When you are praying, don’t rack your brains to find words. On many occasions the simple, monotonous stammering of children has satisfied their Father who is in heaven. Don’t bother to be loquacious lest the mind is bewildered in the search for words. The tax-collector gained the Lord’s forgiveness with a single sentence, and a single word charged with faith was the salvation of the robber. Loquacity in prayer often fills the head with foolish fancies and provokes distractions. Brevity on the other hand - sometimes only one word is enough - in general favors recollection.
In the Church we are freed from worldly enchantment, and from the intoxication of worldly passions and desires; we become enlightened, sanctified, cleansed in our souls; we draw near to God, we are united with God ('Who, by Thy glorious Childbirth, hath united God the Word with men') How worthily reverenced and loved should the temple of God be! How God’s Saints loved it!
Dearly Beloved, each word and deed of our Savior Jesus Christ is for us a lesson in virtue and piety. For this end also did He assume our nature, so that every man and every woman, contemplating as in a picture the practice of all virtue and piety, might strive with all their hearts to imitate His example. For this He bore our body, so that as far as we could we might repeat within us the manner of His Life. And so therefore, when you hear mention of some word or deed of His, take care not to receive it simply as something that incidentally happened, but raise your mind upwards towards the sublimity of what He is teaching, and strive to see what has been mystically handed down to us.
Whether you pray with brethren or alone, try to pray not simply as a routine, but with conscious awareness of your prayer. Conscious awareness of prayer is concentration accompanied by reverence, compunction and distress of soul as it confesses its sin with inward sorrow.
How can one avoid distractions in prayer? If one abides in the presence of God. Indeed, when in the presence of one's judge and one's master, and speaking with him, one does not let one's eyes wander elsewhere. How much more should the one who approaches the Lord never turn away the eye of his heart, but fix it on Him who searches the reins and the heart.
Blessed is the Good One Who opens His door to the good that they might enter therein, and also does not lock the door of His goodness to the evil if they are converted. Blessed is He Who grants everyone the means to inherit the heavenly kingdom: the righteous inherit it through good deeds, and sinners through repentance. Blessed is He Who for the sake of sinners gave Himself up to death and revilement, Who suffered humiliation in order to grant sinners life.
Every day you provide your bodies with good to keep them from failing. In the same way your good works should be the daily nourishment of your hearts. Your bodies are fed with food and your spirits with good works. You aren't to deny your soul, which is going to live forever, what you grant to your body, which is going to die.
Oh, what great happiness and bliss, what exaltation it is to address oneself to the Eternal Father. Always, without fail, value this joy which has been accorded to you by God's infinite grace and do not forget it during your prayers; God, the angels and God's holy men listen to you.
The most important thing in any good effort and the height of all activities is to persevere in prayer, by means of which we can always acquire through supplication the other virtues from God as well.
For while the body is bowed to the ground the mouth babbles idly, and the mind wanders here and there through the house, through the market place, how can such a person say he has prayed before the face of God? He prays before the face of the Lord who contains his soul in every direction, and withdraws it from all that is earthly, and, thrusting aside every human reflection, raises it up towards heaven.
When said with pain, the prayer gives birth to mourning. Mourning brings tears. Tears in turn give birth to purer prayer. For tears like a fragrant myrrh wash away the filth, and thus the inbreathing of God is cleansed, which like a dove is confined within four walls, as if made of the four elements.... And then, as soon as the walls break down and collapse, the dove immediately flies to the Father whence it came.
The mission of the Church is to bring about in her members the conviction that the proper state of human personhood is composed of immortality and eternity and not of the realm of time and mortality... and the conviction that man is a wayfarer who is wending his way in the sway of time and mortality towards immortality and all eternity.
In Christ Jesus, there is neither male nor female, nor Greek, nor Jew, but all, according to the holy Apostle, are one (Gal. 3:28). In the same way, in Him there is neither ruler nor subject, but by His grace we are all one in faith in Him, and belong to one Body, His Church, whose head He is. By the grace of the all-Holy Spirit we have all drunk of the one Spirit, and have all received one Baptism. We all have one hope and one God, Who is above all, and through all, and in us all (Eph. 4:6). So let us love one another. Let us bear with one another, seeing that we are members one of another. As the Lord Himself said, the sign that we are His disciples is love. When He departed from this world, the fatherly inheritance He left us was love, and the last prayer He gave us when He ascended to His Father was about love for one another (John 13:33-35).
Ask the angels and the saints to intercede for you, just as you'd ask people who are alive. Stand face to face with them, in the belief that they are also standing face to face with you.
