May God grant that, through experienced instructors and through the books of the Holy Fathers, that we learn this treasure: the unceasing practice of the Jesus Prayer! We should pray to God for what our heart is asking and yearning for. This is necessary because the cross is the weapon of our salvation.
This thought is still completely alien to one, but appears somewhere on the horizon; its penetration inside us begins when we begin to pay attention to it, enter into conversation with it, examine and analyze it. Let us remember this when we are preparing for prayer. But it very often happens that one is not disposed towards prayer, that one does not want to pray. It often happens that people who have departed from the Church return to God at some stage in their life because in childhood they had become accustomed to prayer. In the words of one Western medieval theologian, God is always next to us, but we are often far from Him; God always hears us, but we do not hear Him; God is always within us, but we are on the outside; God is at home in us, but we are strangers to Him. It can be very difficult to make peace with someone, to forgive someone, but if we don’t find the strength for this, we can’t count on God to forgive us. Many of us know by experience how difficult it can be to immerse ourselves into the lines of prayer when alone. Imagine if I didn’t greet her, if I didn’t notice her, but passed right by her into the house saying: “I don’t need any intermediaries; I only deal with the bishop.” It seemed to me perfectly natural that, dealing with the son, I also dealt with the mother. But if I put it off all week and came unprepared, then the teacher would get upset and it was sickening to me that the lesson did not go as I had hoped. In Soviet times it was forbidden to raise children in a religious spirit. Today very many people, in response to the question of whether they believe in God, reply in the affirmative; but if you ask them how they imagine God and what they think of Him, they respond something like this: “Well, God is good, it is something luminous, some kind of positive energy.” That is, they treat God like some kind of abstraction, as something impersonal. And on and on flows the holy mystery.
The soul of man, far from God, is like a dark room. The Lord's prayer opens with addressing God as "Father who art in Heaven". Some people set themselves the task of repeating the Jesus Prayer over the course of the day, say, one hundred, five hundred, or one thousand times. Obviously, we are not praying that the end of the world would come, but that the Kingdom of God would come to us, that is, that it would become real in our lives, that our present – humdrum, gray, and sometimes dark and tragic – earthly lives would be permeated by the presence of the Kingdom of God. God’s response can take place in different ways, but prayer is never unrequited. One might set out on the way of acquisitiveness and, having everything necessary – a roof over one’s head, a piece of bread, and a minimum of material goods – begin to engage in hoarding and luxury. To count how many times they have said the prayer, they use a prayer rope, which may have fifty, one hundred, or more knots.
Once in church a lady appealed to me: “Batiushka, I have read prayers for many years: both the morning and the evening prayers, but the more I read them, the less I like them, and the less I feel myself believing in God. We do not pray in order to beg for something from God. Meanwhile, already in the Old Testament it was commanded: Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain (Exodus 20:7). Morning and evening, day and night, one can turn to God with simple words coming from the depths of one’s heart. No matter how many times this prayer is read, it should be spoken with care, reverence, and love, with full delivery.
Prayer is only valuable when we feel that, thanks to it, something changes in us, that we begin to live differently. Human life is akin to swimming through a sea or ocean. Finally, there is one more property distinguishing this prayer: in it we confess our sins: “Have mercy on me, a sinner.” This point is very important, because many of our contemporaries absolutely do not feel their sinfulness. Such an understanding is also justifiable, because besides material bread, one also needs spiritual bread. For one person, the morning or evening prayers take up several hours, while for another they take a few minutes. There exists, for example, an icon of the Holy Trinity called the “New Testament Trinity”: it is uncanonical – that is, it does not correspond to the rules of the Church – but one can see it in certain churches. After all, sometimes God sends us suffering, but we turn out to be incapable of accepting it as sent by God, and we murmur indignantly.
It is a spiritual state, when the grace of God touches the heart directly. But let’s now share with you a Russian translation of the Our Father prayer, which Jesus taught his disciples, along with a transliteration of the prayer for those who cannot read Russian.