that we can achieve union with Him. From the Orthodox point of view, there is no “natural person” to whom grace is given as some kind of addition. The first word of God, which called us out of oblivion, was also our first step towards the fulfillment of our calling, so that God would be in everything and we would be in Him, as He is in us.

We must be prepared for the fact that our final step in our relationship with God will be an act of pure worship, face to face with a mystery that we cannot penetrate. We grow in the knowledge of God gradually, year by year, until the end of our lives, and will continue to do so in eternity, never reaching the point where we could say that we now know everything that can be known about God. This process of gradually knowing God leads to the fact that at every moment we stand with our past experience before the mystery of God, known and still unknown. The little we know about God makes it difficult for us to know more, because more cannot simply be added to less; each encounter entails such a change in perspective that everything we knew before becomes almost untrue in the light of what we have learned since.

This is true of all knowledge that we acquire: every day we learn something in the field of natural sciences or humanities, but the acquired knowledge has meaning only because it leads us to the line beyond which lies something that we have yet to learn. If we stop and repeat what we already know, we will simply waste time. And so, if we want to meet the real God in prayer, we must first of all understand that all the previously acquired knowledge has led us to stand before Him. All this is valuable and significant, but if we do not move forward, this knowledge will cease to be real life, but will turn into a ghostly, pale shadow; it will be a memory, and it is impossible to live by memories.

In our relationships with people, we inevitably turn only one facet of our personality towards one facet of the personality of another; this can be good if it leads to rapport; it can be bad when we do things to exploit another’s weaknesses. We also turn one side of ourselves towards God, the one that is closest to Him, the trusting or loving side. But we must remember that we never encounter just one facet of God: we encounter God in His wholeness.

When we begin to pray, we hope to feel God as someone who is present here, we hope that our prayer will be, if not a dialogue, then at least a speech addressed to someone who is listening. We are afraid that we may not feel any presence at all, and we will speak as if into emptiness, where no one listens, answers, or is interested. But this is a purely subjective impression; If we compare our prayer experience with our ordinary everyday human contacts, we can remember that sometimes a person listens to us very attentively, but it seems to us that our words are falling into emptiness. Our prayer always reaches God, but it is not always answered with a feeling of joy or peace.

When we talk about “standing” before God, we always think that here we are, and over there, outside of us, is God. If we look for God above, in front of us, or around us, we will not find Him. Saint John Chrysostom says: “Find the door of the inner chamber of your soul, and you will see that this is the door to the Kingdom of Heaven.” St. Ephraim the Syrian says that when God created man, he placed the entire Kingdom in his innermost depths, and the task of human life is to dig deep enough to discover this treasure. Therefore, to find God, we must dig in search of this inner room, this place where in our very depths the whole Kingdom of God is present, where God and we can meet. The best weapon, the weapon that will overcome all obstacles, is prayer. The essence of the task is to pray carefully, simply and truthfully, without replacing the real God with any false god, idol, figment of our imagination, and without trying to anticipate any mystical experience. By focusing on what we say, trusting that every word we speak reaches God, we can use our own words or the words of great spirits that express better than we can what we feel or dimly sense within ourselves. It is not in the multitude of words that we will be heard by God, but in their truthfulness. When we speak to God with our own words, we must speak as precisely as possible, striving neither for brevity nor for length, but for truthfulness.

There are times when prayer flows easily and freely, and other times when we have the feeling that its source has dried up. Then we need to use prayers that have been compiled by other people and which express in basic terms everything that we believe in, even if at the moment it is not brought to life for us by the deep response of our heart. At such times, our prayer should be a double act of faith – faith not only in God, but also in ourselves; we must believe in our faith, which at the moment has faded, although it is a part of ourselves.

But it also happens that we do not need any prayer words, neither our own nor anyone else’s, and then we pray in complete silence. Perfect silence is ideal prayer, provided, however, that it is genuine silence and not daydreaming. We know very little from experience what deep silence of body and soul is, when perfect silence reigns in the soul, when perfect peace fills the body, when all vanity and movement ceases and we stand before God completely open in the act of worship. There are times when we feel physically good, we don’t want to strain our minds, we are tired of words because we have already spoken them so much; we don’t want to move, and we experience joy in this fragile balance; this is the limit where you can slip into daydreaming. Inner silence is the absence of any internal movement of thoughts or emotions, but it is a state of complete alertness, openness to God. We should maintain complete silence when we can, but we should never allow it to degenerate into a feeling of mere contentment. To protect ourselves from this, the great teachers of Orthodoxy teach us never to abandon completely ordinary forms of prayer, because even those who have achieved this contemplative silence recognized the need, when they felt the danger of spiritual relaxation, to again use the words of prayer until prayer restores silence in the soul.

The Greek Fathers considered this silence, which they called “hesychia,” both the starting point and the crown of the prayer life. Silence is a state when all the forces of soul and body are in complete peace, calm, composure, in a state of perfect alertness and at the same time freedom from all vanity and movement. In the works of many Fathers we find the image of a pond: while there are ripples on the surface of the pond, nothing can be reflected correctly in it – neither the trees, nor the sky; when its surface is completely calm, the sky and trees on the shore are perfectly reflected in it, and everything in this reflection is as clear as in reality.

The fathers also use another image: until the silt that has risen from the bottom of the pond settles, the water is not transparent and nothing can be seen through it. Both of these comparisons refer to the condition of the human heart. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God” (Matthew 5:8).

As long as there is no silence in the soul, there can be no vision; but when silence places us in the presence of God, a silence of a completely different kind sets in, much more absolute: the silence of the soul, which not only remains in silence and composure, but which the presence of God holds in awe of reverent worship, a silence in which, in the words of Juliana of Norich, “prayer unites the soul with God.”

Prayer for Beginners

We are all beginners, and I don’t intend to give a lecture, but I just want to share some of what I have learned, some from my own experience, and perhaps even more from the experience of others.

Prayer about one’s essence is a meeting, a meeting of the soul and God; but in order for the meeting to become real, both persons who participate in it must really be themselves. Meanwhile, we are to a huge extent unreal, and God, in our relationships, is so often unreal for us: we think that we are turning to God, but in fact we are turning to the image of God created by our imagination; and we think that we stand before Him with all truthfulness, when in fact we put in our place someone who is not our true self – an actor, a figurehead, a theatrical character. Each of us is several different personalities at the same time; it can be a very rich and harmonious combination, but it can also be a very unfortunate combination of contradictory personalities. We are different depending on the circumstances and environment: different people who meet us know us as completely different people, according to the Russian proverb: “A good fellow against the sheep, and against a good fellow the sheep itself.” How often does this happen: each of us can remember among our acquaintances a lady who is very polite to strangers and a real fury at home, or a formidable boss who in the family circle is the embodiment of meekness.

In the matter of prayer, our first difficulty is to find which of our personalities should come forward to meet God. This is not easy, because we are so unaccustomed to being ourselves that we sincerely do not know which of all personalities is this true “I”. And we don’t know how to find him. But if we took a few minutes a day to think about our actions and relationships with people, we might get very close to discovering this; we would notice what kind of person we were when we met such and such, and who – already completely different – when we did this or that. And we might ask ourselves: When have I really been myself? Maybe never, maybe only for a split second or to a certain extent in special circumstances, with certain people. And so, in these five or ten minutes that you can allocate – and I am sure that everyone can do this throughout the day – you will find that there is nothing more boring for you than being alone with yourself. Usually we live a kind of reflected life. The point is not only that we are, depending on the circumstances, a whole series of different personalities, but the very life that is in us is very often not ours at all – it is the life of other people. If you look within yourself and dare to ask yourself how often you act from the depths of your personality, how often you express your true self, you will see that this is very rarely the case. Too often we are immersed in various trifles that surround us; So, during this time, these short minutes of concentration, you must leave behind everything that is not vital.

You risk, of course, in this case, that you will be bored alone with yourself; well, let it be boring. But this does not mean that nothing remains in us, because in the depths of our being we are created in the image of God and this removal of everything unnecessary is very similar to clearing away a beautiful ancient wall painting or a painting by a great master, which over the centuries, over the true beauty created by the master, was painted over by people lacking taste. At first, the more we clear, the more emptiness appears, and it seems to us that we have only spoiled where there was at least some beauty; maybe a little, but at least some. And then we begin to discover the true beauty that the great master put into his work; we see squalor, then confusion in between, but at the same time we can predict true beauty. And then we discover what we are: a wretched creature who needs God, but needs Him not in order to fill the void, but in order to meet Him.

So, let’s get down to it and, in addition, every evening for a week we will pray in these very simple words:

“Help me, God, to free myself from all that is counterfeit and to find my true self.”

Sorrow and joy, these two great gifts of God, are often the moment of meeting ourselves, when we abandon all our monkey tricks and become invulnerable, inaccessible to all the lies of life.

Our next task is to explore the problem of a real God, for it is quite obvious that if we decide to turn to God, this God must be real. We all know what a great teacher is for a schoolchild; when a schoolchild has to come to him, he goes to him only as a class teacher, and until he grows up and leaves his power, it never occurs to him that the class teacher is a person. The student thinks about him in terms of his functions, but this deprives the mentor’s personality of all human traits, and therefore no human contact with him is possible.

Another example: when a boy is in love with a girl, he endows her with all kinds of perfections; but she may have none of them, and very often this being, fabricated from nothing, is in fact “nothing”, clothed in non-existent virtues. Here again there can be no contact, because the young man is addressing someone who does not exist. This is true of God as well. We have a certain stock of mental or visual images of God, collected from books, purchased in the temple, from what we heard from adults when we were children, and perhaps from clergy when we got older. And very often these images prevent us from meeting the real God. They are not completely false, because there is some truth in them, and at the same time they do not correspond at all to the real God. If we want to meet God, we must, on the one hand, use the knowledge that we have acquired, be it personally, be it through reading, hearing, hearing, but also go further.

Our knowledge of God today is the result of yesterday’s experience, and if we turn our face to God as we know Him, we will always turn our backs on the present and the future, looking only at our own past. In doing this, we are not trying to meet God, but what we already know about Him. This illustrates the function of theology, since theology is all our human knowledge of God, and not the little that we personally have already comprehended and learned about Him. If you want to meet God as He really is, you must come to Him with a certain experience so that it will bring you closer to God, but then leave this experience and stand not before the God Whom you know, but before the God already known and yet unknown.

What will happen next? Something very simple: God, Who is free to come to you, respond, answer your prayers, can come and make you feel, experience His presence; but He may not do this; He can make you feel His real absence, and this experience is just as important as the first, because in both cases you touch the reality of God’s right to respond or not to respond.

So, try to find your true self and bring it face to face with God as He is, abandoning all false images or idols of God. And to help you with this, to give you support in this effort, I invite you to pray for one week the following words:

“Help me, O God, to free myself from every false image of You, no matter what the cost.”

In the search for our true self, we can experience not only the boredom I spoke of, but also horror and even despair. This nakedness of the soul brings us to our senses; then we can begin to pray. The first thing to avoid is lying to God; it seems so obvious, and yet we don’t always do it this way. Let us speak frankly with God, let us tell Him who we are; not because He doesn’t know it; but it is one thing to accept the fact that someone who loves us knows everything about us, and quite another thing to have the courage and genuine love for this person to speak truthfully to him and tell him everything about himself. Let us tell God frankly that we feel uneasy when we stand before Him like this, that we have no real desire to meet Him, that we are tired and would prefer to go to bed. But at the same time we must beware of license or simply impudence: He is our God. After this, it would be best to remain joyfully in His presence, as we do with dearly loved people with whom we have genuine intimacy. We don’t experience such joy and such closeness with Him that we can just sit and look at Him and be happy. And if we have to talk, then let it be a genuine conversation. Let us shift all our worries to God, and, having told Him everything, so that He learns it from ourselves, we will leave the care of our worries, transferring them to God. Now that He is privy to our concerns, we have nothing more to worry about: we can freely think about Him.

This week’s exercise should obviously be added to the exercises of previous weeks; it will consist in learning, placing ourselves before God, transferring to Him every single one of our worries, and then leaving the care of them; and in order to get help in this, let us repeat a very simple and specific prayer every day, which will determine our behavior in our relationship with God:

“Help me, God, to leave all my worries and focus my thoughts on You Alone.”

If we had not cast our cares over to God, they would have stood between Him and us during our meeting; but we also saw that the next move – and this is very important – we must leave the care of them. We must do this in an act of trust, believing God enough to hand over to Him the worries we want to lift from our shoulders. But what then? We seem to have emptied ourselves, there is hardly anything left in us – what should we do next? We cannot remain empty, because then we will be filled with the wrong things – feelings, thoughts, worries, memories, etc. We need, I think, to remember that a meeting does not mean one-sided speech on our part. When talking, we not only speak out, but also listen to what the interlocutor has to say. And for this you need to learn to be silent; although it seems like a trifle, this point is very important.

I remember when I accepted the priesthood, one of the first to come to me for advice was an old woman and said: “Father, I have been praying almost continuously for fourteen years, and I have never had a feeling of God’s presence.” Then I asked: “Did you let Him get a word in?” “Oh, that’s what,” she said. “No, I myself told Him all the time, “isn’t that what prayer is about?” “No,” I replied, “I don’t think that’s the point; and so, I suggest that you set aside fifteen minutes a day and just sit and knit in the presence of God.” So she did. What happened? Very soon she came again and said: “It’s amazing that when I pray to God, that is, when I talk to Him, I don’t feel anything, but when I sit quietly, face to face with Him, I feel as if enveloped in His presence.” You will never be able to truly and wholeheartedly pray to God unless you learn to remain silent and rejoice in the wonder of His presence, or, if you will, of being face to face with Him, even if you cannot see Him.

Very often, having said everything we had to say and having sat for a while, we are perplexed as to what to do next. Next, I think, you need to read some of the existing prayers. Some find it too easy and at the same time see the danger of mistaking for real prayer a simple repetition of what someone else once said. Indeed, if it is simply a mechanical exercise, it is not worth the effort, but at the same time we forget that it depends on ourselves that it should not be mechanical – if we pronounce the words carefully. Others complain that ready-made prayers are alien to them, because it is not exactly what they themselves would express, it is not their expression. In a sense, these prayers are truly alien, but only in the same way that a painting by a great master is alien and incomprehensible to a student, or the music of a great composer to a beginning musician. But that’s the point: we go to concerts, to art galleries in order to find out what real music, real painting is, in order to shape our taste. And this is why, in part, we must use ready-made prayers – in order to learn what feelings, what thoughts, what ways of expression we should develop if we belong to the Church. It also helps during dry periods when we have little to say.

Each of us is not only that wretched creature, naked to the bones, which we discover when left alone with ourselves; we are also the image of God; and the child of God who lives in each of us is capable of praying the most sublime, holiest prayers of the Church. We must remember this and use them. I suggest that to the previous exercise we add a little silence, three or four minutes, and end with prayer:

“Help me, God, to see my own sins, never judge my neighbor, and all glory be to You!”

Before I start talking about unanswered prayers, I want to ask God to enlighten both me and you, because this is a difficult and yet so vitally important topic. This is one of the great temptations that everyone can encounter on their way and because of which it can be very difficult for beginners and even people with prayer experience to pray to God. So often people pray and it seems to them that they are addressing an empty sky.

This often happens because their prayer is meaningless childishness. I remember an old man telling me that as a child he had asked God for many months to grant him the amazing ability that his uncle had – to take his teeth out of his mouth every evening and put them in a glass of water, and how happy he was later that God did not fulfill his desire. Often our prayers are as childish as this one, and, of course, they remain unfulfilled. We are very often sure that we are praying correctly, but we are praying about something that concerns other people, about whom we do not think at all. When we pray for a fair wind for ourselves, we do not think about the fact that it may turn out to be a storm on the sea for others, and God will not grant a request that will bring harm to others.

In addition to these two obvious points, there is another side to the question, much more significant and deep: it happens that we pray to God with all our hearts for something that from all points of view seems worthy of being heard, and we are met with only silence – and silence is much more difficult to bear than refusal. If God says “no,” then on God’s part it will still be a positive reaction, and silence is, as it were, the absence of God, and it leads us to two temptations: when our prayer does not receive an answer, we doubt either God or ourselves. In relation to God, we doubt not His power, not His power to do what we want, but His love, His participation. We ask for something very important, but He doesn’t seem to pay attention; where is His love, His compassion? This is the first temptation.

And there is another temptation. We know that, having faith the size of a mustard seed, we could move mountains (Matt. 17:20, Mark 9:23), and when we see that nothing moves, we think: “Maybe this means that my faith is somehow flawed, untrue?” This again is not true, and there is another answer to this: if you read the Gospel carefully, you will see that there is only one prayer in it that was not answered. This is the prayer of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. But at the same time we know that if ever in history God took part in someone who prayed, it was certainly in His Son before His death; and we know also that if ever there was an example of perfect faith, it was then. But God found that the faith of the Divine Sufferer was great enough to endure the silence.

God does not answer our prayers not only when they are unworthy, but also when He finds in us such greatness, such depth – the depth and strength of faith that He can rely on us to remain faithful even in the face of His silence.

I remember one woman who was terminally ill; for many years she lived in the sense of the presence of God, and then suddenly she felt His absence – a really real absence; she wrote to me then: “Please pray to God that I will never be tempted to create the illusion of His presence instead of accepting His absence.” Her faith was great. She was able to withstand this temptation, and God allowed her to experience His silence, His absence.

Remember these examples, think them through, because someday you will probably have to find yourself in the same position.

I can’t give you any exercise; I only want you to remember that we must always keep unchanged our faith both in the love of God and in our own honest, truthful faith; and when such a temptation comes to us, let us pray a prayer consisting of two phrases spoken by Jesus Christ Himself:

“Into Your hands I commit My spirit; not My will be done, but Yours.”

I have tried to give you an idea of ​​the main ways in which we can approach prayer; but does this mean that, having completed everything I suggested, you will learn to pray? No, of course not, because prayer is not just an effort that we can make the moment we decide to pray; prayer must be rooted in our life, and if our life contradicts our prayers or our prayers have nothing to do with our life, they will never be alive or real. Of course, we can find a loophole and get around this difficulty by excluding from our prayers everything that is incompatible with prayer in our lives – everything that we are ashamed of or that makes us feel embarrassed about ourselves. But this won’t solve anything.

Another difficulty that we constantly face is daydreaming: then our prayer expresses a sentimental mood, and not what our life is in its essence. For these two difficulties there is one common solution, namely: to connect life with prayer so that it is a single whole, to make your prayer your life. The ready-made prayers that I have already spoken about will be of great help in this regard, because they represent an objective, rigid example of how one should pray. You may say that they are unnatural for us, and this is true in the sense that they express the life of people immeasurably greater than ourselves, the life of genuine Christians; but that is why you can use them, trying to become the kind of people for whom these prayers are natural.

Remember the words of Christ: “Into Your hands I commend My spirit” (Luke 23:46). They are, of course, beyond our own experience; but if day by day we learn to be the kind of people who are able to pronounce these words sincerely, with all truthfulness, we will not only make our prayer real, we ourselves will become real – in the new, genuine reality of becoming sons of God.

If you take, for example, the five prayers that I have proposed to you, if you take each of these petitions one by one, if you try to make each of them in turn a motto, a slogan of the whole day, you will see that prayer will become the criterion of your life, it will give you the basis of your life, but your life will also be your judge – against you or for you – accusing you of lying when you utter these words, or, on the contrary, confirming that you are true to them. Take every phrase of every prayer, use it as a rule, day after day, week after week, until you become the kind of person for whom these words are life itself.

Now we have to part. I was infinitely glad to talk mentally with you, for we are united by prayer and our common interest in spiritual life. May the Lord God be with each of you and among us forever.

And before we part, I invite the reader to say with me one short prayer that will unite us before the throne of God:

Lord, I don’t know what to ask of You. You alone know what I need. You love me more than I can love myself. Let me see my needs that are hidden from me. I do not dare to ask for either a cross or consolation, I only stand before You. My heart is open to You. I place all my hope in You. You see the needs that I do not know, see and do with me according to Your mercy. Crush and lift me. Smite and heal me. I am in awe and silent before Your holy will, Your destinies incomprehensible to me. I sacrifice myself to You. I have no desire except the desire to fulfill Your will. Teach me to pray, pray in me yourself. Amen

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Notes

Living Prayer. London, 1966. Trans. from English Publications: Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate. 1968. Nos. 3–7 (abbreviated); Riga, 1992.

S. S. Lewis. Screwtape Letters. Letter XIX. Rus. lane see: C. S. Lewis. Love. Suffering. Hope. M.: Republic. 1992.

In the Russian synodal translation: “Our residence is in heaven”:

Fr Laurent. (c. 1605–1691). La pratique de la présence de Dieu., 1948.

A. de Chateaubriant (1877–1951). La Reponse du Seigneur.