On Prayer

Prayer which is not from the heart, but is made only by the mind, doesn’t go any further. To pray with the heart, we must hurt. Just as when we hit our hand or some other part of our body our nous (spirit) is gathered to the point we are hurting, so also for the nous to gather in the heart, the heart must hurt.

We should make the others pain our own! We must love the other, must hurt for him, so that we can pray for him. We must come out, little by little, from our own self and begin to love, to hurt for other people as well, for our family first and then for the large family of Adam, of God. –Elder Paisios

Is prayer which lacks attention prayer at all? I’m not sure this is an easy question to answer. Is prayer, in which all the powers of our minds are not gathered up and focused into the kingdom of God, which resides within our hearts, utterly unfruitful? Do we fall into the hypocrisy of the Pharisees of whom Jesus said, “these people draw near with their mouths and honor Me with their lips, but have removed their hearts far from Me” (Isa. 29:13)? These questions have weighed on my mind a lot over the last few months, and even more so recently.

In the Orthodox Church, especially, it can be very easy to “go through the motions,” because being the Church built on 2000 years of saints and Tradition, we truly stand on the shoulders of giants. We have countless prayers set before us, which are not merely words of good men, but the very expressions of hearts immersed in God, outpourings of the heart equal to that of King David in the Psalms. We have the opportunity to speak in our own words to God and, at the same time, to take the words of the holy ones of our Faith and somehow make them our own, making our own hearts another outlet through which to channel those outpourings. This has merely led to more questions for me. Is one superior to the other? Or, if both have their place, where do they fit? In the infancy of our conscious faith, is it better to pray in our own words or use the prayers passed down to us? And thus, as our faith progresses, into which do we pass?

Ultimately, all of these questions center around what to do about dry prayer. I cannot speak for you, but most days I do not feel like praying. I certainly am in no mood to pray in the morning as I am NOT a morning person. And in the evenings I lack motivation and often find myself tired or distracted and so once again I miss the opportunity. I even pass the opportunity to pray during the day. I fall into the fear of vain repetition, again, when considering saying the Jesus Prayer. Doubts and issues like these have often given me a “what’s the point?” attitude. The Fathers often speak of the need for fervor and feeling in prayer and the need to pray with our whole heart and mind. Yet, these feelings do not just come. When I settle myself into prayer, I can hardly squeeze an ounce of passion out of my dry heart. At best I might get one drop through much toil and effort, but even that is rare. So do I just throw up my hands and wait for God to visit me and stir the waters? This can hardly be right.

Over the last few days I have finally had some conversations and read some things that have helped at least begin to clean this dilemma up for me. I have come to believe now that we should always at least make the attempt to pray, even when we think it might be fruitless. The first thing that brought me to this conclusion is remembering the words of St. Francis de Sales when he notes that we only learn a certain art by practicing it. Naturally, at least in things we are not previously disposed to or gifted in, our beginnings are difficult and mangled. It is by no means cliché for me to say that in learning to ride a bike I fell a lot. But we cannot allow these things to upset us. We need to have the humility to admit we are not saints. This is especially needful for us Orthodox Christians who are usually named after saints who have gone before. Even in the event of a close relationship between ourselves and our patrons, we cannot, and are not expected to, be a perfect copy of that person. We each much tread our own path in holiness, though within the confines of Sacred Tradition. Nevertheless, we must persevere. We can only learn to pray by praying. There simply is no other way. Even if our early attempts are dry, and even if we cannot accurately call it “prayer”, we should yet continue. Ultimately our attempts at prayer will break through and our hearts will open and it will truly become prayer. And even afterward, I don’t think we should be surprised if our prayers occasionally return to that dry state. I think in these cases we must be like the ones in Christ’s parables who lost their respective sheep and coin. We must pursue until we find them again. We must also remember that in attempting this kind of work, demons will surely come against us. We should not be shocked when they attack and even knock us down or injure us. When this happens, we simply must get back up and redouble our efforts and make them regret they came against us in the first place. The Orthodox Church teaches neither excessive sovereignty of God, nor Godless free will. God will not do everything for us, and yet without Him we can do nothing. The ideal is cooperation: us doing all we can on our side and yet remaining humble and remembering that the increase is solely in the hands of God.

Secondly—and this addresses the usefulness of the prayers of the saints—we should persevere in prayer, no matter what, because as St. Paul says, we do not always know what to pray for as we ought. Often doubts creep into our hearts and we can barely find the strength to pray for even the most selfish things, in even the most blasphemous words, to say nothing of truly praying within the context of the will and kingdom of God. We desperately need reminders of what Truth is. For this world, and even much of the Church, Truth exists only within the confines of quotation marks. Each person is free to believe how he wishes and is not accountable to anyone. We can each determine for ourselves what Scripture is in fact saying and whether or not we will believe it. We can shout the most blasphemous words, and no one is able to correct us. The prayers of the saints do not fit into this mold. On the contrary, being filled with and inspired by God’s Spirit, they swell and break the mold of our subjective, opinionated “truth” and expand to embrace the whole body of God’s universal, objectivity: Truth itself. We are constantly being fed the lies of satan and his demons, and so it should be little surprise when these very lies are what predominantly proceed from our mouths. However, this regurgitation merely serve as more food for us and thus it becomes an ongoing cycle. Negative cycles can be broken only by introducing a contrary force or obstruction. The prayers of the Church serve to halt and counteract the lies of the evil one. So long as we take in both, they will remain locked in struggle, and we will remain a mixed bag. One must inevitably win out in the end, however. We must not only take in the prayers of the Church, but also reduce, consistently, the intake of all that is opposite of these. I know as well, or more, than most, how when reciting these prayers, we can almost look into ourselves and realize we don’t really mean them or have the faith we would claim in reciting them. However, if we are honest with God in admitting this and asking for His help, it will come. St. Paul tells us to work out our own salvation because God is working in us, not only to do His will, but also to desire it. If we do the works pertaining to our salvation—prayer in this case—God will work in us to make prayer more honest and desirable and fruitful in us.

In summing up, I want to encourage you—and trust me that I am trying to encourage myself much more—to continue in prayer, no matter how fruitful or unfruitful it might seem. We should not trust the externals, and I say this in reference to the mind and emotions. They can often be deceptive and the mistake I often make is that I take my surface thoughts and emotions to be the measuring stick, whether they are positive or negative. I make them the standard by which I judge the quality of my prayer. However, God looks at the heart; and I don’t think this means the heart as the seat of our  emotions, but the heart as the seat of our true being, our soul, what the Fathers call the “nous”. The maturation of the body takes years. At the time of this entry I am 25 and still can not grow the thick, full beard that I want. Change comes painfully slow when it comes to the body. How much more should we expect this when it comes to our deepest selves? So simply because we cannot perceive change and improvement in our hearts when we make the effort to pray, does not mean that it is not happening. And, we must remember that we often cannot see as well from the inside as others can from without.

So this is a call, to my own heart, and to any who read this: let us make the effort to pray. Let us not be afraid of using the prayers of the saints, especially starting out, for we are in need of replacing the horrid lies of our enemies with the Truth of God as He has revealed in His Church. There are many things in life that we have no passion for in the beginning, but if we force ourselves, they often become the most rewarding experiences. If we want to learn to pray, truly—and here I am merely exhorting and I humbly admit I know nothing experientially about prayer—let us admit our weakness and helplessness to God and ask Him to open our hearts, or put another way, to give us courage to open our own hearts to Him. Perhaps the reason our prayer is so dry many times is that we are like the unfaithful servant who buried his talent in the ground for fear of his master. Perhaps the talent that we bury under so many things is our very heart. Yet our Master is not so hard as we imagine Him to be. Let us remember that the God we serve is not only the God of thunder and lightning, sitting in fearful majesty at the top of the mountain—which we believe we must climb alone—but He is also the God who has ascended the mountain Himself, bearing the cross on His back and crying out with us: My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me? If we bear the cross also—the cross of the strain of attempting the crucifying work of prayer—our Master will not cold stand atop the mountain, satisfied to merely watch us suffer in toil, but will reach down and lovingly draw us up to wear He is.

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