Beginning to Pray

I thought I would share this because of the beauty found within the words of St. Theophan the Recluse. The following are words spoken by St. Theophan on how to start a deep and rewarding prayer life. I invite all who are in the Toronto area to come out to the Logos Fellowship Center (33 Mallard Rd) on Friday January 11th at 9PM as my brother in Christ (Raymond) gives a talk reflecting on a practical prayer life based on the teachings of Matthew the Poor.

For those of you following the posts on the reflections of Fr. Alexander Schmemann's book For the Life of the World there are 3 more chapters left in the book and my next posts will be based on those final three chapters! Keep me in your prayers!

Fr. Matthew the Poor. To the bottom is his book Orthodox Prayer Life which I recommend everyone to read.

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Let me recall a wise custom of the ancient Holy Fathers: when greeting each other, they did not ask about health or anything else, but rather about prayer, saying "How is your prayer?" The activity of prayer was considered by them to a be a sign of the spiritual life, and they called it the breath of the spirit. If the body has breath, it lives; if breathing stops, life comes to an end. So it is with the spirit.
If there is prayer, the soul lives; without prayer, there is no spiritual life.

Prayer is so profound that an Orthodox theologian wrote, "When I pray I was new, but when I stopped praying I became old." Prayer then is understood as a way to renew the spiritual life, prayer is being alive in God, prayer gives strength and should be the ultimate joy we have in our lives. Prayer then should guide the way we live. Prayer lifts us from our isolation and depressed state to a loving communion with God in which everything we experience in brought forth in the light of God. Prayer then is a personal dialogue with God, which allows us to pour forth our hearts to God. Prayer will be true and faithful in form once we stop saying the same words from our mouth and start speaking the language of God which is pouring out our hearts in constant prayer.

Not every act of prayer is prayer. Standing at home before your icons, or here in the church, and venerating them is not yet prayer, but just the "equipment" of prayer. Reading prayers either by heart or from a book, or hearing someone else read them is not yet prayer, but only a tool or method for obtaining and awakening prayer.

Prayer itself is the piercing of our hearts by pious feelings towards God, one after another – feelings of humility, submission, gratitude, doxology, forgiveness, heart-felt prostration, brokenness, conformity to the will of God. All of our effort should be directed so that during our prayers, these feelings and feelings like them should fill our souls, so that the heart would not be empty when the lips are reading the prayers, or when the ears hear and the body bows in prostrations, but that there would be some qualitative feeling, some striving toward God. 

When these feelings are present, our praying is prayer, and when they are absent, it is not yet prayer.

The church has always taught that God does not ask of us to talk to him with words, but rather what we say emanates from a beautiful soul. The beauty of the church should express to us how important prayer is through the different lives and services the church gives to us. We have liturgy, personal prayer, the prayer of the hours, prayers with icons, the Jesus prayer. All these different aspect propel us forward in our prayers.

When these feelings are present, our praying is a true prayer, and when they are absent, it is not yet prayer.

It seems that nothing should be simpler and more natural for us than prayer in which the heart is turned toward God. But in fact it is not always like this for everyone. 

We must awaken and strengthen a prayerful spirit in our self, that is one must bring up a prayerful spirit. 

This means that we need to read or listen to prayers. Pray as you should, and you will certainly awaken and strengthen the ascent of your heart to God and you will come into a spirit of prayer.