Cooling Toward Prayer. Negligent and Hurried Prayer. How to Avoid This. Reciting Prayers From Memory

May the mercy of God be with you!

You write: “My prayer is going poorly somehow.” If prayer is going poorly, the prayer itself is not to blame—the person praying is. Strive to pray as you ought, and prayer will go well. If someone writes poorly, they are reprimanded and threatened—and they begin to write properly. Please reprimand yourself and threaten yourself with the judgment of God—and you will begin to pray as you should. We carry out human tasks carefully because people will see and rebuke us, but we do the work of God carelessly because the Lord is silent, not rebuking us immediately, leaving the service due to Him to the eagerness of His children who have received so many of His blessings. Oh, how bitter it will be when one must acknowledge one’s guilt in this before the Lord Himself.

But where has your prayer gone?! After all, it was going well for a time, and you were already feeling its good effect in your heart. I will tell you where it went. Having prayed once and twice with fervor and warmth, and having experienced at Saint Sergius’s such swift help as a result of prayer, you thought that your prayer was already established and that there was therefore no need to trouble much about it: it would go well on its own. Having admitted that thought, you then, when standing for prayer, began to read the prayers carelessly and hurriedly, and stopped watching over your thoughts. Because of this your attention scattered, your thoughts wandered in all directions—and prayer was no longer prayer. Once or twice you conducted yourself this way—and prayer was entirely gone. Begin again to acquire prayer anew and to ask the Lord for it.

From this learn that one must never consider any spiritual practice to be established—and all the more so prayer—but always keep oneself as though beginning it for the first time. What is done for the first time receives the best of one’s eagerness. If you come to prayer holding in mind that you have never prayed as you should and are now for the first time wishing to do so, you will always perform your prayer with that first-time eagerness. And it will go well.

I suppose that you have begun performing your prayer rule hastily, carelessly, simply to get it done. Make it your law from now on never to pray carelessly. Nothing offends the Lord so much as that. Better to read not all the appointed prayers, but with the fear of God and reverence, than all of them carelessly. Better even to read a single prayer, or to pray in your own words on bended knees, than to do it that way. Once you began to pray in such a manner, there was no fruit. Please give yourself a thorough scolding for such negligence. Know this: no one who prays attentively and fervently departs from prayer without having received the effect of prayer. Oh, what a good thing we deprive ourselves of when we allow ourselves to pray negligently!

What causes hurriedness in prayer? It is incomprehensible. We spend hours on other tasks and they do not seem long, but as soon as we stand for prayer, we already feel we have been standing there an impossibly long time. And we begin driving ourselves to finish sooner. Prayer produces no fruit whatsoever. What is to be done? Some people do the following, to avoid falling into such self-deception: they assign themselves a quarter of an hour, or half an hour, or an hour for prayer—as convenient—and pace their standing in prayer so that the stroke of the clock on the half-hour or the hour signals to them the end of their standing. Then, when standing for prayer, they no longer concern themselves with reading such-and-such a number of prayers, but only with rising to the Lord in prayer as is proper for the entire appointed time. Others do it this way: having fixed the time for prayer, they determine how many times in that period they can work through their prayer rope, moving it at an unhurried pace. Then, standing for prayer, they work through the rope at that unhurried pace for the determined number of times, while all the while standing before the Lord in their mind—either conversing with Him in their own words, or reading some prayers, or without either of these simply bowing in reverence before His boundless majesty. Both kinds of people come to pray in such a way that the minutes of standing in prayer are for them sweet minutes. And it rarely happens that they stand only the appointed time; rather, they double and triple it. Please choose one of these methods for yourself. And hold to it without fail. You and I cannot manage without precise rules. But for those who pray with true fervor, no rules are needed.

I already wrote to you to memorize prayers and, when standing for prayer, to read them from memory without taking the prayer book in hand. That is extremely good! When standing for prayer, read the memorized prayer or psalm and embrace every word of it not only with your mind but with your feeling. If from some word of the psalm or prayer your own prayerful cries begin to arise within you, do not cut them off—let them come. After all, you will have no concern about reading so many and so many prayers, but only about standing in prayer for the appointed time, which will make itself known either by the prayer rope or by the clock. There is no need to rush through the reading of the prayers. Let it be that you read a single psalm or a single prayer throughout that entire time. Someone once told me that it often happens that in his entire appointed time for prayer he reads only the one “Our Father”—because every word of it turns for him into a whole prayer of its own. Another said that when someone explained to him that one could pray this way, he stood through all of Matins in reverent prayer, reading “Have mercy on me, O God,” and did not manage to finish the psalm.

Please accustom yourself to pray in this way as well, and God willing, you will soon cultivate prayer within yourself. And then no rules at all will be needed. Labor at it—otherwise nothing will come of you. If you do not advance in prayer, do not expect success in anything else. It is the root of everything.

God bless you.