How to Attain Properly Undistracted Prayer. Preparation for the Right Performance of Prayer

You write that you simply cannot manage your thoughts—they keep wandering away—and that prayer goes quite unlike what you would wish; and during the day, amid your occupations and encounters with others, you almost never remember God.

It cannot happen at once. One must labor properly before the thoughts are even partially settled; and the way you expected—just begin and it is already there—never happens. And it is already a success that you have begun to notice this and to consider it wrong. Before, the same thing was happening—but it was of no concern, whereas now you not only notice the disorder of your thoughts, but you are troubled by it and express the desire to know how to manage them. And please do continue and intensify this trouble, and strain your effort toward correcting your deficiency.

I have already written that constancy and uninterruptedness of labor upon oneself is the indispensable condition of success in the spiritual life. The firm pacification of the thoughts is a gift of God—but this gift is not given without intensified personal labor. And by your own labors alone you will achieve nothing; yet God will give you nothing if you do not labor with all your strength. Such is the inexorable law. You have the book of the homilies of St. Macarius of Egypt. Please read the nineteenth homily, on the necessity for Christians to compel themselves toward every good. There it is written that “one must compel oneself to prayer even if one does not yet have spiritual prayer,” and that “in such a case, God, seeing that a person strives with all his strength and reins in himself against the will of his heart” (that is, reins in his thoughts), “gives him true prayer”—that is, undistracted, collected, deepened prayer, when the mind stands before God without withdrawing. And as soon as during prayer the mind begins to abide unceasingly with God, it will afterwards no longer wish to depart from Him, for this is joined with a sweetness—once tasted, one wishes to taste nothing else.

What precisely the labor required here consists of—I have already mentioned more than once: not to allow the thoughts to wander deliberately, and when they stray involuntarily, to bring them back at once, reproaching, grieving, and sorrowful over oneself for this disorder. St. John Climacus says of this that “one must forcibly confine the mind within the words of prayer.”

Perhaps when you memorize the prayers by heart, as I wrote last time, the matter will go better. Best of all would be to attend church—there the spirit of prayer would quickly unfold, because everything there is directed toward that end; but for you this is inconvenient. So labor at home to acquire the habit of praying without distraction, and to remain with God during the rest of your time as much as you are able. While memorizing the prayers, do not forget to penetrate every word and feel into every one of them—then during prayer those words will rivet your attention and kindle prayerful feeling.

Do also the following. Do not go straight to prayer from household bustle, conversations, and running about—but prepare yourself for it a little beforehand, trying first to gather your thoughts and direct them toward due standing before God. Stir up in yourself the sense of need for prayer—and for prayer at this very hour, for another may perhaps not come. Do not forget also to restore to mind your spiritual needs and, most immediately of all, your present need: the ordering of your thoughts in prayer, with the desire to find satisfaction for them—and specifically in God. When the heart holds the awareness and feeling of such needs, it will not allow your thoughts to run off to other things, but will compel you to beseech the Lord concerning them. Above all, feel as strongly as you can your utter helplessness on every side—that if not God, then you will perish entirely. If a person is threatened by some danger and before him stands someone who can by a single nod deliver him from that danger—will that person be looking this way and that? No, he will fall before him and beseech him. So it will be with you in prayer when you come to it with the feeling of all-encompassing peril and the awareness that no one can deliver you but God alone.

Among all of us there persists a not insignificant fault: whereas toward every other undertaking we approach with some preparation, however small, we take up prayer off-handedly and hasten to dispatch it as quickly as possible—as though it were some passing matter, a mere appendage to our affairs, rather than the most important of them all. How then can there be any collected thoughts or feelings for prayer? So it goes carelessly and without order. No—please do refuse yourself this fault, and under no circumstances allow yourself to be frivolous in your relation to prayer. Bring yourself to the conviction that such a relation to prayer is a transgression—and a most serious transgression, a criminal one. Hold prayer as the first matter of your life, and have it as such in your heart. Then approach it as the first matter—not as something done between other things.

Labor on. May God be your helper. But see that you fulfill what is prescribed to you. If you begin to do so, very soon you will see the fruit. Strive to experience the sweetness of true prayer. When you experience it, it will draw you to prayer and animate you toward the most demanding and attentive prayer. May the Lord bless you!