I recently completed The Art of Prayer: An Orthodox Anthology, compiled by Igumen Chariton of Valamo.
The book follows the movement from outward prayer to inner prayer. Prayer begins with words, grows through attention, and may eventually become rooted in the Heart through Grace.
At the center is the Jesus Prayer:
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me.
This post is a short overview of its main teachings.
Prayer and the Heart
Prayer means standing consciously before God with attention, reverence, repentance, faith, and love.
Church attendance, fasting, spiritual reading, written prayers, and prostrations help guide us inward. Their purpose is the transformation of the Heart.
We can appear religious while remaining distracted, proud, judgmental, angry, or attached to our own will.
Knowledge must also descend from the head into the Heart. Only then does it become lived experience and communion with God.
The Jesus Prayer
Prayer begins with effort. We speak the words, return our wandering attention, and continue during periods of dryness.
Gradually, prayer may move from the lips to the mind and, through Grace, into the Heart. The deeper stages come as a gift from God.
The strength of the Jesus Prayer comes from the Name of Jesus Christ and from calling upon Him with faith that He is near, sees us, and hears us.
The Prayer should be practised simply, without mental images or the pursuit of unusual feelings.
The aim is to stand before God with the mind in the Heart.
Remembrance, Grace, and effort
Unceasing prayer means keeping the Heart turned toward God during work, walking, suffering, conversation, and rest.
When remembrance of God enters the Heart, it begins to shape our thoughts, decisions, reactions, and behaviour.
We must work with all our strength while trusting the result to God. Prayer, repentance, fasting, vigilance, obedience, confession, and Communion prepare the ground.
Grace gives the fruit.
Act fully and trust entirely in God.
The fruits of prayer
The first fruit of prayer is attention.
The mind becomes less scattered, thoughts become easier to observe, and the Heart becomes more sensitive to repentance and God’s presence.
Concentration, peace, emotional warmth, and spiritual sweetness can occur naturally. The clearest fruits are humility, patience, forgiveness, sincerity, peace, and love.
Prayer should make us gentler toward others and more aware of our own weakness.
War with the passions
The spiritual path begins with the struggle against the passions.
Temptation usually enters as a thought, image, memory, or impulse. The danger grows when we welcome it and allow it to remain.
The safest response is to cut it off early, invoke Christ, and return attention to the Heart.
Spiritual reading should be used as a mirror. Its purpose is to correct our own life and help us recognize what needs repentance.
Dryness, illusion, humility, and love
Prayer passes through periods of dryness. Such periods can expose self reliance, test faithfulness, and teach humility.
Spiritual illusion excites the imagination, flatters the ego, and persuades us that we have attained something extraordinary.
Divine action produces sobriety, repentance, peace, humility, and inner unity.
The final test of everything is humility and love.
The goal is to become a person whose entire life is prayer.
Selected passages and reflections
Prayer is standing before God with the mind in the heart.
The power is not in the words alone, but in the thoughts, feelings, faith, and attention with which they are offered.
When remembrance of God lives in the heart, life remains rightly ordered; when it remains only in the head, everything begins to go astray.
A truth understood only by the mind remains fruitless until it descends into the heart and becomes lived experience.
It is easier to philosophize about God than to pray, watch oneself, and change.
Expect everything from God and nothing from yourself, yet act with all your strength and without half-heartedness.
Human effort prepares the ground; grace gives the fruit. Never mistake the effort itself for the fruit of the Spirit.
When self-reliance is exhausted, the soul learns to surrender to the all-embracing action of grace.
Do not measure your spiritual progress. The question “Have I attained it?” easily becomes an opening for pride and illusion.
Spiritual illusion excites the imagination and flatters the ego; divine action produces repentance, humility, sobriety, and inward unity.
Do not seek ecstasy or extraordinary states. Seek a quiet, warm, and constant orientation toward God.
Spiritual warmth sought for its sweetness becomes spiritual hedonism. Seek God, not the pleasure that may accompany prayer.
Sobriety means allowing the heart to cling to God alone; vigilance means watching so that evil does not take root within.
To have the mind in the heart is to place attention there and remain inwardly before God. The mind follows attention.
The spiritual path begins by taming the passions through attention and the guarding of the heart.
The purpose of spiritual reading is to apply it to yourself. Knowledge that is not lived easily becomes criticism of others.
Consider others better than yourself; without humility, even extraordinary spiritual gifts leave a person far from God.
Do sincerely everything that lies within your power and accords with a pure conscience, then entrust the result entirely to God.
The goal is not merely to repeat the Jesus Prayer, but to become a person whose whole life is prayer.
Further selected passages
Watchfulness and the heart
Deep in the heart we cling to our right to judge and punish others for their sins, instead of ourselves. That is all there is to it. If a man saw himself as a sinner, being vividly conscious of all the consequences of sin, anger would be far from him.
Do not let the eye of the mind turn away from the heart; and when anything comes forth from there, at once catch it and examine it. If it is good, let it be; if it is not good, it must be killed at once. In this way, learn to know yourself. … Yet do not place any reliance on yourself and do not expect to achieve anything by your own efforts. … Strive and go on striving; but expect all good to come only from the Lord.
Without entering into altercation with passionate thoughts, let us turn directly to God, with fear, devotion, and trust, surrendering ourselves to His influence. By doing this we already push everything passionate away from our mind’s eye, and look only at the Lord.
From the moment when your heart starts to be kindled with divine warmth your inner transformation will properly begin. This slight flame will in time consume and melt everything within you, it will begin and continue to spiritualize your being to the full. Indeed, until this flame starts to burn, there will be no spiritualization, in spite of all your strivings to achieve it.
I have come to the conclusion that you are still in the head and not in the heart. Descend into the heart and you will know at once what you are worth. … The deeper you go, the clearer it will appear.
Think as little as possible about external ascetic feats. Although they are necessary, they are nothing but a scaffolding inside which the building is erected. They are not the building itself; the building is in the heart. Turn all your attention, then, on what is to be done in the heart.
Inner life in the world
The body at work but the thought with God—such should be the state of a true Christian. We should set in order our inner state as soon as we open our eyes each morning. In this same state of inner order we should keep ourselves all day, and in the evening warm and strengthen it and so fall asleep.
The chief enemy of life in God is a profusion of worldly cares. This profusion of cares impels a man into an endless round of secular activities. Every day, from morning till night, it drives him from one job to another, not giving him a moment’s rest, leaving him no time to turn to God and to remain for a while uplifted in prayer to Him.
External seclusion will come of itself once inner seclusion is established. God will arrange about that. Yet do not forget that you can be alone amid the noise of the world; and equally you can be surrounded by the hubbub of the world whilst withdrawn in your cell. You will have something better than external seclusion if you retreat in this way within yourself, thus making it impossible for any external turmoil to distract you. Pray that you may be granted this.
A man is indeed unwise if he reads diligently the words of God but fails to ponder over them, not making himself feel their meaning and not practising them in actual life. For then the word of God flows through him like water in a gutter, without entering him or leaving a trace.
Struggle, grace, and humility
The life of a Christian on earth is a chain of suffering. It is necessary to fight against our own body, against passions and evil spirits. Our hope lies in this fight. Our salvation is from God. Having put our reliance on Him, we must bear with patience the time of struggle. … Divine Providence permits these trials to assail us for the great benefit of our soul; from them we acquire a contrite and humble heart which God will not despise.
The abiding of our soul with the Lord, which is the whole essence of inner work, is not something that depends upon us. The Lord visits the soul, and the soul dwells with Him; the soul rejoices before Him and He fills it with spiritual warmth. Then the Lord withdraws and at once the soul is empty, nor does it lie at all within its power to make the Good Visitor of souls return.
You say that you have no success. Indeed, there will be no success so long as you are full of self-indulgence and self-pity. These two things show at once that what is uppermost in your heart is ‘I’ and not the Lord.
Humbling oneself is not yet humility, but only the desire and search for humility. … There is a spirit of illusion which in some unknown way deceives the soul by its guile. It so confuses our thoughts that the soul thinks itself humble, whereas inwardly it conceals an arrogant and conceited opinion of its own worth.
You say that you are offended. To be offended at lack of attention is to consider oneself worthy of attention, and consequently to set a high value upon oneself in the heart; in other words, to have a heart swollen with pride. … What you should have done is to consider: do I deserve any attention? If you had had this feeling of unworthiness in your heart you would not have taken offence.
Why do we criticize others? Because we do not try to know ourselves. Whoever is busy trying to know himself has no time to notice the faults of others. Judge yourself and you will stop judging others.
Prayer
In oral prayer we must try in every possible way to keep our mind fixed on the words of the prayer, saying it without haste and concentrating all our attention on the meaning of the words. When the mind becomes distracted by alien thoughts, we must bring it back undiscouraged to the words of the prayer. … What is needed is a humble heart, the grace of Christ, and constant effort.
Glory to God for everything! ❤️🙏
