Chapter 40

On Prayer, Patience, and Humility

^40.2.1 May the mercy of God be with you!

^40.3.1 The Lord has delivered you from NN. Thanksgiving to the Lord! Restore and maintain again the ordinary course of your personal and monastic affairs. May the Lord help you to manage well in all these troubling circumstances.

^40.4.1 It’s a great blessing for you that, as you say, your prayer is intact... And I can wish nothing better for you than this: hold on to prayer, and for this expect nothing from yourself, from your own wisdom and efforts, but everything from the Lord, who is near and attends to the movements of hearts. You write that you’ve collected some little prayers. I assume that they’re all applied to you and your circumstances, and especially to your interior disposition. Let the little prayers of Saint John Chrysostom be a model for them, in which all the essential spiritual needs are outlined.

^40.5.1 But may the Lord grant you unceasing prayer of the heart, which has no need of words but stands by itself and is pleasing to God and fruitful for the soul. Patience and humility are the rulers of the spiritual life. The first governs earthly affairs, the second rules over heavenly things... and holds them, or they hold themselves in it, by their love for it...[1]

^40.6.1 May the Lord bless you!

^40.7.1 Be saved!

^40.8.1 Bishop Theophan.

^40.9.1 November 1, 1893.