Chapter 104

On Prayer for Beginners

My thought is this: beginners must first be taught to pray properly with ready-made prayers, so that they might acquire for themselves the thoughts, feelings and words of prayer. For toward God even the word must be turned in a God-befitting manner. When the teacher notices that they have made sufficient progress in this, then let him tell them how to pray not with words of others, but with their own words—lifting up their own personal spiritual needs to God in prayer and asking Him to be merciful to them and help them. At the same time, one can suggest that they pray with short prayers, showing them as a pattern the twenty-four short prayers of Saint John Chrysostom, and allowing them to gather other such prayers from the Psalms, from church prayers, and to compose them themselves.

With these short prayers they will acquire the good habit of maintaining attention without distraction during prayer. Then, finally, one can teach them lessons about the Jesus Prayer, not surrounding it with any external methods—only urging them to bring forth this prayer from their heart.

Every prayer whatsoever must come from the heart, and any other kind of prayer is not prayer. And prayers from the prayer book, and prayers of one’s own, and short prayers—all of them must go from the heart to the Lord, whom you see before you. All the more so must the Jesus Prayer be thus.

(Letter 917. Vol. 5, p. 198)