How the Saints Hear Our Prayers. A Note on Prayer

I am very glad that you liked my discourse about that substance. Do receive it, impress it more firmly in your mind, and always keep it in your thoughts. You will see how helpful it will be to you in everything. How many subjects it clarifies, and how much consolation it affords! You have probably had occasion to hear the question of how the saints hear our prayers—or perhaps you have posed it to yourself. In response, people explain and explain, and the question remains a question still. To my mind, however, with the assumption of that substance, the answer comes naturally: how could the saints fail to hear our prayers? You know how an electric telegraph works? In St. Petersburg, for example, a certain mechanism is set in motion—and at that same instant that action from St. Petersburg is reflected in Moscow in a similar mechanism, conveying the same meaning as the movement that occurred there. Why does this happen? Because those mechanisms are of the same kind, and the wire connecting them is adapted to them. So the action of such a telegraph is our prayer. We and the saints are like two mechanisms of the same kind; the medium in which the saints dwell and by which our souls are surrounded is the wire. When true prayer—prayer of the heart—is set in motion within the soul, it passes through that substance, acting upon it, and like a ray of light flies to the saints and tells them what we desire and for what we pray. Between our prayer and its being heard there is no interval—only it is necessary that the prayer come from the heart. The heart is our telegraphic apparatus for heaven. But those prayers which come not from the heart but only from the mind and from the lips do not send forth a ray ascending to heaven and are not heard there. That is not prayer at all—merely the external forms of prayer.

Perhaps without realizing it, you have written an experiential confirmation of what I have said. You write that you prayed fervently—and were immediately at peace, having received within you the assurance that you would be delivered from what was troubling you; and then the matter was in fact resolved. So it turns out that my comparison of heartfelt prayer to a telegraph invisibly extended to heaven through that substance is correct. From your heart a pulse, or a ray, went up to heaven; and along that same line, or by a ray of the same kind, what you needed came back to your heart from heaven in response. It is always thus with all prayers that go forth from the heart. The fulfillment of such a prayer does not always follow immediately—but the hearing of it takes place at once.

I cannot rejoice enough that it was so with you. Grant, O Lord, that it may be so with you ever more frequently. Recall how you prayed on that occasion, and always strive to pray in that way—so that the prayer goes from the heart, and is not merely spoken with the lips and thought with the mind.

If you arrange yourself in this way, then here is a practical answer to the question of how to live in the spirit. For such prayer is the life of the spirit. In it the spirit abides in God and is united with Him, and in this lies all the strength of its life. Know then that the spirit truly lives only when it prays as you prayed. When there is no such prayer, it means the spirit has grown numb—if it has not been entirely stifled.

I will not conceal from you that, though you did pray in that way, you will hardly be able always to pray so. Such prayer God grants, or the Guardian Angel stirs up. And it comes and it goes. This does not mean, however, that we are permitted to abandon the labor of prayer. It comes to one who labors in prayer, but to one who does not labor it will not come. And we see that the holy fathers labored greatly in prayer, and by those labors they kindled in themselves the spirit of prayer. How they arrived at this, they have left us a picture in their writings. All that they said on this subject constitutes the science of prayer—the science of sciences. When the time comes, you and I will go through this science together, but for now I have only touched upon it in passing: it came up as I was speaking. Let me add one more thing: nothing is more important than prayer. Consequently, it is this that one must labor over with the greatest earnestness and more than anything else. Grant you, O Lord, the zeal for such labor.

Your humble thoughts and feelings about yourself are angelic feelings. How perfect and how luminous are the Angels! Yet they are all humble—more humble than all men. A humble soul is always luminous. The darkening of the soul begins when it starts thinking highly of itself, for that is the work of dark powers. Grant you, O Lord, never to lose such feelings, so that you may always be in the light.

And here again we have strayed from our question. Please bear with it a little longer.