A prayer offered while one has any cause to reproach a fellow man is an impure prayer. There is only one whom the praying person may and must reproach, and that is himself. Without self-reproach, your prayer is as worthless as it is while you are reproaching someone else in your heart. Perhaps you ask: How can one learn this? The answer is: One learns it through prayer.
I am a Christian, you say, and content yourself with this. This is the first deceit - transferring to yourself the privileges and promise of Christianity, without any care to root true Christianity into yourself; or to ascribe to yourself that which can only be acquired by your strength and inner worthiness. Explain to yourself that it is illusory to hope in a name, that God can raise a son of Abraham from a stone and can take away your promise at any time if the conditions for participating in them are not soon fulfilled. Mainly, clarify to yourself what it means to be a Christian, unite yourself to this ideal, and you will see just how stable is this buttress to your blindness.
You must set about rooting out the very desire to have things pleasant, to get on well, to be contented. You must learn to like sadness, poverty, pain, hardship. You must learn to follow privately the Lord's bidding: not to speak empty words, not to adorn yourself, always to obey authority, not to look at a woman with desire, not to be angry and much else. For all these biddings are given us not in order for us to act as if they did not exist, but for us to follow: otherwise the Lord of mercy would not have burdened us with them. If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, He said (Matthew 16:24), thereby leaving it to each person's own will ... and to each person's endeavor: let him deny himself.
The spirit of faith and piety of the parents should be regarded as the most powerful means for the preservation, upbringing and strengthening of the life of grace in children.
There are certain kinds of trees which never bear any fruit as long as their branches stay up straight, but if stones are hung on the branches to bend them down they begin to bear fruit. So it is with the soul. When it is humbled it begins to bear fruit, and the more fruit it bears the lowlier it becomes. So also the saints; the nearer they get to God, the more they see themselves as sinners.
When the attention of the mind is fixed in the heart it is possible to control what happens in the heart, and the battle against the passions assumes a rational character. The enemy is recognized and can be driven off by the power of the Name of Christ.
True joy is the joy of consolation, the joy that wells up in the knowledge of one's own weakness and the Lord's mercy, and that does not need the bared teeth of laughter to express itself.
If you believe in a Divine Providence which determines the earthly fate of everyone and the way by which he is to be saved, you must also believe that the disposition of your life is the most suitable for you in working out your salvation.
Take remarks without grumbling: be thankful when you are scorned, disregarded, ignored. But do not create humbling situations; they are provided in the course of the day as richly as you need. We notice the person who is for ever bowing and fussily servile, and perhaps say, How humble he is! But the truly humble person escapes notice: the world does not know him (I John 3:I); for the world he is mostly a 'zero.'
In general, loquacity opens the doors of the soul, and the devout warmth of the heart at once escapes. Empty talk does the same, but even more so… Empty talk is the door to criticism and slander, the spreader of false rumors and opinions, the sower of discord and strife. It stifles the taste for mental work and almost always serves as a cover for the absence of sound knowledge…
The guarding of the conscience with regard to one’s neighbor is doing absolutely nothing at all that we know will upset or wound him, either by deed, word, gesture or even a glance. Even a gesture, can wound one’s neighbor. Briefly, man infects his conscience by deliberately doing those things that he knows will provoke his neighbor and will harm and embarrass him. Therefore, to keep one’s conscience and not act in this manner, is what we mean by keeping our conscience towards our neighbor.
Do not pray for the fulfillment of your wishes, for they may not accord with the will of God. But pray as you have been taught, saying: 'Thy will be done in me' (Luke 22.42). Always entreat Him in this way, that His will be done. For He desires what is good and profitable for you, whereas you do not always ask for this. Often when I have prayed, I have asked for what I thought was good, and persisted in my petition, stupidly importuning the will of God, and not leaving it to Him to arrange things as He knows is best for me, But when I have obtained what I asked for, I have been very sorry that I did not ask for the will of God to be done, because the thing turned out not to be as I thought.
To more conveniently become accustomed to remembering God, the fervent Christian has a special means, namely, to repeat ceaselessly a brief prayer of two or three words. Mostly this is 'Lord, have mercy.' or 'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.' If you have not yet heard of this, then hear it now, and if you have not done it, then begin from this hour to do it.
If the main goal of the repentant sinner should be total, light-bearing and blessed communion with God, then the main hindrance to this is the existence of the passions still active and working in him - the virtues being as yet unsealed in him - and the unrighteousness of his powers. Therefore his main work upon conversion and repentance should be the uprooting of the passions and sealing the virtues - in a word, correcting himself.
The root of good inner order is the fear of God. Preserve this fear within you constantly: it will hold everything taut, and will allow no slackness either in physical members or thoughts, creating a vigilant heart and a sober mind, and allowing no bodily torpor or blurring of thought. But one must always remember that success in any aspect of the spiritual life is the fruit of the grace of God. Spiritual life comes entirely from His most Holy Spirit. We have our own spirit but it is void of power. It begins to gain strength only when the grace of God flows in it.
