The Church’s teaching about prayer and the Christian life in the Orthodox tradition reflects the intense experience of God and prayer had by the Fathers and Mothers of the Church, and their deep understanding of human nature. They do not speak and write about ‘spirituality’ as a distinct aspect of Christian theology. That word, now so fashionable in Western Christianity, is not at home in Orthodoxy, which speaks rather of ‘theology’, meaning knowledge of—not about—God, or quite simply, and more truly, of the Christian life. When we do use the term ‘spirituality’, we must insist that it can mean nothing less than the life of the Holy Spirit in us.
‘Spirituality’ cannot be restricted to the practice of prayer alone, for praying and living are inseparable. To pray to God is to commit one’s self to obey God’s commandments in daily life, and to enter into a relationship with God in the depths of one’s being is to commit oneself to a loving relationship with one’s neighbor.
Nevertheless, our relationship with God in prayer is fundamental to the Christian life, and prayer is an art to be acquired through disciplined practice. We must learn to pray, and we need practical and detailed guidance. We must be clear, however, that in the end our prayer is not our own, but the prayer of Christ in us and in the Church, that prayer of Christ which is prayed above all in the liturgy and the other services of the Church. The prayer of Christ grows in us as we persevere in the relentless struggle to conform our whole life to the pattern of Christ’s. The body, too, needs to be trained and disciplined, for we are not disembodied souls, and our bodies cannot be excluded from our praying. They must become the peaceful servants of wills brought progressively into line with God’s will.
For the will is central in Christian living and praying. At the heart of both there must of course be love for God, and the source of both is always the grace of God within us. But determination to choose the good and reject the evil is the key to progress in both. Disciples of Jesus must be disciplined people, since it is only when we set ourselves firmly to do the will of God that God’s grace finds an opening into our life. In our own interior life, in our conduct, and in our relationships with others, we must always seek to shape our thoughts and our actions in accordance with the Gospel.
Together with an insistence on the importance of the will in the Christian life goes a necessary caution against letting our prayer be affected by our mood, or by any emotional experience we may enjoy in prayer. Our feelings are unreliable guides, and our emotions are irrelevant to the goal of prayer, which is nothing less than the transformation of our being. Prayer may at times be easy, at others difficult. What matters is that at all times it should be the offering of our determination to pray.
Prayer springs from faith in God as a living reality, with whom a relationship of a not less than personal kind can be established. That living reality which is God is not distant: he is to be found within us, in the depths of our being. Growth in our relationship with God goes hand in hand, therefore, with growth in our knowledge of ourselves. Prayer is the encounter between God as he truly is, and ourselves as we truly are. If we are to make progress in prayer, we must penetrate beyond our image of God to find him as he truly is, and delve beneath the superficial personalities we present to the world to discover our real selves. Neither process is easy: the Christian life demands discipline; prayer requires rigorous honesty.
Something which must be stressed is the danger involved in the encounter with the holy God, which, since we are sinners, always entails judgment. The Christian life must therefore begin with conversion and repentance. From that beginning we must go on to let the Holy Spirit within us change us, forming in us the mind of Christ. An essential aspect of Christian discipline is prayerful meditation on the Gospels, through which Christ himself confronts us and shows us those aspects of our life where conversion is still needed. Conversion is always the way of living taught and exemplified by Jesus Christ himself. It inescapably involves taking up the cross, and learning to die with him to our sinful self, in order that the new person may be raised up to eternal life in and with God.
The need for silence is a constant emphasis in the Church’s teaching on prayer and the Christian life. Not only our hearts and our minds, but our bodies, too, are to be trained to an alert stillness, in which we are open to God, ready to receive what he wants to give, and open to our neighbor. Prayer is far from being a stream of words spoken without pause by us to God, and too many words can stand in the way of real prayer. Simply to be, and to be still, in the presence of God, rejoicing in His presence, is an art essential to be learned. Words, of course, are needed. They may be the words of prayers we have learned by heart, and which are a constant stand-by at times when we find it hard to pray.
They may be words which express spontaneously what we want to say at that particular time. They may, again, be the few prayerfully repeated words of the Jesus Prayer. But words are to serve, rather than dominate, prayer; and the aim of all our praying is to build up such an awareness of God’s presence that prayer becomes the constant background to the whole of our life, as well as a deliberate activity at specific times.
The goal of all Christian living and praying is the vision of the glory of God, and participation through grace in the life of God himself. The way to that end lies open to us because of the incarnation, death and resurrection of the Word of God, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. But each of us must decide for ourselves to adventure on that way, which leads to eternal life only through the suffering and death of the cross. If we determine to learn to love God and our neighbor as Jesus loved, we shall grow in our knowledge of God. Yet God remains at the same time unknowable, and we must be prepared to find that the last step of our relationship with God is an act of pure adoration, face to face with a mystery into which we cannot enter.
-Fr. Matthew Snowden
“Ever let mercy outweigh all else in you. Let our compassion be a mirror where we may see in ourselves that likeness and that true image which belong to the Divine nature and Divine essence. A heart hard andvunmerciful will never be pure.” - St. Isaac of Syria
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