Chapter 30
On Prayer Rule and Unceasing Prayer
30.2.1 Your Eminence,[1]
30.3.1 Most reverend Father Archimandrite!
30.4.1 With the fast![2]
30.5.1 May all go well with you. And I’m at a loss as to what to correct. I’m even puzzled as to where you got the idea. Keep to your rule as you’ve established it and grown accustomed to it. If sometimes you can’t manage to complete something because of the weakness of age, scold yourself a little, bring your sorrow before the Lord, and be at peace.[3] If you fall short again and don’t complete it, do the same thing again—and always in this way.
30.6.1 It seems to me that you’re giving yourself very little sleep. You could perform your night rule in the evening and then sleep until Matins. But since you write that you’re accustomed to it, it’s hard for you to change your order.
30.7.1 As for the rule, I think this way about it: whatever rule a person chooses for himself, any is good, so long as it keeps the soul in reverence before God. Again: read prayers and psalms until the soul is stirred, and then pray yourself, laying out your needs, or without anything at all: God, be merciful... Again: sometimes all the time set aside for the rule can be spent reciting a single psalm from memory, making your own prayer out of every verse. Again: sometimes the whole rule can be spent in the Jesus Prayer with prostrations. Or take a little from this, that, and the other... God needs the heart, and so long as it stands reverently before Him, that’s enough. Unceasing prayer consists precisely in this: to always stand reverently before God. But in this case the rule is only a stoking of the fire, or throwing wood into the stove.
30.8.1 I write all this to you in a bookish manner. But how many examples do you have?! From them choose what you find suitable.
30.9.1 I ask for your holy prayers on behalf of my great sinfulness.
30.10.1 Your intercessor, Bishop Theophan.
30.11.1