On Prayer: Article 2 (Part 2)

One who has attained pure prayer through weeping remembers during prayer only God and his own sinfulness. Death and the judgment that must immediately follow death present themselves to him as having already arrived. He stands in the heartfelt feeling of one who appears before the impartial and inexorable Judge on the final day of judgment—a Judge Who can still be entreated and Who can still receive with favor the face of one weeping at the tribunal established and inaugurated by prayer. He is seized in good time by terror, bewilderment, trembling, sobbing, and groaning, in order to escape the useless terror, trembling, bewilderment, sobbing, and despair that will be engendered in the rejected sinners by the final verdict of God angered forever. He condemns himself, lest he be condemned; acknowledges himself as a criminal deserving all punishment, in order to avert punishment from himself; confesses himself a sinner, in order to receive righteousness from the right hand of God, Who gives this righteousness freely to all sinners who acknowledge and repent of their sinfulness.

The Lord commands: “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” Here what is indicated is not a single act, but a continuous one; the commandment extends over the entire earthly life of a person. “For everyone who asks” in this manner “receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks” persistently “it will be opened … the Father from heaven will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him” (Lk. 11:9–10, 13[1]).92 By the very nature of the promise, most diligent and unceasing labor is required: “you do not know when the master of the house is coming—in the evening, or at midnight, or at the crowing of the rooster, or in the morning—lest, coming suddenly, he find you sleeping” (Mk. 13:35–36).

It is impossible, St.[2] John of the Ladder observes, to teach prayer to one who desires to learn it by words alone.93 Its teachers are experience and weeping. In contrition and humility of spirit let us begin the struggle of prayer, let us place ourselves under the guidance of weeping: God Himself, Who “gives prayer to the one who prays” (1 Sam. 2:9), will become our teacher of prayer. “Come to me,” the sacred mother of all virtues—prayer—invites us, “all you who labor” under the yoke of the passions, held captive by fallen spirits, “and are heavy laden” with various transgressions, “and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you … and you will find rest for your souls,” healing for your wounds.[3] “For my yoke is easy” (Mt. 11:28–30), capable of healing even the greatest of transgressions.94 “Come, children,” the sacred mother of all virtues—prayer—invites us; listen to me: “I will teach you the fear of the Lord” (Ps. 33:12). I will teach you the “fear of the Lord” through direct experience itself, and will bring the feeling of it into your hearts. I will teach you both the “fear” of the newly begun, by which “everyone turns from evil” (Prov. 15:27), and the pure “fear” of the Lord, “enduring forever and ever” (Ps. 18:10), the fear by which the Lord is feared “above all those around Him” (Ps. 88:8), feared even by the flaming Cherubim and the glorious six-winged Seraphim. Abandon your fruitless and vain attachment to all that is transient, from which you must in any case part against your will! Abandon your seductive amusements and pleasures! Abandon the idle talk, jesting, and verbosity that lay the soul waste! Remember, consider, and assure yourselves that you are here on earth brief sojourners, and that your fatherland and eternal dwelling is heaven. You have need of a faithful and mighty leader for the journey there: that leader is I, and none other. All the saints who have ascended from earth to heaven have made that journey by no other way than through me. I disclose to one who has entered into union with me the fall and sinfulness of man, and I draw him out of it as from a deep abyss. I reveal to him the princes of the air, their snares and chains; I tear apart those snares and chains, and I strike and drive away those princes. I explain the Creator to the creature, and the Redeemer to the redeemed; I reconcile man with God. I unfold before my disciple and beloved the immeasurable greatness of God, and I lead him into that state of reverence and submission toward Him in which creatures ought to stand before their Creator. I sow humility in the heart; I make the heart a fountain of abundant tears; those who partake of me I make partakers of divine grace. I do not abandon those whom I guide until I have brought them before the face of God, until I have united them with God. God is the inexhaustible fulfilment of all desires in this age and in the age to come. Amen.