Chapter 189

Drive Away All Images

You ask about the prayer of one of the poorest of pray-ers.

How do I pray?! In every way I strive during the hour of prayer to stand in the conviction that God is omnipresent and here too, where my consciousness is, and that he sees and hears not the word alone—spoken or not—but every movement of thought, and especially feeling. And I flee from every image, hard though it be. When prayer comes with feeling, there is no effort to keep the imagelessness in prayer. This shows that imagelessness in prayer is the true work, and to achieve it one must reach the prayer of the heart, and therefore must go from the head into the heart.

Likewise—you must not picture the Mother of God, nor the saints, nor the Angels in your soul. Yet pray to them in that same conviction that they hear. How do they hear? Why reason about it? They hear, and that is all.

Let us suppose such a distinction: for mental labors images are needed—and they are indeed in Scripture about God himself and all divine things. And imagination is a mental faculty—a knowing faculty. Imagination—the faculty to form and hold images—is the lowest faculty, the most menial! For that very reason you should not permit it to appear with its images in the higher realm, such as prayer. Noetic contemplative work is lofty, and the spiritual work manifesting in prayer is loftier still. How could imagination reach there…. This is where it belongs: “Friend, how did you come in here?!”

So when you grow angry, use imagination; when you pray, drive away all images. If you allow images, there is danger—you begin to pray to a fantasy. Can you say that the image you hold in mind expresses truth? You cannot….therefore you must become accustomed to imagelessness. But there is one path—prayer of the heart. The mind without images hardly exists.

I remember a saying about an elder who always pictured God in images. When someone explained to him that this should not be done, he said: “You have taken God from me.” But they did not take God from him—they took away his fantasy.

(Letter 1063. Vol. 7, pp. 24–25)