Prayer (and Focus)

“The Gospel is very simple, and yet we don’t understand it. I’m not impressed with overactivity in the Church, and I’m not impressed with overactivity within the family. People who run and do literally everything are very useful, but they don’t have time to lay their own spiritual foundation. Sometimes they basically run from themselves. They run around doing things to forget that it is very hard to pray….every other work compared to the work of prayer is nothing. That’s how hard it is to pray. So, we forget prayer and we forget to look within ourselves. Basically, we are active to forget about ourselves.” (Bishop Emilianos, St. Gregory Palamas)

“Even the tiniest advance in spiritual clarity should inspire us to call mindfully for the Lord’s healing mercy each day in order to grow in our liberation from slavery to the paralysis of sin. Prayer is not about pondering ideas, cultivating emotions, or merely mouthing words, but requires being fully present to God from the depths of our souls. We must intentionally devote time and energy to doing so, if we want to gain His healing and strength so that we may rise up from our beds of spiritual paralysis and move forward on the journey to the heavenly kingdom amidst the challenges that we face.” (Fr. Philip LeMasters) 

“Someone once asked a spiritual father: ‘Can I smoke while praying?’ The spiritual father responded: ‘Definitely not.’ But someone else pointed out: ‘You asked the wrong question, you should have asked: “Can I pray while smoking?” and the answer would have been yes, for sure.’ This highlights an important point about focus. When we talk about silence and prayer, it depends where our focus is. Are we focused on the silence, or are we focused on the prayer? Breathing techniques may focus on the silence with prayer in the background, but for us…the focus is the prayer, the focus is not the silence.” (Bishop Emilianos) 

“If we define a life of prayer as one measured only by the subtraction of relationship, service, and creativity, then we will think prayer is something we cannot attain and ought not try for. But prayer is that inmost communion with God that roots and nourishes the entirety of our lives. Prayer is an inward conversation, the yielding of all things we find in the tumble of our days to the God who orders and holds them fast. We need its rooting as surely as the mystics, however different the vocations and expressions such prayer fuels…Christians pray in order to unite themselves to Christ, not to advise Him or persuade Him.” (Sarah Clarkson)

“Unceasing prayer is the highest wisdom; it doesn’t consist in words, in reading aloud or in prostrations, in standing before icons, but requires only that we remember God everywhere and always, undertaking everything with the thought of Him and doing everything to His glory; then our whole life will be a continuous and unceasing prayer. This prayer is necessary for the salvation of every Christian, not just monastics, as the world tends to think. Whoever wants to renounce sin, strives for solitude in his heart with love for Christ, seeks to build a monastery or a hermitage in himself, won’t achieve any of this without the habit of ceaseless prayer.” (St. Seraphim Chichagov)

“We can sit down and say the Jesus Prayer for hours every night, but if our mind is wandering all over the place, there is no profit in that. The purpose of a prayer rule is to offer God our attention morning and evening, to focus on Him.” (Gerontissa Philareti)

“Prayer is not a technique or a trick…prayer must involve the mind and the heart. It is not a matter of repeating many words, Jesus warned us of this error. When we pray we should try to focus on the words we speak, let their meaning fill our heart and mind so that we are uttering them with our whole self.” (Father Spyridon Baily)

“The beginnings of prayer do not reside in a method, in a specific style or form of practice. They are a cry of the heart, a longing of the soul. If you have discovered this longing within yourself, even if its precise shape or source or focus remains un-known to you, then you have within you the seeds from which prayer can grow. But these seeds must be fostered, watered!” (Bishop Irenei Steenberg)

“When we find ourselves struggling with prayer, and feel that it has become dry and lifeless, we are sometimes tempted to stop praying. When our prayer has become a struggle, it is good to remember that God knows our needs, and even knows what we want to say when we don’t seem to know. This is the time we need to just pray without worrying about it. When we find we can’t keep our minds focused…it is perfectly acceptable to…sit quietly…and let silence be our voice.” (Abbot Tryphon)

“When we ask for help from someone who we know can help us, we turn to him earnestly and, with our whole being, beg him, “Please do this for me. I know you can do it.” This means that we are convinced that he can help us, and so we ask him for help. But we often pray to God without attention, mechanically, and we consider that to be prayer, when actually our minds and hearts are not present. Our minds are elsewhere, or we are planning to do something and our thoughts are occupied with it, or our minds dwell on an insult.... Our minds are focused on many things except for prayer. That is why the Lord has said that God is spirit and that, when we pray, we must pray in spirit and in truth. This means that our spirit must be present when we pray.” (Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica)

“Real prayer is communion with God … What is needed is for Him to fill our hearts with His thoughts, and then His desires will become our desires flowing back to Him…As we pray to God, He shifts our focus from ourselves to Him.” (A. W. Pink, Life Application Study Bible, Psalms 77:1-20)

#FatherSpyridonBaily #BishopIreneiSteenberg #AbbotTryphon #ElderThaddeusofVitovnica #AWPink #LifeApplicationStudyBible #GerontissaPhilareti #BishopEmilianos #StGregoryPalamas #FrPhilipLeMaster #SarahClarkson #StSeraphimChichagov