On Prayer: Article 1 (Part 2)
Attentiveness and compunction are recognized as gifts of the Holy Spirit. Only the Spirit can still the waves of the mind as they race in all directions, said Saint John of the Ladder.[1] Another most blessed Father said: “When compunction is with us, God is with us.”[2]
One who has attained to constant attentiveness and compunction in his prayers has attained the state of the beatitudes named in the Gospel “poverty of spirit” and “weeping”. He has already broken many chains of the passions, has already caught the fragrance of spiritual freedom, already bears within his breast a pledge of salvation. Do not abandon the narrow paths of the true path of prayer—and you will attain to the sacred rest, the mystical Sabbath: on the Sabbath no earthly work is performed; struggle and ascetic labor are set aside; in blessed dispassion, without distraction, the soul stands before God in pure prayer and reposes in Him by faith in His boundless goodness and by submission to His all-holy will.
In one who struggles in prayer, progress in prayer first begins to manifest itself through a special action of attentiveness: from time to time it unexpectedly seizes the mind and encloses it in the words of prayer. Then it becomes far more constant and prolonged: the mind, as it were, cleaves to the words of prayer and is drawn by them toward union with the heart. Finally, compunction suddenly joins with attentiveness and makes the person a temple of prayer, a temple of God.
Offer to God quiet and humble prayers, not fervent and blazing ones. When you have become a mystical minister of prayer, you will ascend to God’s tabernacle and from there fill the censer of prayer with sacred fire. Unclean fire—the blind, material inflammation of the blood—is forbidden to be brought before the all-holy God.
The sacred fire of prayer, drawn from God’s tabernacle, is holy love, poured out in true Christians by the Holy Spirit (Rom. 5:5). He who strives to join prayer with the fire of the blood imagines, in his self-delusion, deceived by his high opinion of himself, that he is performing service to God, whereas in reality he is angering Him.
Do not seek delight in prayer: it is altogether inappropriate for a sinner. A sinner’s desire to feel delight is itself already self-delusion. Seek rather that your dead, hardened heart may come alive, that it may open to feeling its sinfulness, its fall, its nothingness, that it may see and acknowledge these with self-denial. Then the true fruit of prayer will appear in you: true repentance. You will groan before God and cry out to Him in prayer from the disastrous condition of your soul, suddenly revealed to you; you will cry out as from a prison, as from a tomb, as from hell.
Repentance gives birth to prayer, and in double measure is itself born from its daughter.
Delight in prayer is the exclusive lot of the holy elect of God, renewed by the Holy Spirit. Whoever—carried away by surges of the blood, by vainglory and sensuality—contrives delight for himself is in grievous self-delusion. Such contriving is very much within the capacity of a soul darkened by life according to the flesh, a soul deceived and continuously deceiving itself through its own pride.
The feelings produced by prayer and repentance consist in a lightening of the conscience, in peace of soul, in reconciliation with one’s neighbors and with the circumstances of life, in mercy and compassion toward humanity, in restraint from the passions, in indifference to the world, in submission to God, in strength when contending against sinful thoughts and impulses. Be content with these feelings—in which, however, there is a tasting of the hope of salvation. Do not seek prematurely the higher spiritual states and raptures of prayer. They are not at all what they appear to be in our imagination: the action of the Holy Spirit, from which the higher states of prayer arise, is incomprehensible to the carnal mind.[3]
Learn to pray with all your thought, with all your soul, with all your strength. You will ask: what does this mean? — It cannot otherwise be known than by experience. Strive constantly to engage in attentive prayer: attentive prayer will grant you the resolution of this question through blessed experience.
The ascetic struggle of prayer appears burdensome, tedious, and dry to a mind accustomed to occupying itself only with perishable things. The habit of prayer is acquired with difficulty; but when once acquired, it becomes a source of unceasing spiritual consolation.
Prayer, as was said above, is the mother of all the virtues: gain the mother! With her will come her children into the house of your soul and make it a sanctuary of God.
Before undertaking any task, offer prayer to God; by prayer draw down God’s blessing upon your deeds, and by prayer judge your deeds: the thought of prayer stops one from deeds that are contrary to the commandments of God.
Whoever turns to God with prayer for enlightenment, help, and blessing before every deed and word lives his life as though beneath the gaze of God, under His guidance. The habit of such conduct is easy to form; there is nothing swifter than the mind, said the great Barsanuphius, and nothing easier than to raise the mind to God in every need that arises.[4]
In difficult circumstances of life, increase your prayers to God. It is more reliable to have recourse to prayer than to the empty calculations of weak human reason—calculations which for the most part prove unrealizable. It is more reliable to lean by faith and prayer on the omnipotent God than to lean on one’s own infirm reason with its uncertain calculations and suppositions.
Be not foolish in your petitions, lest you anger God with your small-mindedness: one who asks the King of kings for something trifling dishonors Him. The Israelites, paying no heed to the miracles of God wrought for them in the desert, asked for the satisfaction of the belly’s desires—“while the food was still in their mouths, the anger of God rose against them” (Ps. 77:30–31[5]).
Bring to God petitions befitting His greatness. Solomon asked of Him wisdom; he received it, and with it a multitude of other goods, because he asked wisely. Elisha asked of Him the grace of the Holy Spirit in double measure beyond his great teacher, and his petition was accepted.
One who seeks perishable earthly goods in his prayer provokes the displeasure of the Heavenly King. The Angels and Archangels—the courtiers of His court—look upon you during your prayer and observe what you are asking of God. They are filled with wonder and rejoice when they see an earthly creature who has left behind his earthly concerns and brings a petition to receive something heavenly; they grieve, on the contrary, at one who has neglected heavenly things and asks for his earth and his corruption.
We are commanded to be children in malice, but not in understanding (1 Cor. 14:20). In prayer, the wisdom of this world—wordy and puffed up—is set aside: from this it does not follow that feeble-mindedness is required or desired in it. What is required of it is perfect understanding, spiritual understanding, filled with humble-mindedness and simplicity, expressed often in prayer not in words but in a silence of prayer that surpasses words. This prayerful silence seizes the mind when new, spiritual concepts suddenly present themselves to it—concepts inexpressible in the words of this world and this age—when a particularly vivid sense of the God who is present appears. Before the boundless majesty of the Godhead, His weak creature, man, falls silent.
Vain repetition (Mt. 6:7–8[6]), condemned by the Lord in pagan prayers, consists in the numerous petitions for temporal goods with which the prayers of the pagans are filled, and in the rhetorical style in which they are presented—as though oratorical adornments, material sonority, and force of style could act upon God as they act upon the hearing and nerves of carnal people. In condemning this wordiness, the Lord by no means condemned prolonged prayers, as it seemed to certain heretics: He Himself hallowed prolonged prayer by abiding long in prayer. “And He continued through the night” (that is, spent the whole night) “in prayer to God” (Lk. 6:12), the Gospel narrates of the Lord.
The prolonged prayers of God’s saints arise not from vain repetition but from the abundant spiritual feelings that arise in them during prayer. By the abundance and intensity of these feelings, time is as it were annihilated—transformed, for the holy ones of God, into a foretaste of eternity.
When one who labors in prayer attains progress in his blessed struggle, the diversity of thoughts in the psalms and other prayer-offices becomes unsuited to his condition. The prayer of the publican and other briefest prayers express more satisfactorily the inexpressible, vast desire of the heart, and the saints of God have often spent many hours, days, and years in such prayer without feeling any need for a diversity of thoughts to sustain their intense, concentrated prayer. (The hieromonk Seraphim of Sarov, a monk who made exceptional progress in prayer, spent a thousand days and a thousand nights standing on a stone and crying to the Lord: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”)[7]
Prayers composed by heretics closely resemble the prayers of pagans: in them is vain repetition; in them is the earthly beauty of words; in them is the inflammation of the blood; in them is a lack of repentance; in them is a striving toward the marriage-feast of the Son of God directly from the brothel of the passions; in them is self-delusion. They are alien to the Holy Spirit: from them breathes the deadly contagion of the dark spirit, the crafty spirit, the spirit of falsehood and perdition.
Great is the occupation of prayer! The holy Apostles, for the sake of prayer and service to the Word, declined the ministry of bodily care for their neighbors. “It is not right for us”, they said, “to leave the word of God and serve tables… We will give ourselves continually to prayer and to the ministry of the Word” (Acts 6:2, 4)—that is, to converse with God through prayer, and to converse about God with their neighbors, announcing to them the Triune God and the incarnate God-Word.
The occupation of prayer is the highest occupation for the human mind; the state of purity free from distraction, which prayer grants to the mind, is its highest natural state; and its being caught up to God—whose first cause is pure prayer—is a supernatural state.[8]
Into a supernatural state only the holy saints of God ascend—renewed by the Holy Spirit, having put off the old Adam and put on the New—those who are capable of “beholding with unveiled face of the soul the glory of the Lord, being transformed into the same image from glory to glory” by the action of the Spirit of the Lord (2 Cor. 3:18).[9] The greater part of Divine revelations they receive during the exercise of prayer, as at a time when the soul is especially prepared, especially purified, and attuned to communion with God. Thus the holy Apostle Peter during prayer saw the symbolic sheet descending from heaven (Acts 10:11). Thus to Cornelius the centurion an angel appeared during prayer (Acts 10:3). Thus, when the Apostle Paul was praying in the Jerusalem temple, the Lord appeared to him and commanded him immediately to depart from Jerusalem: “Go, for I will send you far away to the Gentiles” (Acts 22:21), He said to him.
Prayer is commanded by the Lord, just as repentance is. The end of prayer, just as the end of repentance, is appointed as one: entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven, into the Kingdom of God, which is within us. “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” (Mt. 4:17). “The Kingdom of God is within you” (Lk. 17:21). “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened… The Father who is in heaven will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him” (Lk. 11:9–10, 13). “Will not God bring about justice for His chosen ones who cry out to Him day and night”—and who complain of the violence done to them by sinful corruption and by demons? “I tell you, He will bring about their justice speedily” (Lk. 18:7–8). Entry into the Kingdom of Heaven—planted in the heart of every Christian through holy baptism—is the development of that Kingdom by the action of the Holy Spirit.
Hasten with prayer, O soul thirsting for salvation; hasten in the footsteps of the Saviour, accompanied by His countless disciples. Call out after Him with prayer as the Canaanite woman did (Mt. 15:22–28); do not be grieved by His prolonged inattention; endure with magnanimity and humility the sorrows and humiliations which He will permit you on the path of prayer. For success in prayer, help from temptations is indispensable. By your faith, for your humility, for your persistent prayer, He will comfort you by healing your daughter who is tormented by demonic action—the passion’s action—by healing your thoughts and feelings, transforming them from passionate to passionless, from sinful to holy, from carnal to spiritual. Amen.