Dear brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus
Wishing each and everyone of my beloved readers a very happy new year and a decade starting in 2020. As I was looking for topics to write on as an yearly topic, I thought of addressing the simplest of Christian acts but also the most difficult and mis-communicated of all, the act of Prayer. In the Orthodox tradition, one prayer is widely used by all, The Jesus Prayer, but before we understand and learn more about the Prayer, we need to understand what prayer is.
It has been wisely said by an Orthodox writer, Tito Colliander in ‘The Way of the Ascetics’, “When you pray, you yourself must be silent… You yourself must be silent, let the prayer speak.” To achieve silence: this is of all things the hardest and the most decisive in the art of prayer. But in our busy schedules today, with the constant jabbering of words through the use of modern technology, it is difficult to achieve the virtue of silence in out lives. Silence is not merely negative- a pause between words, a temporary cessation of speech- but properly understood, it is highly positive: an attitude of attentive alertness, of vigilance, and above all of listening. The person who has attained inner stillness or silence, is par excellence the one who listens. He listens to the voice of prayer in his own heart, and he understands that this voice is not his own but of Another speaking within him.
The first definition I would like to look upon prayer is from The Concise Oxford Dictionary, which describes prayer as ‘… solemn request to God …formula used in praying. Prayer here is envisaged as something expressed in words, and more specifically as an act of asking God to confer some benefit. Many of us are swimming at this level of prayer, which is mostly an external prayer.
The second definition I would look upon is from an elder of the Russian Orthodox Church, St. Theophan the Recluse (1815-94). He says that in prayer the principal thing is to stand before God with the mind in the heart, and to go on standing before Him unceasingly day & night, until the end of life. As per St. Theophan, prayer is not merely to ask for things, but to pray is to stand before God, to enter into an immediate and personal relationship with Him; it is to know at every level of our being, from the instinctive to the intellectual. from the sub- to the supra-conscious, that we are in God and He is in us. Do we continually present requests or use many words with other human beings to affirm an deepen our personal relationship with them? The better we come to know and love one another, the less need there is to express our mutual attitude verbally. It is the same in our personal relationship with God.
When we look at the above two definitions of prayer, the emphasis is primarily laid on the activity of the human individual rather than on God. But in the relationship of prayer, it is the divine partner and not the human who takes the initiative and whose action is fundamental. This brings us to our third definition, which is taken from St. Gregory of Sinai. St. Gregory in an elaborate passage trying to describe the true reality of inner prayer, he ends suddenly with unexpected simplicity: ‘Why speak at length? Prayer is God, who works all things in all men.
Prayer is God – it is not something that I initiate but something in which I share; it is not primarily something that I do, but something that God is doing in me: St. Paul’s phrase, ‘not I, but Christ in me’ (Galatians 2:20). The path of inner prayer is exactly indicated in St. John the Baptist’s words about the Messiah: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). It is in this sense that to pray is to be silent. ‘You yourself must be silent; let the prayer speak’ – more precisely, let God speak. True inner prayer is to stop talking and to listen to the wordless voice of God within our heart; it is to cease doing things on our own, and to enter into the action of God.
Our fourth definition, taken once again from St. Gregory of Sinai, indicates more definitely the character of this action of the Lord within us. He says “Prayer is the manifestation of Baptism”. The action of the Lord is not limited solely to the baptized, because God is present and at work within all humankind, by virtue of the fact that each is created according to His divine image. But this image has been obscured and clouded over, although not totally obliterated, by our fall into sin. It is restored to its primal beauty and splendor through the sacrament of Baptism, where Christ and the Holy Spirit come to dwell in what the Father call ‘the innermost and secret sanctuary of our heart’. For the majority us, Baptism is something we have received in infancy, of which we have no conscious memory. Although Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit which we received during our Baptism never cease, not even for one moment to work within us, most of us-save on rare occasion-remain virtually unaware of this inner presence and activity.
True prayer, then, signifies the rediscovery and ‘manifestation’ of baptismal grace. To pray is to pass from the state where grace is present in our hearts secretly and unconsciously, to the point of full inner perception and conscious awareness when we experience and feel the activity of the Holy Spirit directly and immediately. In the words of St. Kallistos, ‘The aim of the Christian life is to return to the perfect grace of the Holy and Life-giving Spirit, which was conferred upon us at the beginning in divine Baptism.’
The purpose of prayer can be summarized in the phrase, ‘Become what you are’. Become, consciously and actively, what you already are potentially and secretly, by virtue of your creation according to the divine image and your re-creation at Baptism. Become what you are: more exactly, return into yourself, discover Him Who is yours already, listen to Him Who never ceases to speak within you, possess Him Who even now possesses you. Such is God’s message to anyone who wants to pray: ‘You would not seek me unless you had already found me.’
But how are we to start? How, after entering our room and closing the door, are we to begin to pray, not just by repeating words which we have learned by rote memory from childhood or from books, but by offering inner prayer, the living prayer of creative stillness? How can we learn to stop talking and to start listening? Instead of simply speaking to God, how can we make our own the prayer in which God speaks to us? How shall we pass from prayer expressed in words to prayer of silence, from ‘strenuous’ to ‘self-acting’ prayer, from ‘my’ prayer to the prayer of ‘Christ in me’?
One way to embark on this journey inwards is through the Invocation of the Name – the Jesus Prayer – Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner.
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Your brother in Christ Jesus
Jobin George
Thank you very much, encouraging, enlightening.
Thank you