“Man is not only a body but also a soul, and as the body needs food, so the soul needs God and must find spiritual food. The food of the soul is prayer...Because just as a man can’t live without air and food for the body, so he can’t live without Divine food for the soul. He must always be connected with God by unceasing prayer. God created him for a purpose…if we understand why God created him this way, then we learn how to lead a spiritual life. Not seeing the spiritual side, man has violated nature. He didn’t use it properly, he abused it with the rights he has over it, and now nature is taking its revenge. Not having the right understanding he overused it for the body alone; and as a result, all the mistakes wreak havoc on him.” (Protosinghel Petroniu Tănase)
“…for our life to become prayer…to encounter the true, living God, we have to meet our true self. We’re strangers to ourselves. Think about how many masks we put on every day…At work we’re in one role, at home another, with our wife a third,…and so on. We change and adapt to different roles depending on who we’re with. Therefore, authenticity is very important…In other words, we’re not ourselves, and so it’s hard to understand the meaning of prayer when we begin to pray if we constantly deceive, if we don’t know who we are, if we don’t live our own life but rather live someone else’s life. We live the life our father , mother, or someone else wanted, but we don’t live our own life and we aren’t ourselves. And how will we encounter God if we’re inauthentic and don’t know who we are?” (Fr. Charalampos Papadopoulos)
“It is through prayer that we begin to see ourselves. Silent prayer acts as a mirror in which we have opportunities to see aspects of ourselves that we would not normally see when rushing through our day. Prayer becomes the classroom through which God teaches us and reveals many things to us. Prayer needs to be more than just reading out loud prewritten prayers written by someone else—we need to open ourselves to God and face Him. In prayer, we communicate with God, we dialogue with Him, and we listen. We strive always to pray silently, without words, but in the beginning, we may need to use words. As we pray about various matters, God will reveal to us things we need to know. We will see aspects of ourselves that we need to change, and we will be granted understanding as to why we are struggling with certain issues.” (Fr. Joshua Makoul)
“A merciful heart is acquired primarily through prayer. For a believer, prayer is the breath, the “oxygen” of his life. Without regular prayer your soul becomes hardened and insensitive to God and your neighbors, and faith turns into an ideology, even if you do not realize it. However, only prayer performed by the mind in the heart is true, authentic prayer that transforms the human heart and makes it like that of Christ.” (Metropolitan Seraphim Joanta)
“The spiritual path towards true existence is difficult and even tedious. It requires attention and repentance, the willingness to expose ourselves to God in the naked, honest truth. However, this is not a journey we make alone. St. Paul declares, “Christ within us, the hope of glory.” (Col. 1:27) If St. Silouan was correct in declaring, “My brother is my life,” then we must understand that Jesus has said as much of us: “You are my life.” We have no such declaration in the gospel, but we are told, “…that you may dwell in Me, and I in you.” We have been shaped far too deeply in our modern individualist world-view. We hear Jesus saying nothing more than, “I’ll help you from time to time,” and we pray in precisely that manner. We fail to see that the Life-of-Christ-in-me is also living and willing my life (Phil. 2:13). Learning to live in union with Him, in a communion of life and action, is the very heart of the life of grace.” (Father Stephen Freeman)
Comments