On Prayer

Although distrust of oneself, trust in God, and perseverance in struggle are, as has been shown, all extremely necessary in our spiritual warfare, prayer is more necessary than all of them—this fourth weapon in that warfare, as we said at the beginning (ch. 1, at the end)—because through it those first three weapons, as well as every other good, are acquired and receive their full strength. Prayer is the means for attracting and the hand for receiving all the graces so abundantly poured out upon us from the inexhaustible fountain of God’s boundless love and goodness toward us; in spiritual warfare, through it you place your sword of battle in God’s right hand, that He may fight for you against your enemies and conquer them. But in order for prayer to manifest its full power in you in this matter, it must remain in you unceasingly, as a natural function of your spirit, and be guarded and animated by the following dispositions.

1) You must always have a living aspiration to serve God alone with every act, and to serve Him in a manner well-pleasing to Him. To enliven and sustain such an aspiration, be persuaded and hold unwaveringly in mind that the Lord, by virtue of His wondrous attributes—goodness, greatness, wisdom, and His other countless and immeasurable perfections—is owed worship, honor, and service by every rational creature. But when you add to this the constant remembrance that He Himself has served you in an inexpressibly beneficent way through His incarnate economy, that He has redeemed you and removed from you the great curse, that He has cured and healed your wounds inflicted by the poison of sin—not with wine and oil, and not with any sort of plasters, but with His priceless Blood that flowed from His most holy side and from His most pure flesh, torn by scourges, thorns, and nails—then can you refrain from devoting every moment with wholehearted zeal to serving Him alone in word, deed, and thought? Moreover, you must not forget how beneficial to us ourselves is such service, since it makes us masters over ourselves, conquerors of the devil, and sons of God.

2) You must have a living and fervent faith that God, by His great mercy and the multitude of His tender compassions, Himself desires and is ready to grant you everything needful for your due service to Him, and every good that is needful for you. Such faith and such hope will be in you a vessel that the boundless mercy of God will fill with the treasures of His graces. And the larger and more capacious this vessel is in you, the more richly laden your prayer will return each time into your bosom. And how can one conceive that God—the unchanging Lord of all, who has commanded us to pray to Him and has promised to grant us the goods we ask for—would refuse to make us partakers of them, when we ask for them with earnest and patient prayer, and would not give us His Spirit? Is it not His word: ”how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?” (Lk. 11:13)? And did He not promise: ”and all things, whatever you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive” (Mt. 21:22)?

3) You must approach prayer with such a disposition that you desire only the divine will and in no way your own, both in the very petition and in the receiving of what is asked—specifically, that you are moved to prayer because God wills it, and that you desire to be heard, again as He wills it. In a word, let it be in your mind and heart to unite your will entirely with God’s will, to submit to it in all things, and in no way to desire to bend God’s will to your own.

And why is this? Because your will is always mixed with self-love, very often errs, and does not know what it ought to desire. But God’s will is always good, wise, wholly righteous, beneficent, and can never err. Therefore, just as it is the immutable law for all that exists and comes to pass, so it must be the rule for the will of all rational creatures and the queen of their desires, which they must obediently follow in all things.

Thus you must always desire, ask, and seek that one thing which is pleasing to God. And if you are ever uncertain whether this or that is pleasing to God, seek and ask it with the thought that you wish to do or have it, if God also so wills. But what you know for certain is pleasing to God—such as the virtues—seek and ask in order to please God above all and to serve Him alone the more faithfully, and not with any other aim, even a spiritual one.

4) You must approach prayer adorned also with deeds consistent with your petition, and after prayer labor above all to make yourself a worthy vessel of the grace and virtue you have asked for. The labor of prayer must therefore be accompanied by the effort of self-compulsion and exertion toward what we ask for, because here, in the order of spiritual life, petition and one’s own seeking follow one another in mutual reception. If someone prays to God for some virtue in prayer, yet in the meantime gives himself over to negligence, taking no definite means for acquiring that virtue, doing nothing for this purpose, and undertaking no struggles—then in truth such a person tempts God rather than prays. This is why divine James said that ”the prayer of a righteous person, when it is set to work, is very powerful” (Jas. 5:16). What is meant by “set to work” here is both when someone, asking a righteous person to pray for something on his behalf, also prays for it himself, and when someone, praying to God for something, himself zealously does everything needful to acquire what he has asked for—as St. Maximus understands it.

5) In your prayer you must include the four actions about which St. Basil the Great writes: first, glorify God; then give thanks to Him for the benefactions shown to you; next, confess to Him your sins and transgressions of His commandments; and finally, ask of Him what you need, above all for your salvation. Following this, you may pray approximately as follows:

“Lord, my God! I praise and hymn Your ineffable glory and Your boundless greatness. I thank You that, having given me existence by Your goodness alone and made me a partaker of the saving goods of Your incarnate economy, You have repeatedly delivered me—even unbeknownst to myself—from the dangers that threatened me and from the hand of my invisible enemies. I confess to You that a countless number of times I have trampled my conscience underfoot and have fearlessly violated Your holy commandments, proving ungrateful for so many and such great benefactions of Yours. But, my most merciful God, may this ingratitude of mine not overcome Your goodness: overlook my sins and unworthiness, but look upon the tears of my contrition, and in the multitude of Your tender compassions help me also now; grant what is needful for my salvation, and direct all my life toward pleasing You, that Your all-holy Name may be glorified even by me, the unworthy.”

At this last point you may enumerate by name all your present needs—spiritual, mental, and bodily—and if at this time you are practicing some particular virtue, mention it as well and pray that God may help you to advance in it to perfection; if you are being troubled by the stirrings of some passion, pray for help not to give in to it and to drive it away; and if you are suffering some injustice and offense, or any kind of loss or misfortune, do not forget to thank God for it, because this too, occurring by God’s will—which is always good—visits you for your own good.

6) In order that your prayer may have power before God and attract His good pleasure, give it wings and adorn it with unshakeable faith—not only in the boundlessness of God’s generosity and in the immutability of His promise to hear us when we call upon Him, even before our prayer is finished (Is. 58:9), but above all in the power of the incarnate economy of our Lord Jesus Christ on our behalf, who for our sake underwent death on the Cross, rose again, ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father, where He ever intercedes for us—for “since God did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not also with Him freely give us all things?” (Rom. 8:32).

Also offer for your being heard the intercession of the Most Holy Mother of God and Ever-Virgin Mary, who prays for us day and night, and the intercession of all the saints—Archangels and Angels, apostles and prophets, pastors and teachers, martyrs and martyresses, venerable fathers and mothers, and all who have pleased God by every kind of holy life—your guardian Angel and the saint whose name you bear and to whose church you were baptized and always pray in. By sending these intercessions before your prayer, you will be sending humility before it—than which nothing is more pleasing to God, who looks with such mercy upon no one as upon the ”meek and humble. A broken and contrite heart God will not despise” (Is. 66:2; Ps. 50:19).

7) You must always offer your prayers with unwearied diligence, as the apostle commands, saying: ”Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it” (Col. 4:2). For humble patience, tirelessness, and persistence in prayer conquers the unconquerable God and inclines Him to mercy. If the persistence of the gospel widow inclined toward her request even an evil and unjust judge—as told in the Lord’s gospel parable, which He deliberately uttered to teach us not to grow weary but to persevere patiently in prayer, as we read in the Gospel: ”He also told them a parable… how they ought always to pray and not lose heart” (Lk. 18:1)—if, I say, even the unjust judge yielded to the widow’s request because of her persistence, how shall God not yield to our prayers—He who is goodness itself—if we persistently entreat Him? Therefore, when you beseech God for something and He delays in hearing you, continue to pray, keeping in your heart a firm and living hope in His help. For no earnest prayer ever goes unanswered before Him, and rich mercies are always ready to flow from Him upon it, exceeding even the very expectations of those who pray—provided there are no moral obstacles on their side, and provided they are not in such a state that it is better for them that their petition remain unfulfilled. In such a case He sends in place of what was asked some other good that is needful for them, whether known to them or unknown. In this sense it is right to hold the conviction that prayer is never unheard, but only what is sent in response to it is not what was asked—because what was asked is not beneficial for them, and it is left unseen because seeing it would not be harmless to those who receive it. Therefore, always be patient in prayer and be assured that prayer is never fruitless. If you do not receive what you asked for, believe that you are receiving or will receive some other good in its place; and if you do not see and will not see this, do not inquire why, but rather turn to your own unworthiness and fill your soul with thoughts and feelings of humility. If through prayer you produce and establish such feelings within yourself, then even if you receive absolutely nothing from it—not visibly, nor invisibly—accept those very feelings as the fruit of prayer, both saving for you and more pleasing to God than anything else.

Hear what St. John Chrysostom says: “Prayer is a great good, if it is made with the proper disposition, and if we train ourselves, both when we receive what we asked for and when we do not receive it, to give thanks to God. For both when He gives and when He does not give, He does both for our benefit; so that both when you receive what you asked for, you have evidently received it, and when you do not receive it—you have received, because you certainly did not receive what was not beneficial to you, and not to receive what is not beneficial is the same as obtaining what is beneficial. So whether you receive or do not receive what you ask for, give thanks to God, believing that if it were not often more beneficial for us not to receive what we ask for, God would always grant us what we ask.”

Therefore, always pray to God patiently and give thanks to Him for all things, believing and confessing that He is good to you and good wisely, and that He is your loving Benefactor both in giving and in not giving according to your petition; and in this faith remain unshakeable in humble submission to Divine Providence, meeting everything that happens to you—pleasant and unpleasant alike—with joy and gratitude.