Chapter 45

On the Jesus Prayer and Walking Before God

^45.2.1 The mercy of God be with you!

^45.3.1 Lord, bless you to receive the Holy Mysteries. A most excellent deed!

^45.4.1 You are right in your judgment about the labor of caring for the little one—that she has been entrusted to you by God. And the Lord will repay you! And the little one can repay you too. When she grows up, she’ll be attached to you as to a mother... and later she’ll be your novice... and you an eldress. There’s the shadow of a future monastery!

^45.5.1 Labor over the Jesus Prayer. God will bless you. But together with the practice of pronouncing this prayer vocally, unite the remembrance of the Lord, with fear and reverence. The main thing, after all, is to walk before God, or under the eye of God, with the awareness that God is looking at you, at your soul – into your heart – and sees everything there... This awareness is the most powerful lever in the movement of the interior spiritual life. You surely have there the ‘Letters on the Spiritual Life’, written in response to Speransky’s letters. Look through more often what is written there about the Jesus Prayer. It’s not at the beginning, but, I think, from the fifteenth or twentieth letter.

^45.6.1 May the Lord bless you!

^45.7.1 Be saved!

^45.8.1 Your intercessor, Bishop Theophan.