Day 4 – These All Continued with One Accord in Prayer
Ascension to Pentecost – Season of Waiting
Christ is ascended! Glorify Him!
“Prayer is the mother of all virtues, and from her, as from a pure spring, the waters of divine grace flow into the soul.” – St. Isaac the Syrian, Discourses, Discourse 35
“Stretch out your hand to the poor, and you will find what was sought in prayer. For prayer without works is like a body without a soul.” – St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Homily 1
There is a single phrase in Acts 1:14 that I want to hold carefully today, because I think it contains more than it first appears to.
Luke tells us that the disciples, gathered in the Upper Room, all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication. The phrase translated as “one accord” is the Greek homothumadon, a word that Luke uses ten times in the Acts of the Apostles, more than any other New Testament writer, and which clearly carries special significance for him. It is a compound word built from homos (same) and thumos (passion, breath, spirit). One passion. One breath. One animating spirit moving through many people at once.
It is not a word that describes agreement on a committee. It is not the word you would use for a group that had reached a satisfactory consensus after discussion. It is the word you use when something deeper than agreement has taken hold of a community, when a single current is running through many lives at once, when the many have somehow, by grace, become one.
I have been sitting with that word all day. And the more I sit with it, the more I think it names something that we have largely lost the vocabulary for in contemporary Christian life.
What One Accord Is Not
Before we can say what homothumadon is, it may help to say what it is not.
It is not uniformity of feeling. The one hundred and twenty people gathered in the Upper Room were not all in the same emotional state. Some of them had stood at the foot of the Cross and watched. Some had fled. Some had doubted, even after the Resurrection appearances. Thomas had famously refused to believe until he touched the wounds. Peter carried the weight of his threefold denial. Mary Magdalene had wept at the tomb. The brothers of the Lord had not believed in Jesus during His public ministry, and had only come to faith after the Resurrection. These were not people who had arrived at a uniform emotional experience of the Risen Lord. They had arrived at very different places, through very different paths, carrying very different histories.
And yet they were of one accord.
This means that one accord is not something we manufacture by getting everyone to feel the same thing. It is not the product of a particularly moving worship experience, though such experiences have their place. It is not the result of emotional unanimity. It is something that can hold together people of very different temperaments, histories, and emotional states, because it operates at a level deeper than emotion. It operates at the level of will and direction. It is the alignment of many wills toward a single purpose, the turning of many faces toward the same horizon.
The Syriac Understanding of Prayer
St. Isaac the Syrian, writing in the seventh century from within the great contemplative tradition of the East Syriac Church, offers us one of the most profound theologies of prayer in the Christian tradition. His Discourses, written originally in Syriac and later translated into Greek and thence into many other languages, have been a treasure of the whole Church, read by Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant Christians alike across the centuries.
For Isaac, prayer is not primarily a technique or a discipline, though it requires both. Prayer is the fundamental orientation of the human person toward God. It is what the soul does when it is most fully itself, when it has recovered something of the original dignity that was damaged by the Fall, when it has turned away from the centripetal pull of the self and begun to move, however haltingly, toward the divine light.
Isaac distinguishes between what he calls “pure prayer” and the various forms of prayer that precede and prepare for it. Pure prayer, for Isaac, is not the recitation of words, however beautiful. It is not even the devout and attentive meditation on Scripture, though that is precious. Pure prayer is the state in which the soul has been so stripped of its own agendas, so emptied of its own noise, that it becomes simply receptive to the divine presence. He describes it as a kind of luminosity, a state in which the boundary between the one who prays and the One who is prayed to becomes, not dissolved, but transparent.1
This is what the Upper Room community was moving toward in those nine days of waiting. Not a prayer meeting in the modern sense, though it was certainly that. Not a series of devotional exercises, though those were surely part of it. They were being drawn, by the very act of their persistent, one-accord prayer, into a state of receptivity that would make them capable of receiving what no human heart could contain by its own unaided capacity.
The Holy Spirit does not fall on the unprepared heart, not because He is unwilling, but because the unprepared heart cannot receive Him. One cannot pour fire into a vessel filled with other things. The nine days of waiting were the emptying of the vessel. The Qurbana, our eucharistic gathering, is itself a weekly participation in this same dynamic: the Epiclesis, that moment when the priest implores the Holy Spirit to descend upon the gifts, is the liturgical enactment of the Upper Room prayer. We are always, in the Qurbana, the disciples in the Upper Room, asking the Spirit to come upon what has been offered.2
Prayer as the Womb of the Spirit
There is an image from the Syriac tradition that I find particularly beautiful and that speaks directly to the Upper Room experience. Several of the Syriac Fathers, drawing on the feminine grammatical gender of Ruha d-Qudsha, the Holy Spirit in Syriac, developed a maternal theology of the Spirit’s work. The Spirit broods, as a mother bird broods over her eggs. The Spirit overshadows, as a mother shelters her child. The Spirit brings to birth, as a mother labours for new life.3 4
Within this theology, prayer becomes the womb in which the Spirit forms new life. It is not that prayer earns the Spirit, or produces the Spirit by its own power. A womb does not produce the child it carries. It provides the conditions, the shelter, the warmth, the nourishment, within which life that has been given from elsewhere can grow and develop and finally be born. The one hundred and twenty in the Upper Room were not generating the Spirit by the intensity or persistence of their prayer. They were creating, together, the conditions in which the Spirit Who had been promised could come and take form among them.
This image has a direct connection to the Annunciation, which is itself a moment of prayer and receptivity. When the angel came to Mary, she was not generating the Incarnation by her own spiritual intensity. She was the prepared vessel, the one who said “Let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38), and in that surrender, in that one word of consent, she became the womb in which the Word took flesh. The Upper Room community, gathered in prayer and supplication, was doing something analogous: saying, together, with one accord, let it be to us according to your word. And the Spirit who had overshadowed the Virgin at the Annunciation would come again, at Pentecost, and overshadow the whole gathered Body of Christ.
The Eucharist as Perpetual Pentecost
The connection between the Upper Room prayer and the Eucharistic prayer of our tradition is not incidental. It is structural.
Every time the Malankara Orthodox community gathers for the Qurbana, we are re-enacting the Upper Room. The gathered assembly, the shared prayer, the reading of the Scriptures, the intercessions offered with one accord, and then that supreme moment of the Epiclesis, when the priest turns to the altar and the deacon calls the people to attention and the prayer goes up for the Spirit to descend, this is Pentecost re-lived. Not repeated, because Pentecost happened once, as the Incarnation happened once. But re-lived, participated in, entered into afresh, by the community that joins itself to the Body of Christ in the breaking of bread.
Fr. Baby Varghese, in his indispensable study of West Syriac liturgical theology, draws out the deep connection between the pneumatology of the Upper Room and the pneumatology of the Eucharistic prayer in the West Syriac anaphora. The Epiclesis is not a formulaic moment in the liturgy. It is the moment in which the gathered community, having offered its prayer and its gifts, stands in the posture of the Upper Room, waiting and asking for the fire to fall. And the tradition affirms, with full confidence, that the fire does fall. Every Qurbana is a Pentecost. Every Sunday morning gathering of the faithful is a re-entry into the Upper Room experience.5
This gives our Sunday worship a weight and a dignity that we do not always feel, because we are tired, because the children are restless, because the week has been long, because our hearts are not always where we would wish them to be. But the tradition is clear: the Qurbana does not depend on the emotional state of the participants for its reality. It depends on the faithfulness of the Spirit who was promised, who comes as He came at Pentecost, upon the gathered Body that asks Him to come.
Praying When Prayer Feels Impossible
I want to end today’s reflection with a word that I think is needed, because the devotional life is rarely as clean as our theological descriptions of it.
The Upper Room community prayed with one accord for nine days. That sounds, from a distance, like a sustained and glorious experience of communal prayer. And perhaps it was. But I suspect it was also, at moments, difficult. Some of those one hundred and twenty people had not slept well. Some were anxious. Some were grieving, still, the loss of the One they had followed. Some found their minds wandering. Some prayed in the morning with great fervour and found, by evening, that the fervour had subsided into something quieter and less certain.
St. Isaac the Syrian knew this. He wrote with characteristic honesty about the experience of prayer that feels dry, that feels like speaking into an empty room, that does not produce consolation or warmth or any of the experiences we associate with genuine spiritual encounter. His counsel, in such moments, was not to stop, but to persist. Not because persistence earns anything, but because the very act of persisting in prayer, even dry prayer, even prayer that feels like nothing, is itself a form of the Upper Room posture. It is the will choosing, day after day, to turn toward God even when the feelings do not follow.6
This is the deep meaning of one accord. It is not the one accord of shared feeling. It is the one accord of shared direction. The will saying, with all the other wills gathered in the room: we are here. We are waiting. We do not know when or how, but we believe the promise. And so we remain.
That is enough. It has always been enough. The Spirit does not require our feelings to be in order before He comes. He requires only that we be there, in the Upper Room, with whatever we have, turned in the right direction, waiting.
For Reflection
- What does one accord mean practically in the context of our parish or prayer community? Is it something I experience, or something I am still seeking? What might be preventing it?
- How does Isaac the Syrian’s understanding of pure prayer as receptivity rather than achievement challenge the way I approach my own prayer life?
- The next time I participate in the Qurbana, can I enter the Epiclesis with the consciousness that I am standing in the Upper Room, asking the Spirit to fall? What would it change about how I participate?
A Closing Prayer
Lord, teach us to pray as those who have learned that prayer is not our achievement but Your gift. Teach us the one accord that is deeper than agreement, the unity that holds together people of different histories and different temperaments and different emotional states, because it operates at the level of will and direction rather than feeling. When our prayer feels dry, remind us that the disciples prayed for nine days without knowing when the fire would come. When we are tempted to give up on the gathered life of the Church, remind us that the Spirit fell on the assembly, not on the solitary. And in every Qurbana, every time the Epiclesis rises from the lips of the priest and the hearts of the faithful, let us be there as those who are truly waiting, truly asking, truly ready to receive whatever fire You choose to send.
Through the intercessions of the Theotokos, the holy Apostles, and the great teachers of prayer in our Syriac tradition, have mercy on us.
Amen.
Day 4 of 9 reflections for the days between the Feast of the Ascension and the Feast of Pentecost. Come, Holy Spirit.
Patristic References
- Isaac the Syrian (c. 613–700 AD) Discourses (Mystic Treatises). ↩︎
- Varghese, Fr. Baby. West Syriac Liturgical Theology. The essential scholarly study of the Epiclesis in the West Syriac tradition and its pneumatological significance. ↩︎
- Brock, Sebastian P. The Holy Spirit in the Syrian Baptismal Tradition. 2nd ed. The essential reference for the feminine, maternal imagery of the Spirit in the Syriac tradition. ↩︎
- Murray, Robert. Symbols of Church and Kingdom: A Study in Early Syriac Tradition. Revised edition. Chapter 9 addresses the maternal imagery of the Spirit in the earliest Syriac theology. ↩︎
- Varghese, Fr. Baby. The Syriac Version of the Liturgy of St. James. ↩︎
- Isaac the Syrian (c. 613–700 AD) The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian translated by Dana Miller. The most complete modern English translation, translated from the Greek version.
Isaac of Nineveh: The Second Part translated by Sebastian Brock. Translation of the second collection of Isaac’s writings, which was unknown in the West until 1983 and contains some of his most profound teaching on prayer. ↩︎
