Letter to a Priest on the Teaching of Prayer

Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky)

 

 

Friend and father! Long ago I should have replied to you about the impoverishment of faith and prayer and about the means of combating them. But that same bustle which, by your own admission, disperses the feeling of reverence, deprived me as well of the opportunity to write to you for a month and a half. Now it is Clean Monday; I have just returned from the cathedral, where I read the Great Canon and, together with all who were praying, showered myself with the reproaches of Saint Andrew for negligence toward the eternal and for preference of the temporal.

True, our episcopal bustle is more involuntary than voluntary; it consists of constant receptions of petitioners and clergy asking for transfers, engaged in lawsuits, requesting to be sent to the front, or wishing to take examinations; then papers and papers without end. Yet, in spite of all this, I managed to write down from memory a huge public lecture on a philosophical topic, to write two large articles on ecclesiastical-publicist topics, and for that which is “one thing needful,” I did not find time until this day. Our wrongly directed education is the cause of this. I am not an enemy of what is called science, but it is vexing with regard to myself when I catch myself preferring subjects, even of theological science, to the subjects of the study of the spiritual life, upon which contemporary theologians look with a certain disdain, partly because they understand little in them, and partly because theologians who are self-taught, or even academic theologians who have withdrawn by their life and by their consciousness from the theological school, reason about them more deeply and better. There ought not to be such divisions and preferences; good Christians live according to the Apostle, “in honor preferring one another,” and rivalry and envy are especially inappropriate where the acquired possession of experience and study does not remain the property of the author alone, but of all readers, that is, a possession belonging to all.

You write: “I experience involuntary hardness; there is no former prayerful compunction; even more—against my will there are moments of complete absence of faith at the most important moments of the liturgy. Heal me! I write to you, my spiritual father. I desire prayer; but there is no prayer. Does the Lord truly deprive me of His grace?” No, my friend: if, God forbid, the latter had happened, then this would be expressed first and foremost in the fact that a person would not grieve over such a state of his; and if he fears falling into such estrangement, then the Divine grace is dear to him, and if it is dear, then it is not far from him. No one on earth responds to one who calls with such readiness as our Heavenly Father, but one must know how to hear His response. At times it is beneficial for us to come to know His chastisement, so as not to think highly of ourselves and thereby to come to know our sins and to learn humble-mindedness; in this learning, which is of greatest value, come to know His fatherly response to the cry of summons, as it were, of one’s soul drying up in insensibility. You have surely read in the works of the Right Reverend [St.] Theophan the Recluse a fatherly parable. If you heat strongly a bucket with water and pieces of ice, the water will not begin to warm until all the pieces of ice, to the last one, have melted; but then the warming will proceed very quickly. Therefore, above all, never think that the Lord has left you if for a long time you do not feel compunction and living joyful faith, although you would wish to experience both; the action of grace is manifested in you, but for the time being in contrition of soul, and not in compunction.

Now let us examine those circumstances under which the Lord permits a person to fall into a depressed state and to suspect himself of having lost faith.

The first and least dangerous condition of struggle and doubts arises directly from spiritual inexperience and the absence of guidance from elders. It happens precisely that a young priest or a young ascetic becomes accustomed in his mind, as it were, to feel about, or, speaking in bookish terms, to attentively analyze his spiritual state.

Previously he always wept when he read the Trinitarian prayers in church; even when, in a moment of solitude, he recalled the words of the mystical prayers, tears would come to his eyes. But then he sets himself to test with his attention how this feeling differs from that which he had when he partook of the Holy Mysteries. What, properly speaking, moves him to compunction in the words of these prayers? Does this compunctious feeling repeat itself if he reproduces these words in his memory a third time, a fourth time, and so on?—Naturally, the tears will soon cease to appear in your eyes, and in these moments, you are no longer a man of prayer, but an investigator. Does this mean that your heart has truly been torn away from God and that the soul has become alien to those penitential and all-embracingly compassionate dispositions which were so characteristic of you in the past?

Of course not; but every feeling, even a bodily sensation, weakens and, as it were, completely evaporates when we begin to make it the object of our persistent attention. Pinch yourself on the arm and, while enduring the pain, begin to ponder how this pain differs from toothache, from chest pain—and you will soon lose the very sensation of pain. A German scholar some seventy years ago overcame the most severe toothache, which tormented him almost to fainting, by such a method.

It is understandable that more spiritual feelings, which waft over our soul as it were with a “still small voice,” become completely imperceptible if they themselves are subjected to idle probing or so-called reflection.

Such is also the feeling of faith, that is, the living sensation of the divine presence and of God’s participation in your personal life. If even in secular life absent-minded young people are constantly told by teachers and parents, “Do not dig into yourselves; you will be capable of nothing,” then all the more is such a requirement appropriate in the spiritual life. When bright compunction has visited you, when a ray of God’s grace has as it were opened before you the face of God and sacred awe together with blessed joy has illumined the heart, then do not brood over your sensations, but surrender yourself to the stream of thoughts that flow into your soul, and put your deeds and life to the test, like Zacchaeus when the Savior came to him, in order to impel yourself to the correction of life and to the service of virtue: “Lord, half of my goods I give to the poor, and if I have wronged anyone of anything, I restore fourfold” (Lk. 19:8). A good feeling and spiritual rapture must be secured in one’s soul by an exploit either of struggle with one’s sins or of works of love. If those two blessed travelers on the evening of the Resurrection had limited themselves to the “burning of hearts” at the explanation of the prophecies, they would not have recognized their Interlocutor. But they fulfilled the commandment of hospitality: they constrained Him, saying, “Stay with us, for it is toward evening and the day is far spent” (Lk. 24:29). Then their eyes were opened, and they knew Him (Lk. 24:31).

Such an indication of the Gospel as to how one ought to strengthen in one’s soul holy prayerful and other grace-filled dispositions has significance also in other difficult circumstances of our spiritual life. Here you may perhaps say: “I did not at all have the habit of probing my dispositions and asking myself what and how I feel. This digging into myself was always alien to me, and yet the compunctious feelings that visited me before have left me; saddened by this, I perhaps even asked myself without need: do I believe in God at all? And I did not find in my soul a confident answer. I realize that I should not have done the latter, for I could not have lost faith in God without wavering in my convictions and without succumbing to some false teaching; I know that faith remains with me, but where has the bright feeling gone that embraces the believer when he thinks of God? I would not have dug into it, but I am aware that it has not been in me of late. What is the reason for that?”

About the reasons we shall say something presently, but first I will remind you of the counsel of the holy fathers on how to act in such impoverishment. The fathers speak thus: “Compunctious feeling is not yours, but God’s gift; yours, however, must be the labor to receive it.” What labor? First of all, the labor of a virtuous life in general, and in particular with regard to the very prayerful exploit. The fathers strictly forbid squeezing a feeling out of oneself, straining one’s breathing and forcing out tears; but what must the laborer of prayer strain? His attention! He must ponder the words of the prayer, not merely run through the prayerful words with eyes or voice, but also with his mind imagine what he is saying before God. Very often this alone is quite sufficient for prayerful compunction soon to penetrate the soul and for the fullness of communion with the Divinity accessible to you to open again before you. However, if this too does not happen, do not despond: you strove to fulfill before the Lord what was within your power, and now reflect on why the Lord, who undoubtedly looks with love upon your prayerful labor, did not grant you to hear His response.

I said that the reasons for this are various; you mentioned distraction by earthly bustle. Simple distraction is removed by the fulfillment of the stated rule of prayer; but if insensibility continues, then it means that the hook was not in simple distraction, but in the oppression of the soul by one or many cares. It is precisely of this that it is spoken in the Sermon on the Mount, at the end of the sixth chapter. What is condemned by the Lord is not the foresight of our needs, family and personal, but the oppression of one’s soul by them, when care so takes possession of the latter that it becomes almost indifferent “to the Kingdom of Heaven and its righteousness.” One must calmly set before oneself the always-near possibility of ruin, and of severe family need, and of illness, and of injury, and of the death of one’s loved ones, but at the same time remember that if you have fulfilled everything that depends on you to provide for relatives and loved ones, and yet it should please God to subject you or your family to severe misfortune, then it means that this is necessary for their salvation, for everything that happens to us not by our evil will happens by God’s permission, and therefore for our benefit, since the Lord does nothing and permits nothing except what is good for us.

If you thus calm your heart and, following the Church, will conclude your petitions before the Lord by entrusting yourself and your own to His holy will (“Let us commit ourselves to Christ God”), then that sinful distraction, that is, the oppression of the soul by cares and fears, will leave you, and you will again glorify God with all your heart and with all your soul.

Condescending to our weakness, the Lord does not forbid us to desire external well-being for ourselves, and especially for others; He also permits us to pray for this, but commands us to entrust the fulfillment of such a prayer to the will of God and not to murmur, and not even to grieve excessively, if things turn out not according to our desire, for we ourselves do not know what is more beneficial both for our own soul and for the souls of those close to us. But, of course, far from Christian righteousness are those who desire for their children only happiness and happiness. In our mad time, even among believing society, such people are the majority, and they do not understand that, while believing in the Christian God, they look upon Him and upon their life in a purely pagan way, because all these things the pagans seek (Mt. 6:32).

One of the best means of combating the impoverishment of prayer arising from the oppression of the soul—and, moreover, from other causes as well—must be acknowledged to be a temporary withdrawal from the world and from one’s own, that is, a journey on pilgrimage or a direct withdrawal to a monastery for a period of retreat; finally, confession, even in the usual setting of one’s life, if there is no possibility of leaving it even for a time.

As for what irreplaceably precious significance a heartfelt conversation with an experienced monastic elder has, everyone knows this already, if not from practice, then even from secular accounts. But the monastery itself also instructs. Both monks or nuns and laypeople who have gathered on pilgrimage, by their appearance and by their standing in church, by reading, chanting, and prostrations, bear living witness to us that there is one thing needful. The vanity of the earthly, its transitory significance, and the value of the eternal, the value of the soul and of conscience—this is the lesson from which no one can evade who has spent even three days in a monastery as a pilgrim. To see people fervently praying, having forgotten the earthly, is impossible without a lofty elevation of one’s own soul. At times, standing in the altar of the Kiev Caves Lavra, I would cast a glance through the Royal Doors at the simple pilgrims standing in front. On their faces shone that spiritual rapture which is expressed in the brief church prayer: “Standing in the temple of Thy glory, we think ourselves to be standing in heaven, O Theotokos, Gate of Heaven.” Strive to be among such people—and you will be filled with their spirit, like Saul who met on his way the sons of the prophets (see 1 Sam. 10:10–13).

Sinful distraction, or the “cares of life,” by which people stifle the Word within themselves (see Lk. 8:14), is not the only cause of the temporary loss of the gift of prayer. Such a loss also occurs as the sole recompense: 1) for a sin not covered by repentance, and 2) for an evil intention that has crept into the soul, and all the more—for a sinful passion.

One monk often fell into a grievous sin and, trembling at the coming wrath of God, cried out: “Lord, punish me however You will, only do not deprive me of faith and repentance!” A sin that is covered by repentance will not expel prayerful warmth from the heart until a person befriends that sin to the degree of complete impenitence. The parables of the publican and of the prodigal son, and the pardoned prudent thief, assure us of this. From this we learn that it is not sin that is so terrible as impenitence. But a sin lightly consigned to oblivion, offenses against one’s neighbor not covered by reconciliation, mad blasphemy (but, of course, not merely “blasphemous thoughts” that assail a person without his guilt), a malicious threat—for example, a threat of suicide or of renouncing the priestly rank or of apostasy from the Orthodox faith—these are what become the cause of “my prayer returning to my bosom” (Luke 34:13). Such transgressions against God’s commandments, even if they were isolated and, through human light-mindedness, consigned to oblivion, leave a dark, sinful whirlpool on the heart and hinder the grace of the Holy Spirit from gaining access to it. But most of all our heart is barred from receiving this grace through the conscious concealment of sin at confession. Alas, those who permit the latter often end their lives by suicide—monks and priests. May the Lord preserve all from such a Judas-like lot!

Therefore, until you understand why the spirit of prayer has departed from you, strive to recall whether you have forgotten some grievous sin committed by you, like those that have just been indicated; and if you recall such a one, hasten to weep over it, bringing repentance before God and before your neighbor, if you have offended him.

However, sin often lies not in deeds committed by you, but in intentions and in the dispositions of your heart. At times this is a formed, already assimilated malicious disposition, as with Amnon and Absalom; at times it is merely a nascent lust or passion. Here one must especially beware of the passions of lust, envy, ambition, or love of money. To such a state of soul pertain the Lord’s words about the impossibility of serving two masters—God and mammon (see Mt. 6:24; Lk. 16:13). The subjugation of the heart to one of the mentioned passions, even before its domination expresses itself in any deeds or undertakings, will immediately manifest itself in an impoverishment of the gift of prayer. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also (Mt. 6:21; Lk. 12:34). If your treasure, toward which you strive, is high rank, or money, or sinful love, then your heart will no longer take delight in communion with God, and when you stand to pray you will think only of how it might end as quickly as possible. And conversely—if such an impatient thought visits you during prayer, then, the fathers say, know that your heart has been seized, or is being seized, by some subtle passion that is driving out of it the joy of glorifying God and the thirst for knowing Him through spiritual reading, which begins to seem boring to you. But you will say: “I have tested my heart and in none of the things indicated am I guilty—not, of course, in the sense of considering myself passionless or sinless, but I hate my sinful habits or the embryos of passions, I bring sincere repentance for my sins, and yet I have not found healing for my ‘hardened insensibility.’”

“It is good for you if it is so,” I shall answer, “for righteous anger is that which the ascetic directs not against people, but against his passions; and if he acts thus, then, although the passion has not yet been completely expelled from his heart, being scourged by sacred anger it can no longer expel the spirit of prayer from your soul. — And yet this spirit of prayer has left me: I do not pray to God for health, for family happiness, for wealth and long life; I ask of Him only those gifts which are enumerated in the prayer of Ephrem the Syrian, which today, on the first day of the fast, I read sixteen times with prostrations; but the Lord refuses me these gifts, for I feel this by my despondent disposition, and this despondency insistently presses into my soul. Friend! If this is so, then know that not you alone, but Paul—immeasurably superior to us sinners—prayed three times that the angel of Satan might depart from him, yet he was not heard by God in this petition. Lest I should be exalted (2 Cor. 12:7)—thus the apostle himself explains this. The impetuosity of a young soul, making progress in the knowledge of God, is sometimes subjected to a trial in patience and humility, as with the Old Testament Job and the New Testament Paul, and the most ancient of both—Abraham. Therefore, do not give way to the spirit of despondency: strike it with itself. What does this mean? Here is what the holy fathers say: “Such a seemingly causeless attack of despondency is the direct action of the devil.” Having recognized whence it comes, you have almost already conquered it, conquered the spirit of despondency, for you yourself will not wish to accept a demonic suggestion. “The demon falls upon us with despondency then,” say the fathers, “when he sees the invincibility of our soul to other passions.” Therefore answer the spirit of despondency thus: “You wish to trouble me with the thought that God is far from me, but I know that, without revealing Himself to me, He is testing my patience and teaching me humility; and the very fact that you, and not another spirit, are attacking me ought to gladden and console me by the thought that your approach signifies (in the absence of other causes) that the other passions have not gained power over me, and that you take up the passion of despondency as the last instrument accessible to you. Therefore, I patiently accept God’s trial and repeat the words of the apostle read on Forgiveness Sunday: now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, and the day is at hand (Rom. 13:11).”

Of course, all this concerns those who, after testing their conscience with prayer, have not discerned in themselves other reasons for the impoverishment of the gift of prayer: they may with hope and in the near future await that joyful clarification of their trials with which God consoled the Apostle Paul: “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9).

We mean, of course, not any miraculous revelation, for to seek such a thing is a matter of ruinous delusion, but we foretell to the ascetic the unveiling of inner perplexities through a subsequent compunctious disposition of the soul, through the unexpected finding of a direct answer to its inquiries in the sacred books, in edifying conversations, or in the events of one’s life. And there is no need to consider oneself to have attained (see Phil. 3:13) a high degree of spirituality in order to understand, in the events of one’s life or in the replacement of oppressive perplexity by joyful doxology, the response of Divine Providence to your seeking.

Thus, I have written to you about various obstacles on the path of drawing near to God; I have set forth various circumstances in which the rays of Divine illumination do not immediately penetrate our soul. This happens to the servants of God, but these trials befall them when they are already able, with diligence, to understand and to bear them. The Lord tempts no one, that is, He does not test beyond one’s strength, as the Apostle Paul assures (see 1 Cor. 10:13). “Blessed is the man who endures temptation, for when he has been tested, he will receive the crown of life, which the Lord has promised to those who love Him” (Jas. 1:12).

I repeat: only those are rejected by God who themselves have rejected Him; but he who struggles, even with heartfelt anguish, is thereby being taught by God, so that, “having been tempted,” he might also “be able to help those who are tempted.” Therefore. give thanks to God, my friend, that you are working through a question not about worldly needs, but about the gift of prayer, for the very desire to know all this has entered your soul not without His gracious help.

My son! do not despise the chastening of the Lord, nor grow despondent when He reproves you. For whom the Lord loves He chastens; and He scourges every son whom He receives. If you endure chastening, God deals with you as with sons (Heb. 12:5–7).

 

Source: Собрание сочинений [Collected Works], Vol. 1, Moscow: Даръ, 2007, pp. 652-659.