Saint Theophan the Recluse

For the feast of the Entry of the Most Holy Mother of God into the Temple, I think it timely to offer you an instruction on the chief work of the temple — prayer. The temple is the place of prayer and the arena of its growth. The entry into the temple means for us drawing near to the spirit of prayer. For the Lord regards our heart too as His temple — a temple which we enter with the mind and stand before Him, and this ascent of ours to Him is like the rising of the fragrance of incense. Let us learn how to attain this.

You pray in church and you pray at home. So it would be useless to speak today about the necessity of prayer, but I think it will by no means be superfluous, if not for instruction then at least as a reminder, to point out to you two or three rules on how to pray.

Prayer is the Christian's first duty. If with ordinary things the saying is true, “live and learn till you die,” then all the more does it fit prayer, which must act unceasingly and whose degree has no limit.

I recall a wise custom of the holy fathers, by which, after meeting and greeting one another, they did not ask each other about their health or anything else, but precisely about prayer: How goes the work of prayer, how is it acting? — they would ask, for the action of prayer was for them the sign of spiritual life, which they call the breathing of the spirit. When there is breath in the body, it is alive; when breathing stops, life stops too. So it is with the spirit: if prayer is acting, it lives; and if there is no prayer, there is no life in the spirit either.

But not every kind of prayer is prayer. Standing before an icon at home or in church and making prostrations is not yet prayer, but something that belongs to prayer. Reading a prayer from a book or from memory, or hearing it from someone else, is not yet prayer, but only a means of performing it.

True prayer is the stirring up in our heart of reverent feelings towards God, one after another. It is the state in which humility, devotion, thanksgiving, praise, forgiveness, contrition, submission to the will of God and so on take hold of us. Therefore all our attention must be directed to this: that when we offer prayer, these and similar feelings should fill our soul; and when we read a prayer or listen to it, and make prostrations with the body, we should try to see that the heart is not empty, but that some feeling directed to God dwells in it. If we can do this, then the prayer we offer will be real prayer; and if we cannot, then it will not yet be prayer.

What, it would seem, could be simpler and more natural for us than prayer, that is, the striving of the heart towards God? And yet not everyone succeeds in it, and not always! Prayer is needed. First let us stir it up, and then establish it in our own soul, which means to nurture in it the spirit of prayer. The first means for this is prayer by reading or listening. Carry it out as is right and proper, and you will be able to stir up and keep in your heart the ascent to God, and the spirit of prayer will be granted you by Him.

In our prayer books we are given the prayers of the holy fathers — Ephraim the Syrian, Macarius of Egypt, Basil the Great, John Chrysostom and others. Filled with the spirit of prayer, they handed on to us in words what that spirit inspired in them. Therefore these prayers have the greatest power, and whoever enters into them with great attention and diligence will, by the law of interaction, at once taste the power of prayer — according, of course, to how far his own disposition comes close to the content of the prayer. In order to make the prayer we read an effective means of nurturing the spirit of prayer in us, we must offer it in such a way that we grasp the content of the prayer with both heart and mind. For this I want to point out to you three quite simple methods:

1. Do not begin to pray without preparation beforehand, however brief;

2. Do not pray any old how, but carry it out with attention and feeling;

3. As soon as you finish praying, do not pass straight on to your ordinary activities.

Let us count prayer a perfectly ordinary activity for us; still it cannot but require preparation. What could be more ordinary for those who know how to read and write than writing or reading? But when we sit down to write or read, do we set to work at once? Do we not delay a little until we have settled ourselves comfortably? All the more necessary, then, is preparation before we begin to pray, especially when the activity that comes before it belongs to a sphere quite different from prayer.

So in the morning or evening, before you begin to pray, pause for a little while, sit down or walk about, try in this time to sober your thinking and draw it away from worldly things and affairs. Then consider Who He is to Whom you must turn in prayer, and who you are who must now offer prayer to Him — and accordingly stir up in your soul a disposition filled with contrition and reverent fear. All the preparation consists precisely in this — to stand reverently before God. It seems a small thing, but it is not an unimportant one, because such a good beginning is half the work.

Having reached such an inner disposition, stand before the icon, make a few prostrations and begin the prayer: “Glory to Thee, our God, glory to Thee! O Heavenly King, Comforter, Spirit of truth… come and abide in us,” and so on. Read without hurrying, entering into every word and bringing the meaning of every word down to the heart, making prostrations as you go. Only such prayer is pleasing to God and fruitful. So the main thing is to understand what you read and to feel it. No other rules are needed: only understand and feel. These two rules, properly carried out, adorn every prayer with full worth, and are very fruitful as well. When you read: “Cleanse us from every stain,” feel your own defilement, desire purity and seek it with hope from the Lord. When you read: “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors,” forgive everyone in your heart and ask the Lord's forgiveness for yourself. When you read: “Thy will be done,” entrust your lot to the Lord with all your heart and express your wordless readiness to meet with long-suffering everything He is pleased to send you. If you do this as you say each word of the prayer, your prayer will be exactly what it should be.

In order to carry all this out with greater success, here is what you should do:

1. With the blessing of your spiritual father, the prayer rule you read should not be large, but such that you can read it unhurriedly in the ordinary course of your affairs.

2. In your free time, often read over the prayers that make up your rule, grasp every word in them well and ponder their meaning, so that you know beforehand what feeling should settle in your soul at this or that place in the prayer. And it will be better still if you learn them by heart. Then, when you offer the prayer, it will be much easier for you to understand and feel what you read, and only one difficulty will remain: the flighty mind will keep jumping over to other things. And here, this is what is needed:

3. Be ready beforehand for your thoughts to run away. So try with all the strain of your powers to keep your attention, and if it wanders during prayer, try to gather it; if it wanders again, gather it again. And do not forget to read again what you read without attention and feeling. Even if your thought runs away several times at one and the same place, return to it as many times, until you read it with attention and feeling. If you overcome this difficulty once, the next time it may not recur at all, or if it does recur, not with the same force. That is how you should act when your attention wanders and your thoughts run away. But it may also happen otherwise — some word may act on the soul in such a way that you no longer wish to go on with the prayer, and though the tongue reads on, the thought runs back again to the place that had such an effect on you. In that case:

4. Stop, do not go on reading, but ponder that place with attention and feeling, steep your soul in it, and do not hurry to break away from this state. If time does not allow, it is better to leave the prayer unfinished than to squander the feelings stirred up in you. They may give you light the whole day long, like a guardian angel! Grace-filled action of this kind on the soul at the time of prayer is a sign that the spirit of prayer is already taking root in you, and consequently, keeping such a state is the surest means of nurturing and strengthening it.

Finally, when you have finished praying, do not pass straight on to various activities, but again pause for a little while and consider what you have done and what it obliges you to, and try to keep after prayer what you felt during it. Though whoever reads the prayer as he should will, as a rule, not want to go straight on anyway! Our forefathers, returning from Constantinople, used to say: whoever has tasted the sweet will not want the bitter. The same happens with right prayer, and drawing near to this sweetness is precisely the main aim of prayer, because it is by this that the spirit of prayer is nurtured in us.

If you duly carry out these few rules, you will soon receive the fruit of your labour too; and whoever does this even without these directions has, of course, already tasted this fruit. Every offering of prayer leaves its trace in the soul, and patience in this labour will grant us the spirit of prayer as well. May the Lord grant it to you through the prayers of our Most Holy Lady, the Mother of God!

This is the first, initial method of nurturing the spirit of prayer that I have pointed out to you — that is, offering prayer as it should be offered: at home, morning and evening, and here, in church. But this is not yet everything. Of another means, if God helps me, I will tell you tomorrow. Amen.

21 November 1864