Date: 2026-08-15T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Asceticism & Spirituality; John of Kronstadt; Orthodox prayer; the life of prayer; the breathing of the Holy Spirit; the Divine Liturgy; intercession of the saints; Russian Orthodox spirituality; Religion & Spirituality; Christianity / Orthodox; Christian Living / Spiritual Growth
Description: Saint John of Kronstadt called prayer the breathing of the Holy Spirit, and this book is his guide to living in that air. He treats the practical craft — recovering wandering attention, the power of the Name of God, casting every care upon the Lord — and sets it within the Liturgy, where Christ is invisibly present and the saints are asked to pray. Diary pages from his old age close the book with a witness drawn from life.

In the World of Prayer

John of Kronstadt

Royal Archives

2026

Copyright

The modern English translation and the cover design are © 2026 Royal Archives. All rights reserved.

The underlying source text is in the public domain.

Published by Royal Archives

First published 2026

Translated by Royal Archives

Source: В мире молитвы (azbyka.ru; from the pre-revolutionary Russian edition of St John of Kronstadt)

Cover: The Vision to the Youth Bartholomew by Mikhail Nesterov (Russian, 1862–1942), Wikimedia Commons, which is in the public domain.

Edition identifier: urn:royalarchives:v-mire-molitvy:en:1

Introduction

The Author

John of Kronstadt was born on October 19, 1829, in the far northern village of Sura, in the Arkhangelsk province of Russia, and given the name Ivan—John—the son of Ilya Sergiev, a poor church sacristan. The family’s poverty was real and formative; the boy who would one day give away fortunes to the destitute of a naval town grew up knowing hunger and cold himself. He was a slow and struggling pupil at first, until, by his own later account, a sudden gift of clarity came to him in answer to prayer, after which he rose steadily to the top of his class. From the parish school he passed to the seminary at Arkhangelsk, and from there, in 1851, he was sent at government expense to the Theological Academy of Saint Petersburg. His father died while he was a student, and he supported his widowed mother from the small stipend he earned as the Academy’s registrar, a post given him for the beauty of his handwriting.

He completed the Academy’s course in 1855. As a young man he had been drawn toward the monastic life and had dreamed of going out as a missionary to the unconverted peoples of Siberia; he came instead to the conviction that the baptized crowds of a Russian port city could be as spiritually darkened as any who had never heard the Gospel, and that his mission field lay among them. A dream in which he saw himself serving in an unfamiliar cathedral seemed to him an answer. In 1855 he married Elizabeth, the daughter of an archpriest, and on December 12 of that year he was ordained a priest and appointed to Saint Andrew’s Cathedral in Kronstadt—the fortified naval base on Kotlin Island in the Gulf of Finland, guarding the sea approach to the capital. There he would remain, without transfer, for the fifty-two years of his ministry. By mutual consent his marriage was celibate; husband and wife lived, as the tradition remembers it, more as brother and sister, he having given himself to a life of continence and prayer.

Kronstadt in those years held not only sailors and garrison troops but a large population of laborers, transients, and the very poor, many of them banished from the capital across the water. To these Father John gave himself without reserve. He visited the tenements, sat with the drunk and the despairing, and at first simply emptied his pockets to them—sometimes returning home barefoot, having given away his shoes. Recognizing that alms alone could not lift a family from destitution, he founded in 1873 what became the House of Industry, a complex that offered work along with a dormitory, a dining hall, a clinic, a library, and a school, so that the poor might recover both bread and dignity. His fame spread outward from this labor. From the early 1880s reports multiplied of healings granted through his prayer, and pilgrims came to Kronstadt in their thousands; letters and telegrams begging his intercession arrived from across the empire and beyond it. He served the Divine Liturgy daily, and to handle the multitudes who came to him he revived the practice of a general, public confession—an intense, often overwhelming corporate act of repentance—before giving Communion to the crowds.

At the center of it all stood the altar. What sustained this vast public ministry was, on his own testimony, the daily Liturgy and the daily reception of the Holy Mysteries; without them, he wrote, he faded and died spiritually, and by them he was made new. His health began to fail in 1906, but he continued to celebrate the Liturgy until December 10, 1908, and he communicated to the end. He fell asleep in the Lord on December 20, 1908, in Kronstadt, already venerated across Russia and the emigration as a saint. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia glorified him in 1964, and the Moscow Patriarchate glorified him at its Local Council on June 8, 1990; he is commemorated on December 20 and October 19. Both parts of a divided Russian Church thus came, in their turn, to receive him as a saint—a convergence he would surely have read as an answer to the prayer for unity that runs through this very book.

The Work: Occasion and Purpose

In the World of Prayer is a book about the one thing Father John did more constantly than anything else, and to which he attributed everything else. It is best understood not as a formal treatise composed at a desk but as a gathered witness—a thematic anthology of his teaching on prayer, arranged by subject and drawn from his writings, closing with pages from his own diaries and a late sermon preserved from his manuscript. The opening leaf names it plainly: “In the World of Prayer. Selections from His Writings.” Its native voice is therefore the terse, luminous, aphoristic voice of a man recording, day by day, what he saw and felt in the act of praying.

The particular edition on which this English is based carries its occasion in its front matter. It was published by the Committee of Russian Orthodox Youth Abroad as a contribution to the thousandth anniversary of the Baptism of Rus—the millennium of 988, marked in 1988—with a preface signed by Protopresbyter Nikita Chakirov and dated to the spring of 1987. That setting matters. The book took its form in the Russian emigration, among the children and grandchildren of exiles, offered to a scattered people as a means of holding fast to the faith of their homeland at a moment when the practice of that faith was still constrained inside Russia itself. The compiler’s hope, stated in the preface, was that the reader would “shake off the vanity of the world and turn to the essential.” The book was assembled, in other words, less to inform than to summon.

This is the place to distinguish the present work from the book for which Father John is most widely known. His great spiritual diary, My Life in Christ, is the fuller and more famous record—a vast, unsystematic collection of reflections on God, the soul, the Church, and the whole span of the Christian life, which carried his name around the world and has never gone out of print in Orthodox lands. In the World of Prayer is the smaller and more concentrated companion to that diary. Where My Life in Christ ranges across every theme, this book gathers and orders what he had to say about prayer alone, and adds the intimate closing testimony of his final years. The two share a single mind and a single manner—the same short, incandescent entries, the same habit of catching a spiritual truth in the moment of its striking—and a reader who values one will recognize the other at once. But they are not the same book, and this one asks to be read for what it is: a focused, practical, and finally autobiographical guide to the life of prayer, from a priest who lived his whole life inside it.

Argument and Structure

The book moves outward in widening circles, from the inner act of the praying soul to the whole communion of heaven and earth, and then back inward to the diary of a single old man. After the preface, the long opening section sets out the nature, significance, and power of prayer itself. Here Father John lays his foundation: prayer is the proof and exercise of the human person made in God’s image, the pledge of our deification, and at the same time the constant confession of our nothingness before God. It must be offered from the heart and not merely the lips; it must be true, since God is Truth, and free, since God is free. He returns tirelessly to the nearness of God—as close to the soul as the air is to the body—and insists that the whole difficulty and the whole promise of prayer lie in learning to stand consciously in that nearness.

From there the themes unfold. Prayer is the breathing of the Holy Spirit, and the hymns and prayers of the Church are that Spirit’s very air. It is a standing before the Holy Trinity in the company of the angelic hosts. It is carried in words—and so the choice, weight, and truthfulness of words in prayer receive their own treatment. The circle then widens to the Church: prayer in the temple, where Christ Himself is invisibly present in the Liturgy and acts through the priest; and the conciliarity of prayer, Father John’s insistence that Christian prayer is never a private transaction but the act of members of one body who must pray for all and with all. He gives a searching, phrase-by-phrase meditation on the Lord’s Prayer, testing the heart against each petition. He turns to prayer addressed to the Mother of God and to the saints, grounding both in the communion of the one Body and taking care to distinguish the intercession he asks of them from the worship due to God alone. He treats prayer for our neighbor and prayer for the departed, remembered in the bloodless sacrifice of the Liturgy.

The later sections descend into the practical difficulties of the praying life: repentance as the soul of prayer; the discipline of the flesh, since intemperance and a scattered life quench the spirit of prayer faster than anything else; and the darkness, dryness, and assaults of the enemy that every serious pray-er meets, together with the means of overcoming them. Shorter chapters address prayer before icons, the outward actions that accompany prayer, moderation, and—gathering much of the foregoing into a single practice—the Jesus Prayer, the ceaseless invocation of the Name.

The final movement of the book is its most personal. A long section preserves Father John’s own prayerful addresses—outpourings of praise, petition, and thanksgiving, some of them dated to the 1860s, one recording a vision of the Mother of God granted him on the feast of her Dormition in 1898. Then come excerpts from his diary written in extreme old age, in his seventieth and seventy-ninth years, looking back over more than half a century of priesthood with unsparing self-accusation and unfailing gratitude, testifying that the daily Liturgy and Communion re-created and renewed him each day. The book closes with a sermon from July 1907, printed from his manuscript and, the editor notes, until then unknown in print: prayer, he tells his people, is the beginning and end of every virtue, and without it a Christian can no more live than a fish out of water. The treatise thus ends not with a theory of prayer but with the plain testimony of a man caught in the act of it.

Theological and Spiritual Significance

The governing image of the book, and its deepest claim, is that prayer is breath. “Prayer is spiritual breathing; in praying we breathe the Holy Spirit.” This is not a decorative metaphor but a whole theology in miniature. It means that prayer is not one religious activity that a Christian may take up or lay down, but the very respiration of the spiritual life, as continuous and as necessary as the breath of the body—so that to stop praying is, quite literally, to begin to die. It means, too, that prayer is never merely the soul’s own effort reaching upward; it is a participation in the life of God, an inhaling of the Spirit who is already nearer to the one praying than his own words. Father John’s counsel on distraction, dryness, forced and hurried prayer, and the recovery of attention all follows from this: the aim of every technique he offers is simply to bring the heart, consciously and truthfully, into the presence in which it already stands.

Around this center gather the book’s other great themes. One is deification—the ancient conviction that the human person, created from nothing and possessing nothing of his own, is nonetheless made for union with God and can, through grace, be raised to share in the divine life. Prayer, for Father John, is the daily instrument of that ascent. Another is the corporate and priestly character of Christian prayer. Formed at the altar and steeped in the services of the Church, he cannot conceive of prayer as a solitary affair. The Liturgy stands at the heart of the book as the place where Christ Himself acts; the departed are carried there in the Church’s offering; and the whole people are to pray for one another as members of a single body, so that even private prayer is offered “on behalf of all and for all.” His teaching on the invocation of the Mother of God and the saints belongs to this same vision of one communion spanning heaven and earth: he asks their prayers as one asks the prayers of a fellow Christian, and is careful to say that he honors no saint as God. These are the devotional convictions of the Eastern Christian tradition in which he was formed and which he served; where the book touches the questions that have divided Christians on these points, its purpose is not controversy but the upbuilding of trust in the nearness and hearing of God.

What gives the book its peculiar authority is that its author is manifestly writing from within the experience he describes. Again and again he breaks from teaching into confession—“This I say from experience”—and the closing diaries make the whole preceding argument autobiographical. Here is a priest of enormous public renown, sought out for miracles by an empire, recording in old age that without daily Communion he weakens and dies, that invisible enemies fight him hardest at the altar, that he has sinned every day for seventy years and been forgiven every day. The book’s significance is finally of that order: it is not only instruction in prayer but the disclosed inner life of a man the Church came to receive as a saint, offered as evidence that the things he teaches can in fact be lived.

Reception and Influence

Father John was a public figure of the first rank in the last decades of imperial Russia, known throughout the country and among Russians abroad long before any formal act of the Church. His diary My Life in Christ was translated and read well beyond Orthodox circles, and his reputation as a pastor, almsgiver, and wonderworker made him, in the memory of the Church, a model of the parish priesthood—a secular clergyman, not a monk, who reached the heights of the spiritual life in the midst of an ordinary city cure. That example is part of the point of a book like this one: the life of ceaseless prayer it describes is set forth not as the preserve of the cloister but as the vocation of any Christian, and supremely of any priest.

His veneration outran the institutional recognition of it. Honored as a saint at his death in 1908, he was formally glorified first by the Russian Church Outside of Russia in 1964 and then by the Moscow Patriarchate in 1990—the two glorifications marking, in their way, the long separation and eventual reconciliation of a Church divided by revolution and exile. The very edition behind this translation, produced in the emigration for the millennium of Russian Christianity, is a small monument to that history: the children of the exiles reaching back through Father John’s words to the faith of their homeland.

The Text and This Edition

This is a fresh, modern English translation of In the World of Prayer (В мире молитвы), made directly from the Russian. The base text is the public-domain Russian edition available through azbyka.ru, descending from the pre-revolutionary printings of Father John’s works and gathered, in the form translated here, by the Committee of Russian Orthodox Youth Abroad for the 1988 millennium of the Baptism of Rus. The English is rendered from that Russian throughout; it is not a parallel or bilingual edition, and it is not a reprint of any earlier English version.

A few conventions of this edition are worth noting. The author is named as the Church has always received him—John of Kronstadt, with his sanctity recorded in a separate designation rather than folded into the attribution—and those who carried the text into English are credited as translators, never as authors. The scriptural quotations have been translated from Father John’s own citations, which follow the Slavonic and Synodal Bible he prayed and preached from, rather than being conformed to any standard English Bible; where an existing English phrasing would have distorted his meaning, the Russian has been followed instead. The theologically and liturgically weighted passages—those on the divine Mystery of the Eucharist, on partaking of the most pure and life-giving Mysteries, on Christ’s invisible presence and action in the Liturgy, and on the sacrifice offered for the departed—were collated with particular care so that their sense is preserved intact. Citations of Scripture and of the book’s own divisions are given in modern Arabic-numeral style for the reader’s convenience. Chapter titles and the internal numbering of the sections follow the arrangement of the source. The aim throughout has been an English that is clear and readable to a Christian of any tradition while keeping faith with the fervor, the concreteness, and the unmistakable voice of the original.

Suggestions for Reading

This is not a book to be read straight through at speed. Like the diary from which its manner descends, it is made of short, self-contained entries, each meant to be weighed rather than skimmed; a reader will gain more from a handful of sections held in the mind through a day than from many pages hurried over—which is, in fact, exactly the counsel Father John gives about prayer itself. Those chiefly interested in the practice of prayer may begin with the opening section on its nature and power and with the chapters on prayer in the Church and the Jesus Prayer. Those who wish first to meet the man may turn to the closing diaries and prayerful addresses, and then read the teaching in the light of the life. Newcomers to the Eastern Christian devotional world will find here its characteristic emphases—the Liturgy, the Mother of God and the saints, unceasing invocation of the Name—set out warmly and from within; they are best received, in the first place, simply as one believer’s testimony to the nearness of God, which is the burden of the whole book.

In the World of Prayer

In the World of Prayer. Selections from His Writings

Preface

This book In the World of Prayer was published by the Committee of Russian Orthodox Youth Abroad as the next contribution to the one-thousandth anniversary of the Holy Baptism of the Russian People.

The All-Russian Intercessor and Wonderworker, the Righteous Holy Father John of Kronstadt, the Wonderworker, was an example of Orthodox priesthood not only in Russia but throughout the entire world. Through his prayer, an ocean of miracles poured forth, and all who came to him were visited by God’s mercy and grace.

The year 1988 is a year that is both historical and unique. And for each of us it is a year of testing our conscience—are we faithful to Holy Patristic Orthodoxy and do we place foremost the fulfillment of Christ’s commandments and the preservation of purity and faithfulness to the Truth. Reading this book, we see what we ought to be, and may this publication bring benefit to each of us and compel us to shake off the vanity of the world and turn to the essential—listening to and keeping and fulfilling the one thing needful—the words of Eternal Life from the Holy Gospel. May the Lord and the Queen of Heaven and the Righteous Holy Father John of Kronstadt, the Wonderworker, be our helpers and teachers in this work.

Protopresbyter Nikita Chakirov

April 23 – May 6, 1987 [Old Style, corresponding to May 6-19, 1987 New Style], Saint Great-Martyr George the Victorious and Queen Alexandra

On the Nature, Significance, and Power of Prayer

1. Prayer is a proof of my rational person, of my being made in God’s image, a pledge of my future deification and blessedness. I am created from nothing; I am nothing before God, having nothing of my own; yet I, by His mercy, am a person—I have reason, a heart, a free will—and through my reason and freedom, I can through heartfelt turning to Him gradually increase within myself His infinite kingdom, gradually multiply more and more within myself His gifts, draw from Him as from an ever-flowing inexhaustible Source every spiritual and bodily good, especially spiritual good. Prayer teaches me that I am the image of God, that with humble and grateful disposition of my soul before God, with my free will, I, infinitely multiplying the spiritual gifts of God, can thus in infinity perfect myself and infinitely increase my god-likeness, my heavenly blessedness to which I am predestined. O! Prayer is a sign of my great dignity, with which my Creator has honored me. But at the same time it reminds me both of my nothingness (from nothing am I, and I have nothing of my own, and therefore I ask God for all things), and of my highest dignity (I am God’s image, I am deified, I can be called the friend of God, as Abraham the father of believers, only if I believe steadfastly in God’s existence, goodness, and omnipotence, and become like Him in this life through deeds of love and mercy).

2. In prayer, petition is against our proud flesh, which attributes everything to itself; thanksgiving is against the insensitivity of our flesh to God’s innumerable benefits; praise is against the carnal person who seeks glory only for himself.

3. God is Truth: and my prayer must be true as is my life. God is Light: and my prayer must be brought forth in the light of mind and heart; God is Fire: and my prayer, as is my life, must burn with flame; God is all-free: and my prayer must be the free outpouring of my heart. What riches of the human spirit: let one but think from the heart of God, let one but desire heartfelt union with God, and He is immediately with you—neither the walls of a house nor prison bars, neither mountains nor chasms can hinder this. Daring conversation of creature with Creator, reverent standing of the soul before Him as before the King and Life-giver who gives life to all; forgetting for the soul of all that surrounds us, food of the soul, air and light, life-giving warmth, purification from sins, Christ’s good yoke, His light burden.

4. Prayer is a constant feeling (awareness) of my spiritual weakness or poverty, sanctification of the soul, a foretaste of future blessedness, angelic blessedness, heavenly rain that refreshes, waters, and makes fruitful the earth of the soul, strength and fortitude of soul and body, refreshment and purification of the mental air, enlightenment of the face, joy of spirit, a golden link binding creature to Creator, boldness and courage in all sorrows and temptations of life, success in deeds, equality with angels, the strengthening of faith, hope, and love. Prayer is correction of life, mother of heartfelt contrition and tears; a strong impulse to deeds of mercy; the safety of life: the destruction of the fear of death; contempt for earthly treasures, a longing for heavenly goods, expectation of the universal Judge, the common resurrection and the life of the age to come; intense effort to escape from eternal torment; constant seeking of mercy and forgiveness from the Lord; walking before the eyes of God; blessed dissolution before the all-creating and all-sustaining Creator; living water of the soul; prayer—the embrace in the heart of all people with love; the descent of heaven into the soul; the embrace in the heart of the All-Holy Trinity, as it is written, “We will come to him and make our dwelling with him” (Jn 14:23).

5. Prayer is a constant awareness of my spiritual poverty and weakness, contemplation within myself, in people, and in nature of the works of God’s wisdom, goodness, and omnipotent power, prayer is a constant grateful disposition.

6. When praying, strive with all your might to feel in your heart the truth and power of prayer, be nourished by it as by incorruptible food, water your heart with it as with dew, warm yourself with it as with gracious fire.

7. In prayer and in every deed of your life, avoid suspicion and doubt and diabolical fantasy. Let your soul’s eye be simple, so that your whole prayer, your whole life and deeds may be filled with light.

8. As long as we stand in fervent prayer, so long is there calm and warmth and ease and light in the soul; for then we are with God and in God; but the moment we cease from prayer, then temptations come, various sorrows. O blessed time of prayer!

9. When praying, we must certainly take our heart into our power and turn it toward the Lord. It must not be cold, deceitful, unfaithful, double-minded. Otherwise, what benefit is our prayer, our worship? It is good to hear from the Lord the angry voice: “These people draw near to Me with their mouth and honor Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me” (Mt 15:8). Therefore, let us not stand in the church with a soul that is slothful, but let each be burning in spirit, serving the Lord. And people do not much value the services we render with coldness and out of habit. But God desires exactly our heart. “My son, give me your heart” (Prov 23:26); for the heart is the chief thing in a person, their life; more than that—our heart is the person themselves. Therefore, whoever does not pray or serve God with their heart—it is as if they do not pray at all, for then only their body prays, which without the soul is the same as earth. Remember that standing in prayer, you stand before God who knows the hearts of all. Therefore your prayer must be, so to speak, entirely spirit, entirely reason.

10. When praying, be like a babbling child, merging into one spirit with the spirit of the prayer you are uttering. Consider yourself as nothing, accept prayers as a great gift of God. Utterly renounce carnal reasoning and do not listen to it, for carnal “reason puffs up” (1Cor 8:1)—it doubts, fantasizes, blasphemes. If during or outside prayer the enemy troubles your soul with certain blasphemies or abominations, do not despair because of them, but say firmly in your heart: it is for the purification from these and similar sins that our Lord Jesus Christ came to earth; it was in these and similar spiritual weaknesses that the Most Merciful came to help us; and when you say these words with faith, your heart will immediately find peace, for the Lord will purify your heart. Generally, do not despair over any sin as you would over a temptation, but hope in the Savior. O boundless mercy of God! O greatest service of the God-man to us sinners! Even now He helps us with love, cleansing and saving us. Therefore let the power of the enemy be put to shame.

11. The thoughts of a person have an extremely strong influence on the state and disposition of their heart and actions; therefore, so that the heart may be pure, good, calm, and the disposition of the will good and pious, you must purify your thoughts through prayer, reading Holy Scripture and the works of holy Fathers, and reflection on the transience and swift passing and disappearance of earthly pleasures.

12. As close to you as your thought, as close to your heart as faith, so close is God to you; and the more vivid and firm your thought of God, the more vivid your faith and knowledge of your own weakness and nothingness and sense of need for God, the nearer He is. Or as close to the body as the air is, so close is God to the soul. For God is, so to speak, spiritual air, which all Angels breathe, the souls of saints, and the souls of people who live with particular piety. You cannot live without God for a single minute, and truly, each minute you live by Him: “For in him we live and move and have our being” (Act 17:28).

13. The heart’s insensitivity to the truth of words in prayer comes from heartfelt unbelief and lack of feeling one’s sinfulness, and this in turn flows from a hidden feeling of pride. By the measure of your feelings in prayer, a person knows whether they are proud or humble: the more sensitive and fervent the prayer, the more humble they are; the more insensitive, the prouder.

14. Strive to arrive at childlike simplicity in your dealings with people and in prayer to God. Simplicity is the greatest good and dignity of a person. God is perfectly simple because He is perfectly spiritual, perfectly good. And let your soul not be divided between good and evil.

15. Learn to pray, compel yourself to prayer: at first it will be difficult, but the more you compel yourself, the easier it will become; yet at first you must always compel yourself.

16. When you pray, imagine that as though there were only God alone before you, Three in One, and beside Him nothing else existed. Imagine that God is in the world as the soul is in the body, though infinitely higher than it and not confined by it; your body is small, and one small soul pervades all of it. But the world is vast. God is infinitely great, and throughout all creation God fills everything— present everywhere and filling all things.

17. The Savior deigned to become incarnate not only to save us when sins and passions have overcome us, when we are already entangled by them, but also to save us by our prayer even when sin and passion are just beginning to assault us, when they are fighting us. Do not sleep and let your hands fall in despair when passions fight you, but at that very time be on guard, watch, and pray to Christ that He not allow us to fall into sin. A house should not be saved from fire when the flames have already spread everywhere, but especially when the fire is just beginning. So it is with the soul. The soul is a house, passions are fire. “Give no place to the devil” (Eph 4:27).

18. The deceitful one strives to scatter prayer like a heap of sand, to make words like dry sand without connection, without moisture—that is, without warmth of heart. Prayer is sometimes a house built on sand, sometimes a house built on rock. Those who pray without faith, distractedly, with coldness, build on sand—such prayer crumbles on its own and brings no benefit to those who pray; those who build on rock are those who throughout the entire prayer keep their eyes fixed on the Lord and pray to Him as to one living, speaking face to face with them.

19. Let us measure the worth of our prayer by human faith and the quality of our relationships with people. What are we like with people? Sometimes we express our requests, praises, gratitude to them coldly, without heartfelt participation, out of duty or propriety, or we do something for them; sometimes with warmth, with heartfelt participation, with love; or sometimes with pretense, sometimes with sincerity. We are the same and not the same with God! We must always express to God with our whole heart both praise and thanksgiving and petition; we must always with our whole heart do every deed before Him; we must always with our whole heart love Him and hope in Him.

20. Can one pray hurriedly without harming one’s prayer? One can—those who have learned inner prayer with a pure heart. In prayer, the heart must sincerely desire what it is asking for; it must feel the truth of what it is saying—and a pure heart has this, as it were, in its nature. Therefore it can pray even hurriedly and yet please God, for haste does not harm the truth (sincerity) of prayer. But those who have not yet attained heartfelt prayer must pray slowly, waiting for the appropriate echo in the heart of each word of the prayer. And this is not always quickly given to one unaccustomed to prayer’s contemplation. Therefore for such people, the rare utterance of the words of prayer must be an absolute rule. Wait until each word resonates in the heart with its proper echo.

21. As a wicked person coming with a request to a good, meek, and humble person tries to be like that person for better success of their petition, so a Christian, approaching God with prayer to the Lord or to His Pure Mother or to Angels or to Saints—for the success of their prayer must, as far as possible, become like the Lord Himself or His Pure Mother or the Angels or the Saints. And herein lies the mystery of drawing near and the swift hearing of our prayers.

22. Give to God, you who pray, your heart—that loving, sincere heart with which you love your children, your parents, your benefactors, your friends, in which you feel the sweetness of unfeigned, pure love.

23. Sometimes in a prolonged prayer only a few moments are truly pleasing to God and constitute true prayer and true worship of God. The main thing in prayer is closeness of the heart to God, witnessed by the sweetness of God’s presence in the soul.

24. Prayer done by force develops hypocrisy, makes one incapable of any work that requires thought, and makes a person sluggish in everything, even in fulfilling one’s duties. This should convince all those who pray thus to correct their prayer. One must pray willingly, with energy from the heart. Do not pray to God from sorrow, from necessity (by force)—“God loves a cheerful giver” (2Cor 9:7).

25. The greatest gift of God, which we need above all else and which we receive most often from God as a result of our prayer, is peace of heart, as the Savior says: “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Mt 11:28). And rejoice and consider yourselves rich, having everything, when you receive peace.

26. When asking the Lord or the Pure Mother of God or Angels or saints, you must have such faith as the centurion of Capernaum had. He believed that just as his soldiers listened to him and carried out his words, so even more by the almighty word of the All-good Lord would his request be fulfilled. If creatures with their limited power did what he asked of them, will not the Master Himself fulfill with His almighty power the prayers of His servants who turn to Him with faith and hope? Will not the Pure Mother of God, the Angels, and the holy people—faithful and strong in grace and intercession with God, His servants—fulfill our prayers brought with faith, hope, and love? Truly, with the centurion I believe that if I ask some saint, distinguishing none: give me this—and he will give it; come to me to help—and he will come; do this—and he will do it. This is the simple and strong faith one must have.

27. Outer prayer often happens at the expense of inner prayer, and inner prayer at the expense of outer prayer; that is, if I pray with my lips or read, many words do not settle on my heart, I am divided, I am a hypocrite: my lips say one thing while my heart believes another; my lips speak truth but my heartfelt disposition does not agree with the words of prayer. But if I pray inwardly, with the heart, then not paying attention to the utterance of words, I concentrate on their content and power, gradually training my heart to the truth, entering into that very disposition of spirit in which the prayer words were written, and thus little by little I learn to pray in spirit and truth, according to the words of eternal Truth: he who worships must worship in spirit and truth. When a person prays outwardly, aloud, it is not always possible to follow all the movements of the heart, which are too swift; therefore of necessity one must attend to the utterance, the external form of the word. Thus many readers who read quickly acquire completely false prayer: with their lips they seem as if they pray, they appear as pious, but the heart sleeps and knows not what the lips are saying. This happens because they hurry and do not think with their heart about what they are saying. One must pray for them as they pray for us; they pray for us with the words of holy people, and we must pray for them—we must pray that their words reach their heart and breathe with its warmth.

28. All who come to serve the Lord in prayer, learn to be like Him—meek, humble, true in heart; have no deceit in your soul, no double-heartedness, do not be cold; try to have His Spirit, for whoever does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to Him—and the Lord seeks in us one who is like Himself, something to which His grace can attach itself. Remember that no word uttered in prayer is ever wasted if it comes from the heart: each word the Lord hears and each word is on His scales. We sometimes think our words only beat the air in vain, sound like a voice crying in the wilderness: no. You must remember that the Lord understands us in prayer, if I may so say—our words—just as perfect pray-ers understand themselves, for man is the image of God. The Lord responds to every desire of the heart, whether expressed in words or not.

29. For a Christian to live a Christian life and not have the life of the spirit completely extinguished in him, he needs home prayer and public prayer, he needs to attend with faith, understanding, and earnestness the worship in the church, as it is necessary to pour oil into a lamp so it burns and does not go out; and since sincere, fervent prayer comes with temperance, then for maintaining Christian life or the fervor of faith, hope, and love, temperance and fasting are necessary. Nothing so quickly extinguishes the spirit of faith in us as intemperance, gluttony, and excess and a scattered, loose life. I fade, I die spiritually when I do not serve in the temple for a whole week, and I burn, I come alive in soul and heart when I serve, compelling myself to prayer that is not formal but truly spiritual, sincere, fervent.

30. Look firmly at God with the eyes of your heart, and during His contemplation ask what you will in the name of Jesus Christ—and it will be done for you. God will be everything to you in a single moment, for He is simple Being, beyond all time and space, and in the moment of your faith, your heartfelt union with Him, He will accomplish for you all that you need for the salvation of yourself and your neighbor, and you will at that moment be yourself a partaker of Godhood through the most sincere communion with Him: “I said, ‘You are gods’” (Ps 81:6). As there will be no gap between God and you at that moment, so too there will be no gap between your word and its fulfillment; you will speak—and it will immediately come to pass, as God spoke and it came to be, He commanded and it was created. This applies both to the Mysteries and generally to spiritual prayer. Yet in the Mysteries all is accomplished because of the grace of the priesthood with which the priest is clothed, because of the Very High Priest—Christ. Whose image the priest bears on himself—therefore even though he bears this office unworthily, even though he is suspicious, little-faithful or mistrustful, nonetheless the Mystery of God is accomplished quickly, in a moment.

31. They say: we quickly grow tired of praying. Why? Because you do not vividly picture the Lord before yourselves—as standing at your right hand. Look at Him constantly with the eyes of your heart, and then you will stand the whole night in prayer and not grow weary. What do I say—a night! You will stand three days and three nights and not grow weary. Remember the pillar-dwellers. They stood for many years in a prayerful disposition of spirit on a pillar and conquered their flesh, which like yours was also inclined to sloth. And you find a few hours of public prayer burdensome, even one hour.

Prayer – Breath of the Holy Spirit

32. Prayer is spiritual breathing; in praying we breathe the Holy Spirit: “praying in the Holy Spirit” (Juda 1:20). Therefore all church prayers are the breath of the Holy Spirit, as it were spiritual air and at the same time light, spiritual fire, spiritual food and spiritual clothing.

33. In the prayers and hymns of the church, throughout their entire scope, the Spirit of truth moves. All that comes into the head as contradicting and blaspheming—this is from the devil, the father of lies, the slanderer; prayers and hymns are the breath of the Holy Spirit.

34. We have felt in our heart during prayer or while reading God’s word and other books of sacred content (and sometimes even secular ones—of good intention, where perhaps some event is described that shows the working of God’s Providence over people), or in pious conversations—“a still, small voice”, so that over your body it is as though electricity ran. This is the Lord visiting you. “A still, small voice—and there the Lord” (1King 19:12).

35. “You know not… that I am in the Father and the Father in me” (Jn 14:9-10). Do you not know that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are in you during prayer and you are in them?

36. Prayer is the soul’s breathing, as air is natural breathing of the body. We breathe the Holy Spirit. You cannot say a single word of prayer from your whole heart without the Holy Spirit. When praying, mouth to mouth with the Lord you speak, and if you have open the lips of your heart in faith and love, at the same time you breathe in, as it were, from Him the spiritual blessings you seek through the Holy Spirit.

37. When you come to prayer, burdened by many sins and held by despair, begin to pray with hope, with a spirit ablaze, remember then that God’s Spirit Himself helps us in our weaknesses, interceding for us with groanings too deep for words. When you remember with faith this action of God’s Spirit in us, then tears of compunction will flow from your eyes, and in your heart you will sense peace, sweetness, justification, and joy in the Holy Spirit; your heart will cry out with the words of the heart: Abba, Father!

Prayer – Standing Before the Holy Trinity and the Multitude of Heavenly Powers

38. When you call upon God in prayer—three in one—remember that you are calling upon the beginningless Father of all creation, Angels and people; those who call upon you are filled with amazement by all the Powers of heaven and look upon you with love because you with faith, love, and proper reverence call upon the common Creator and Lord of them and us, whom they infinitely love and before whom they hold great reverence. O what great happiness and blessedness, what greatness, what dignity to call upon the eternal Father! Cherish continually and unchangeably this highest happiness, this blessedness which the infinite goodness of your God has granted you, and do not forget yourself during your prayer. God listens to you, the Angels listen and the holy people of God listen. – February 26, 1864. I wept while writing these lines.

39. When you are alone praying and your spirit becomes discouraged and you find yourself grieved and oppressed by loneliness, remember then, as always, that upon you the three-in-one God gazes with eyes brighter than the sun, all the holy angels, your guardian Angel, and the holy people of God. Truly, for they are all one in God, and where God is, there they are too. Where the sun is, there all its rays are directed. Understand what is being said. Always pray with a burning heart, and for that never overeat and never get drunk. Remember with whom you are speaking! People often forget with whom they speak in prayer, who is the witness of their prayer. They forget that they speak with the Awake and All-seeing, that your prayer is witnessed by all the Powers of heaven and the holy people of God.

40. When you pray to the Ruler or to some saint, vividly imagine that you are a member of the Church in which the Ruler is the chief cornerstone, the principal leader of spiritual edification (Akathist to the Mother of God, Icon 10), and know that you are closely bound inwardly to all the heavenly dwellers as a stone of the building, though soft and not hard. Understanding this, you will understand why prayers reach the saints so easily: for we are all under one Head—Christ (Eph 1:22) and all are quickened by one Spirit of God.

41. At the end of your home prayers, morning and evening, call upon the holy patriarchs, prophets, apostles, hierarchs, martyrs, confessors, ascetics, abstainers, and holy workers—so that, seeing in them the fulfillment of every virtue, you yourself may become an imitator of every virtue. From the patriarchs learn childlike faith and obedience to the Lord; from the prophets and apostles—zeal for God’s glory and for the salvation of human souls; from the hierarchs—zeal to preach God’s word and generally through writings to contribute to the possible glorification of God’s name, the strengthening of faith, hope, and love in Christians; from the martyrs and confessors—steadfastness for the faith and piety before unbelieving and impious people; from the ascetics—the crucifixion of the flesh with its passions and desires, prayer, and God-mindedness; from the physicians without fee—freedom from possession and free aid to those in need.

The Word in Prayer

42. The word even in our lips is already creative, forming articulate sounds; with the word goes the living spirit of the person, not separated from thought and word. See how by its very nature the word is creative even in us. Why then are we little-faithful and distrustful of the creative power of the word, for example in prayer—that this word service will certainly bring down to us the mercy of the Lord? So the word constantly creates flesh: articulate sounds, and our writings or books—are they not flesh in which the word is clothed? And we have become so accustomed and familiar with this that it seems to us completely unworthy of special attention. Not only the nature of the Godhead, but by His gift the nature of living creatures—is creative under God’s guidance: “Be fruitful and multiply” (Gen 1:28). The souls of living creatures create for themselves bodies under God’s guidance (spider, bee, worm). Thus people given the power from God continue to grow and multiply on earth; thus people and animals create all that is necessary for life, especially people—that most inventive of creatures, which astounds with its endless creativity in all the arts. Since the Word—the Creator is omnipresent, then everywhere, though not infinitely, His creations are spread out, and everywhere He creates and, if needed, transforms.

43. God’s Word is the same as God Himself. Therefore believe unreservedly in every word of the Lord; God’s word is deed; and your word must be deed; therefore having given your word, certainly fulfill it; therefore in prayer our words must be deed and truth, not falsehood, not pretense, not flattery. So too in all of life.

44. Always in prayer firmly believe and remember that each thought of yours and each word of yours can, certainly can be deed. “Not one word fails with God” (Lk 1:37). And “He who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him” (1Cor 6:17). Therefore your word also will not fail. “All things are possible to him who believes” (Mk 9:23). Guard your word: the word is precious. “For every idle word people will give account in the day of judgment” (Mt 12:36).

45. When praying, listen intently to the words of prayer and feel them in your heart. Do not turn your mind from them to any other thought. When praying during worship, the performance of Mysteries and prayers for various occasions, firmly rely on the very words of church prayers, believing that not one word is placed in vain, each has its power, that in each word God Himself, three in one, is present, everywhere existing and filling all things; think: I am nothing, the Lord accomplishes all. Further think: I speak—the God-Word in me speaks. I have nothing to worry about. “All your anxiety cast upon him, because he cares for you” (1Pet 5:7).

46. As in God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are inseparable, so in prayer and in our life thought, word, and deed must also be inseparable. Do you ask something of God? Believe that it will be, it will come to pass according to your prayer, as God wills; do you read God’s word? Believe that all that is spoken in it was, is, and will be, and came to pass, comes to pass, and will come to pass. Thus speak, thus read, thus pray. What a great thing is the word! What a great thing is the thinking, speaking, and acting soul—the image and likeness of the almighty Trinity! Human being! Know yourself, who you are, and conduct yourself in accordance with your dignity.

47. When you doubt the fulfillment or accomplishment of a prayer word, remember that the nature of the word is accomplishment, effectiveness, and that the Holy Spirit, teaching us to pray “as we ought” (Rom 8:26), is and is called the Accomplisher Himself. He it is who accomplishes our prayer (accomplished by the Spirit). Remember that the word is power, “no word fails with God” (Lk 1:37). God’s word “does not return empty” (Is 55:11), but like rain or light, waters the earth of our hearts and gives seed to the sower. And of people they say: he has extraordinary power of speech. You see, the word is power, spirit, life.

48. God is Spirit, simple Being. And how does spirit manifest itself? Through thought, word, and deed. Therefore God, as simple Being, does not consist of a series or multitude of thoughts or words or creations, but He is all in one simple thought—God-Trinity, or in one simple word—Trinity, or in three Persons united in one. Yet He is also wholly in all that exists; He pervades all, fills all with Himself. For example, you read a prayer, and He is wholly in each word, as Holy Fire, penetrating each word: each one can experience this if you pray sincerely, earnestly, with faith and love. But especially He is wholly in the names that belong to Him: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit or Trinity, or Lord, O God, or O Lord, God of Hosts; O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God; O Holy Spirit; O Heavenly King, Comforter, Spirit of Truth, and in His other names. Angels and saints too are close to us in their names, as their names are close to us and as our faith in them is—to our heart; for they are nothing other than God’s breaths and are one spirit with the Lord.

49. Each word of Holy Scripture, each word of the Divine Liturgy, matins and vespers, each word of the sacred-mysterious prayers and prayer-texts has within itself a corresponding force contained in it, like the sign of the precious and life-giving cross. Such grace belongs to each church word because of the incarnate Word of God who dwells in the Church, who is the Head of the Church. And every true good word has a corresponding force because of the omnipresent simple Word of God. With what attention and reverence must each word be uttered, with what faith! For the Word is the Creator Himself—God, and by the Word all things were brought from non-being into being.

50. Word-being! Remember that you have your beginning from the word of the All-creator, and in union (through faith) with the creative Word, through faith, you yourself can be a creator of things material and spiritual. Believe that with your faith in the creative Word of the Father and your word will never return to you empty, powerless (when, for example, you pray to the Benefactor—God according to the guidance of the holy Church or according to the teaching of the Lord), but will bring you the needed gift; believe that with faith in the creative Word, your word in the temple during worship, during the performance of Mysteries in homes will not be without success, during study will build the minds and hearts of those who listen to you.

51. Firmly believe in the accomplishment of every word, especially uttered during prayer, remembering that the author of the word is the God-Word, that God Himself, worshipped in Trinity, expresses Himself through three words or names: Father, Word, and Holy Spirit; that every word corresponds to being, or every word can be being and deed. Reverently treat the word and value it. Remember that as the hypostatic Word of God—the Son of God is always united with the Father and the Holy Spirit, so in Holy Scripture or in prayer or in the writings of the wise Fathers, the Father participates through His omnipresence as supreme Reason, His creative Word, and the Accomplisher Holy Spirit. Therefore no word is empty, but must have its power, and woe to those who speak idly, for they will give account for idle speech. “Not one word fails with God” (Lk 1:37); this is generally the property of the word—its strength and perfection. Such it must be in the mouths of people.

Prayer in the Church

52. I love to pray in the Temple of God, especially in the holy altar, at the throne or at the table of sacrifice of God, because I am wondrously transformed in the temple by God’s grace; in a prayer of repentance and compunction of heart the thorny bonds of passions fall from my soul, and it becomes so light for me; all the fascination, all the spiritual delusion of passions disappears, and it is as though I die to the world, and the world with all its goods dies for me; I come alive in God and for God, for God alone, and I am wholly penetrated by Him and become one spirit with Him; I become like a child comforted on the knees of a mother; my heart is then full of heavenly, sweet peace; my soul is illuminated by heavenly light; you see everything clearly, you look at everything rightly, toward all you feel friendship and love, even toward enemies, and you willingly forgive and pardon them. O how blessed is a soul with God! The Church is truly an earthly paradise.

53. O Holy Temple! How good, how sweet it is to pray in you! For where is fervent prayer if not within your walls before God’s throne and before the face of Him who sits upon it! Truly, the soul melts from the compunction of prayer, and tears flow down like water. It is sweet to pray for all.

54. During worship, during the performance of all Mysteries and prayers, be trusting as a child in relation to your parents. Remember what great Fathers, what luminaries of the universe, illuminated by the Holy Spirit, guide you. Like a child, be simple and trusting, not doubting in God’s work. Cast all your sorrow on the Lord, and be yourself entirely free from care. “Do not worry about how or what you will say… for it is not you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you” (Mt 10:19-20). Long ago the Lord took this care from us, having taught our spirit-bearing Fathers through the Holy Spirit what to say to the Lord during worship, the performance of Mysteries, and in various circumstances of human life that require prayer calling down heavenly blessing. It should be easy for us to pray. Only the enemy troubles us. But what is his troubling if our heart is established in the Lord! The trouble is if we are not in God, if we do not have firm faith in us, if we have bound ourselves with attachments to worldly things, if our mind is proud and haughty—then even in the holiest, most blameless work of worship, the performance and receiving of the Holy Mysteries, the devil will greatly hinder us.

55. In worship the Church points us to the objects or needs about which we ought to ask God’s mercy with unshakeable hope of obtaining them, because we ask in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ who said: “whatever you ask the Father in my name, he will do it, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son” (Jn 14:13).

56. Standing in the temple, be entirely as if in heaven with God; for in the temple everything is heavenly… Here common prayer is about nothing earthly, but about—the salvation of the soul, forgiveness of sins, advancement in virtue, and the bestowal of immortality on our souls—prayer for all. Every worldly concern must be set aside when entering the temple and standing in it.

57. The Liturgy is a vivid portrayal in persons, various things, words, and actions of the birth, life, teaching, commandments, miracles and prophecies, the sufferings, crucifixion on the cross, death, resurrection, and ascension to heaven of the Leader of our faith, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only-begotten. During the Liturgy He Himself invisibly is present, He Himself acts, and He accomplishes all through the priest and deacon, who are only His instruments.

58. You hear in the church mainly the voices of the clergy, readers, and singers singing about mercy upon us. What does this mean? It means that all of us, as many as we are in the Temple of God, by our sins are worthy of God’s punishments, and that first and foremost, upon entering the temple, we must remember that we are sinners, that we have come to the Lord of heaven and earth, the Creator and Benefactor, angered daily and every hour by our unrighteousness, to beseech Him, each for himself and even—by Christian love—for others, for mercy. Prayers for mercy are sometimes great, sometimes small, sometimes doubled. Since in the church there is not one superfluous word, then when the double litany is sung, one must pray to God with particular strength from the very depths of the soul, from the most broken heart, as is said at the beginning of the opening litany: we all say from all our soul and from all our thought. At this time you must set aside even the slightest coldness, the slightest inattention of the heart, and burning with humble spirit, standing in complete attention, raise to the Creator the most fervent prayer for mercy from us sinners. But what do we see when the clergy exclaim and the singers sing the double litany and the great litany? For the most part—ordinary thoughtlessness and indifference of those who pray.

59. If your brother does something incorrectly or somewhat carelessly during the service, do not become irritated either inwardly or outwardly against him, but magnanimously descend to his error, remembering that you yourself make many, many mistakes in your life, that you yourself are a person with all weaknesses, that God is patient and very merciful and forgives you and all of us countless wrongs. Recall the words from the Lord’s Prayer: and forgive us our debts as we also forgive our debtors. These words should always remind us that we ourselves are at all times great debtors, great sinners before God, and that remembering this, we should humble ourselves in the depths of our heart and not be too strict with the wrongs of brothers, who are like us and weak—so that as we do not judge ourselves strictly, so we do not judge strictly of others, for our brothers are members of us, as it were we ourselves. Irritability of temperament comes from lack of self-knowledge, from pride, and from the fact that we do not reflect on the strong corruption of our nature and have learned too little of the meek and humble Jesus.

60. Those who go to worship having eaten beforehand voluntarily place on themselves an unnecessary and harmful burden and in advance silence their heart for prayer, blocking access to it of holy thoughts and holy feelings. One must be extremely careful not to eat before worship. You must remember that the Kingdom of God “is not food and drink” (Rom 14:17)—that is, God cannot reign in a heart weighed down by gluttony and drink.

61. To the glory of the most holy name of the Lord Jesus Christ and the Ruler Mother of God. I have felt countless times in my heart that after receiving the Holy Mysteries or after earnest home prayer, ordinary or for some sin, passion, and sorrow, the Lord, by the prayers of the Ruler, or the Ruler Herself by the goodness of the Lord, has given me, as it were, a new spirit, pure, good, magnificent, bright, wise, gracious, instead of an unclean, dejected, sluggish, despondent, dark, dull, evil one. I have changed many times with wonderful, great changes, to my own astonishment and often that of others. Glory to your power, Lord! Glory to your goodness, Lord! Glory to your mercies, Lord, which you show upon me, a sinner!

62. Educated and uneducated youth rarely go to church, generally do not take up the work of their spiritual upbringing, considering it unnecessary and giving themselves over to worldly vanity. Attention must be paid to this. This is the fruit of pride, lack of spiritual development. They consider attendance at the temple and public worship as the business of the common people and women, forgetting that in the temple with fear serve together with humans the Angels and count this as their greatest blessedness.

On the Conciliality of Prayer

63. Feel in your heart the words of the Savior’s prayer to the Father: “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, so may they also be in us” (Jn 17:21)—and in every way strive to unite yourself with God and unite others with Him; support with all measures mutual pious unity, sparing nothing of yourself or your possessions—for the support of the unity of love: for God is our Life-giver, all-good and all-powerful Provider of everything; He will support our life in labors for the good of our neighbors if needed, and will provide everything necessary if for the support of mutual love we give away our possessions.

64. In prayer you must remember that we are members for one another and must pray for all, as the Our Father prayer shows. The Apostles set an example and all the saints. If you remember this and pray for others, then the holy Angels will pray for us too, as members of one kingdom of Christ, one Church, one body. “As you measure it, so will it be measured to you” (Mt 7:2).

65. During public prayer, let your whole heart be in God and not cling to anything earthly for even a moment; have also a fervent love for human souls, a love for the sake of God’s love and zeal for their salvation; pray for them as for those in great distress. All are, it is said, in hardship, subjected to spiritual delusion.

66. What does the holy Church teach us when both in home prayer and in church prayer it places in our lips prayers on behalf of all, not on behalf of one person? It teaches us constant mutual love, so that we always and in everything in prayer and in worldly dealings love one another as ourselves, so that, imitating God in three persons constituting the highest Unity, we ourselves too may be one, composed of many. “May they all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I am in you, so may they also be in us” (Jn 17:21). Common prayer on behalf of all and in your life teaches you to share worldly needs with others, so that in your life too everything would be common and as it were one, so that mutual love would be visible in all, so that each would use their abilities for the good of others as they are able, and not hide their talent in the earth, not be selfish and lazy. Are you wise—give counsel to the unwise; are you educated—teach the ignorant; are you strong—help the weak; are you rich—help the poor.

67. When praying with people, you must sometimes pierce through prayer like the hardest wall—human souls hardened by worldly attachments—pass through Egyptian darkness, the darkness of passions and attachments. That is why sometimes it is difficult to pray. The simpler the people with whom you pray, the easier it is.

68. When you pray, try to pray more for all than for yourself alone, and during prayer vividly imagine all people together with yourself as one body, and each individually as a member of the body of Christ and your own member: “we are members of one another” (Eph 4:25); pray for all as you pray for yourself with such sincerity and warmth; their weaknesses and illnesses consider as your own weaknesses and illnesses; their spiritual ignorance, their sins and passions—as your own ignorance, your own sins and passions; their temptations, troubles, and sorrows of all kinds—as your own temptations, troubles, and sorrows. Such prayer with great approval the heavenly Father accepts—this common all-good Father in whom “there is no partiality” (Rom 2:11), “nor shadow of turning” (Jac 1:17)—this love having no bounds, embracing and sustaining all creatures.

69. Do not be lazy to pray earnestly for others, either at their request or by yourself and with them—you yourself will receive mercy from God—the grace of God in the heart, sweetening and strengthening you in faith and love toward God and your neighbor. These are words of truth, taken from experience. Usually we are not very willing, more from necessity or habit, to pray for others without full participation of the heart; you must compel yourself to pray from your whole heart with great faith, with great boldness so that you may receive great and rich mercy from the generous and great reward-giving God. “Let him ask with faith, doubting nothing; for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, swept and tossed about by the wind” (Jac 1:6). The Lord, this common Father of all, is pleased when we willingly, with faith and love, pray for one another, for He is Love, ready to show mercy to all for mutual love. The Holy Spirit said: “pray for one another so that you may be healed” (Jac 5:16). See how pleasing to God and effective is prayer for one another!

70. A Christian must pray for all Christians as for himself, that God would grant them advancement in life and faith and spiritual understanding, and freedom from sins and passions. Why? By Christian love, which sees in all Christians its own members and members of Christ God, the common Savior of all, wishes for them the same as for itself, and likewise in every way strives to do for them the same as for itself.

71. When a strange, proud, evil spirit brings confusion upon you before reading and during reading prayers to God or the Mother of God, picture then vividly that all who stand are children of the heavenly Father, almighty, beginningless, endless, all-good, and that the Lord—their Father, and speak boldly, peaceably, joyfully, freely to Him on behalf of all, without fearing mockery, contempt, or evil of worldly people. Do not be deceitful, ashamed before human faces; do not doubt to sincerely pray to the heavenly Father, especially read the Lord’s Prayer with reverence peacefully without hurrying; generally read all prayers quietly, evenly, with reverence, knowing before Whom you speak them.

72. “Where two or three have gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them” (Mt 18:20). I reverence even two or three praying together: for by the Lord’s promise He Himself is found in their midst; how much more I reverence a multitude. Prayer together is effective and fruitful when it is harmonious, united-minded (“gathered together in my name”). The diligent prayer of the Church for Apostle Peter immediately reached God’s throne and the Lord sent His Angel to miraculously free Peter from prison, whom Herod wanted to kill. The united prayer of Apostles Paul and Silas brought down to them heavenly miraculous help from the Holy Spirit. (Act 12:5-11,16:24-26).

73. My God! How love and sincere sympathy toward us from the neighbor sweet our heart! Who can describe this blessedness of the heart penetrated with the feeling of love toward me of others and my love toward them? It is indescribable! If here on earth mutual love so sweetens us, then what sweetness of love will we be filled with in heaven, in living together with God, with the Mother of God, with the heavenly Powers, with the holy people of God? Who can imagine and describe this blessedness, and what temporal earthly thing should we not sacrifice to obtain such unspeakable blessedness of heavenly love? God, Your name is Love—teach me true love, strong as death. See, I have abundantly tasted the sweetness of it from communion in the spirit of faith, which is in You, with Your faithful servants and handmaidens and abundantly calmed and enlivened by it. Strengthen, God, this which You have accomplished in me. O if only this were so always! Grant me to have communion of faith and love with Your faithful servants more often, with Your temples, with Your Church, with Your members!

74. Sweetest my Savior! You set out on ministry to mankind, preaching the word of heavenly truth not only in the temple but going about cities and villages, not avoiding anyone, going to all in their homes, especially to those whom You foresaw through Your divine sight would have warm repentance. Thus You did not sit at home but had communion of love with all. Grant us too to have this communion of love with Your people, that we pastors may not shut ourselves away from Your sheep in our homes as in fortresses or prisons, going out only for service in church or for duties in homes out of sheer obligation with only memorized prayers. Let our lips be opened for free, spirit-filled and loving speech with our flock. Let Christian love toward our spiritual children be opened and strengthened through living, free, fatherly conversation with them. O what sweetness You have hidden, our boundless Love, in spiritual, love-warmed conversation of a spiritual father with his children, what blessedness! How could I not strive on earth with all my strength for such blessedness? And it is still only weak beginnings, only a faint likeness of heavenly blessedness of love! Love especially the communion of beneficence, both public and spiritual. “Do not forget to do good and to share, for with such sacrifices God is well pleased” (Hebr 13:16).

75. The Church, praying together, is a great power of God, conquering the hosts of demons and able to obtain from God every perfect gift, every help, every intercession, every deliverance, every salvation.

76. The Lord loves and hears more the prayer when we are not alone and not from ourselves alone and not only for ourselves, but together, on behalf of all and for all.

On the Lord’s Prayer

77. Christian, remember and hold always in your thoughts and heart the great words of the Lord’s Prayer: Our Father, Who art in heaven (remember, who is our Father?—God—our Father, Love Itself; who are we? we—His children, and brothers to one another; in what love should children of such a Father live with one another? “If you were Abraham’s children, you would do what Abraham did” (Jn 8:39); what then are we to do?) Hallowed be Your name, Your kingdom come, Your will be done. Give us this day our daily bread (our bread [collective], not mine; selfishness must be driven from the hearts of God’s children: we—are one) and forgive us our debts (you wish and love God to forgive you your sins; make it a rule to forgive the sins of those who sin against you, knowing that love is patient and merciful). Lead us not into temptation (and do not give way to temptation; “may he not stumble, nor the One keeping you slumber… the Lord, your protection on your right hand” (Ps 120:3-5). But deliver us from evil (do not give yourself over to it willingly, and the Lord will not hand you over to it). For Yours is the kingdom (acknowledge the one King—God and serve only Him) and the power (hope in His almighty power) and the glory (glory in His glory with all your strength and throughout your whole life) forever (He is the eternal King, while the kingdom of Satan soon passes like a robber’s theft, false). Amen. Truly all this. Remember this prayer above all and read it more often in your mind, and meditate on it, what each word, each expression and petition means in it.

78. Saying Our Father, we must believe and remember that the heavenly Father never forgets and will never forget us, for what earthly good father forgets and does not care for his children? “I will not forget you, says the Lord” (Is 49:15). “Your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things” (Mt 6:32). Commit these words to your heart! Remember that the heavenly Father constantly surrounds you with love and care and is not named your Father for nothing. Father—this is not a name without meaning and power, but a name in its full meaning and power.

79. To accurately understand the words of the Lord’s Prayer: lead us not into temptation, you must remember that this prayer was given to the apostles who asked Him to teach them to pray, given before the descent of the Holy Spirit upon them, when Satan asked for them to sift them like wheat (Lk 22:31). Then the apostles were still weak and could easily fall under temptation (as Peter did), and therefore the Savior places in their lips the words: lead us not into temptation. But without temptations of our faith, hope, and love, it is impossible to live; testings of the hidden things of the heart are necessary for the person himself, so he can see what he is and correct himself. Yes, temptations are necessary, “so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed” (Lk 2:35)—so that your firmness or weakness in faith, knowledge or ignorance, vice or purity of heart, hope in God or in earthly things, love for yourself and for the perishable or more than anything for God, will be revealed.

80. Never is it so difficult to say from the heart: Your will be done, Father, as in great sorrow or in grievous illness, especially in unrighteousness from people, in enemy’s violence or scheming. It is difficult to say from the heart: Your will be done—and then when we ourselves have become the cause of some misfortune, for we think that this is not God’s will but our will that has put us in such a position, though nothing happens without God’s will. Generally, it is difficult to believe heartily that God’s will is our suffering when the heart knows both by faith and by experience that God is our blessedness, and therefore it is difficult to say in misfortune: Your will be done. We think, can this be God’s will? Why does God torment us? Why are others peaceful and happy? What have we done? Will our torment end? and so on. But when our corrupted nature finds it difficult to acknowledge over itself the will of God, without which nothing happens, and to submit to it with humility, then let it submit to it, then let it offer the Lord its precious sacrifice—heartfelt devotion to Him not only in peace and happiness, but in sorrow and misfortune; let it subject its vain, erroneous reasoning to the perfect wisdom of God, for as the heavens are high above the earth, so are His thoughts above your thoughts (Is 55:8,9). Let every person offer his Isaac, his only-begotten, his promised one (to whom rest and blessedness are promised, not sorrow) in sacrifice to God and show Him his faith and obedience, to become worthy of God’s gifts which you have used or will use.

81. Your will be done. For example: when you want to be well and strive with all your might to be free of pain and healthy, yet you remain ill—say: Your will be done; when you undertake something and your undertaking does not succeed, say: Your will be done; when you do good to others and they repay you with evil, say: Your will be done; or when, for example, you want to sleep but have insomnia, say: Your will be done; generally, do not become irritated when something is not done according to your will, and learn to submit in everything to the will of your heavenly Father. You wished to have no temptations, yet daily the enemy troubles you with them, sets you ablaze, oppresses you in every way—do not become irritated, but say: Your will be done.

82. Father of ours! Your kingdom come. The Lord reigns everywhere in all the visible world (He is in every place) and in all the angelic assemblies; He reigns with His infinite power and righteousness both over evil spirits and over evil or unrighteous people; some of them He bound with eternal chains of darkness for the day of great judgment, and others He punishes in various ways both in this life and will punish in the age to come with unquenchable fire. But He, Truth, does not reign in demons and evil people with His truth because in them is falsehood; He does not reign with love because in them is malice; in evil people the Truth does not reign through faith, nor through hope and love, nor through exact fulfillment of His commandments. “Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?” (Lk 6:46). “Obey my commandments” (Jn 14:15). In every smallest natural action of my body and soul (for example, in speech) God’s laws are obeyed—my body in nourishment, rest, sleep, growth, walking follows His laws; thought and speech by His laws are constructed and move, but not always in my heart, in my heartfelt dispositions and in my free choice: I often incline toward evil and do evil instead of the good set before me. I often oppose Him and His laws. I often have little faith, lack faith, am self-loving, proud, a despiser of others, envious, stingy, grasping, covetous, gluttonous, a pleaser of my sinful flesh in every way, ambitious, impatient, irritable, lazy, I do or do very few good deeds and those more by happenstance than by the free disposition and inclination of my heart, I do not suffer with those suffering as members of one body of the Church: in short, not always does the Lord reign in me through the thoughts, feelings, and deeds of faith, hope, and love.

83. In prayer, the intentional, deliberate, extreme humility is necessary. You must remember who is speaking and what is being said, especially this is necessary when reading the Lord’s Prayer: Our Father. Humility destroys all the enemy’s schemes. Ah, how much hidden pride is in us. This—I know; I don’t need this; this is not for me; this is superfluous; in that I am not sinful. How much of your own reasoning!

84. When we read the Lord’s Prayer, we must read it with special clarity of understanding and earnestness; namely: 1) to deeply understand each word and expression; 2) with all soul and all heart to desire what we are asking for; 3) to have zeal, eagerness to do what God desires in this prayer from us, and 4) in deeds to fulfill what is required.

85. Worship God in spirit and truth. In truth—for example, you say: hallowed be Your name. Is there in you truly a desire that God’s name be hallowed by the good deeds of people and by you? You say: Your kingdom come: do you truly desire the coming of God’s kingdom, do you desire to be a dwelling place of God’s Spirit rather than a dwelling place of sin; do you not rather desire to live in sins? You say: Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven: are you not seeking your will rather than God’s will? Yes, that’s so—you say: give us this day our daily bread; are you not saying in your heart something else: I don’t need to ask this from You; I have it without asking, let those without call out; or with greed you seek much and are not satisfied with little or with what God has given you, do not give thanks for what you have, yet ought to give thanks; you ask God: and forgive us our debts as we also forgive our debtors; and while praying, are you not thinking: I—God knows what a sinner; I, it seems, do not live worse than others and have no need to ask forgiveness of my debts or sins; or while praying, do you not harbor some displeasure, anger, and thus you boldly lie to God in your prayer; you say: lead us not into temptation—and are you not yourself pushing, not rushing without temptation into every sin? You say: deliver us from evil; and do you not live in partnership with evil, or with all sorts of evil whose leader is the devil? Look then, let your tongue not disagree with your heart; do not lie then, look, to God in your prayer. Keep this always in view both when you read the Lord’s Prayer and when you read other prayers; observe whether your heart agrees with what your mouth pronounces.

On Prayer to the Theotokos

86. When you come to pray to the Queen Mother of God, before prayer be firmly convinced that you will not leave Her without receiving mercy. To think and to be convinced this way about Her is worthy and right. She is the all-merciful Mother of the all-merciful God-Word and of Her mercy, which are immeasurably great and countless, all ages and all Christian churches proclaim; She is truly an abyss of goodness and compassion, as is said of Her in the canon of the Hodegetria (Canon Song 5, p. 1). Therefore to approach Her in prayer without such conviction would be unwise and presumptuous, and by doubt you would offend Her goodness, just as God’s goodness is offended when they come to pray to God and hope not to receive what they ask. How people hurry with petitions to some high and rich person whose mercy all know, which mercy that person has proven with many examples? Usually with the most calm confidence and hope to obtain what they desire from him. So in prayer you must not doubt, not lose heart.

87. The Virgin Mary is the all-gracious Ruler of all sons and daughters of mankind, as the Daughter of God the Father, who is love, Mother of the God-Word—our love, chosen Bride of the All-Holy Spirit who is love, united in will with the Father and the Word. How not to flee to such a Ruler and how not to expect from Her every spiritual good!

88. Pray, my brothers, to the Mother of God when the storm of enmity and evil rises in your house. She, all-good and all-powerful, can easily and most readily calm human hearts. Peace and love come from the one God as from their Source, and the Ruler is in God, united with God, and as the Mother of Christ—the Peace—She cares and prays for the peace of all the world, and still more for all Christians. She has the all-powerful ability through Her authority to drive away from us the spirits of malice under heaven, these sleepless and zealous sowers of malice and enmity among people, and to all coming with faith and love to Her mighty protection grants quickly, swiftly peace and love. Care also yourself for the preservation of faith and love in your hearts; if you yourselves do not care about this, then you will not be worthy of the intercession of the Mother of God before God; moreover, always be yourself zealous and reverent worshippers of the Mother of the Lord Most High; for it is meet and right to call blessed the Mother of God, the ever-blessed and ever-pure, highest of all creation, the Protectress of mankind. Strive to cultivate in yourself the spirit of humility, for She Herself is humble as no one else among mortals, and with love looks only upon the humble. “He has looked upon the humility of his handmaid, her God, the Savior Himself” (Lk 1:48,47).

89. Of all the saving works of God in the world, the holy Church most glorifies the greatest miracle of God’s incarnation and its life-giving consequences for mankind—the Most Pure, Most Blessed Mother of God: equal to the sand of the sea are these praises of the Mother of God, especially in canons, stichera, theotokia, and akathists. And She is worthy of this, indeed all these praises are too few, for She was deemed worthy to be the Mother of God, and through Her God was united with people and deified them. And we must breathe with this mystery of the incarnation, be confirmed by it.

90. Why do we unceasingly exalt with the voice and prompting of the Church the Most Pure Queen Mother of God with myriads of hymns and prayers? So that we might somewhat repay glory to Her greatness, holiness, righteousness, marvelous purity, humility, love for God and for us, the unworthy, Her unceasing intercession for us; so that we might know and remember the infinitely great blessings which the Lord through Her poured out upon mankind. For through Her we were deemed worthy to eternally praise the Holy Trinity-Life-beginning; through Her we were made alive and saved by the Tri-personal Godhood. The Mother of God is exalted above the cherubim and seraphim and all creation for Your salvation and exaltation, Christian, so that she saves you and protects you.

91. Where in what foreign churches is the name of the Mother of God so understood, exalted, glorified, and invoked as in our Orthodox Church day after day?! Proclaim then ceaselessly and zealously this name… For we have tested and convinced ourselves over the centuries how strong for us and life-giving is Her prayer. How many times She has saved our Fatherland and our cities, our people, our villages and many individual people—from all misfortunes and evils! Where on earth is the name of the Most Holy Mother of God so magnified and glorified as is due—meet and true—except in the Orthodox Church!

92. As long as Russia remains Orthodox and zealously honors God and the Mother of God, so long will she be mighty and unshakeable, for from the beginning and until now she has emerged from all misfortunes, been strengthened and expanded by the intercession and help of the Mother of God in all wars and miserable circumstances. And Russian princes, tsars, emperors, and the Christian-loving army have always zealously honored the Ever-Virgin and Mary, the Most Blessed Mother of God, as more honorable than the cherubim and more glorious beyond compare than the seraphim.

93. Give thanks to the swift Intercessor, our Lady the Mother of God, the Most Pure, Most Blessed Virgin Mary, by our heartfelt prayer saving us from the biting and oppression of the devil. Behold Her with the eyes of your heart in the Holy Spirit, behold as if dwelling at the heart itself and cry out to Her: Swift Intercessor, O Lady Mother of God Mary, save me from the enemy-tempter! And immediately in that moment She saves you by the faith of your heart, by your hope in Her. And straightway from your side departs the oppression, the fire and heavy despair. Marvelous is the salvation of the Ruler! Thus does it flow into your soul. Only behold Her with the eyes of your heart with hope in Her goodness and power. “Your faith has saved you” (Mt 9:22).

94. O if we could hear and see the prayer of the Most Holy Virgin Mother of God for us and for the world, the angels and the saints, we would be astonished and ashamed of our sloth and negligence in prayer; we would not only during the day but in the midst of night arise for prayer and glorification of the Lord’s goodness, God’s patience, God’s greatness, God’s wisdom and all-powerful might.

On Prayer to the Saints

95. The saints fulfilled the word of the Lord; the Lord fulfills their word: they did for Him—He does for them. “As you measure it, so will it be measured to you” (Mt 7:2). This is why the Lord swiftly fulfills the prayers of the saints for us.

96. “Abraham my servant will pray… Job my servant will pray for you… Moses… Samuel… Elijah” (Job 42:8; Gen 20:7,17; Jer 15:1; 1King 18:36; Ps 98:6). The prayers of the saints for us are pleasing to the Lord as the prayers of faithful servants of God.

97. The holy people of God are great merchants enriched with all spiritual treasures, all virtues: meekness, humility, self-restraint, patience, rich faith, hope, and love. That is why we ask for their holy prayers, as the poor ask the rich to help us in our spiritual poverty, to teach us to pray and advance in Christian virtues, so that they, having boldness before God, would pray for the forgiveness of our sins and protect us from new ones. We go to earthly merchants in their shops to buy their goods: how should we not turn to heavenly merchants with earnest prayer, as with silver and gold, how should we not buy from them their intercession before God for the forgiveness of sins and the granting of various Christian virtues! It seems very natural.

98. Call upon the saints with fearless faith and unfeigned love if you wish them to hear you and fulfill your prayer. Remember: like seeks like. The saints pleased God through faith and love, and they demand the same from you. With faith and love, unite also the proper reverence toward them.

99. The Lutherans say: “Why do we ask the prayers of the saints for ourselves? We ask God Himself” and thus refute themselves: for why do they ask the pastor to pray for them? They would pray without the pastor if every one had equal access to God and there was no need for the ordained intercessors for us. What blindness! They say: praying to the saints, we commit idolatry. It is not true! We do not consider any saint as God, we do not pray to any saint as to God, but only ask his prayer for us; is there even a shadow of idolatry? We ask the prayers of living clergy and pray-ers for us before the Lord so they would pray for us, so we ask of the heavenly pray-ers, who for their love toward God have great boldness before Him; besides, many of them here on earth were intercessors and mediators before God for the world; there—in heaven—this activity of theirs continues, has greater scope and is especially strong because it is not hampered by heavy and sluggish flesh. All saints, though their earthly course is finished, yet they live: “God is not God of the dead but of the living; all live to him” (Lk 20:38).

100. How do the saints hear us? They hear, as one with us in the Holy Spirit—“so that they also may be in us and made one” (Jn 17:21)—as members of one Church of God headed by the one Christ and quickened by one Spirit of God. The saints behold and hear us in the Holy Spirit as we with bodily eyes and ears see and hear by means of light and air; but our bodily sight and hearing are far from perfect compared to spiritual sight and hearing: at a great distance we do not see many objects, we do not hear many sounds. Spiritual sight and spiritual hearing are perfect: not a single movement of the heart, not a single thought, not a single word, intention, desire escapes them, for God’s Spirit, in whom the saints dwell, see, and hear us, is all-perfect, all-knowing; He sees and hears all because He is omnipresent.

101. The holy people of God are close to believing hearts and, as sincere and good friends, in a moment are ready to help the faithful and pious who call upon them with faith and love. Unlike earthly helpers to whom one must usually send and sometimes wait a long time before they come, you need not send for these spiritual helpers and wait long: the faith of the one praying can in a moment place them at your very heart just as receive full help by faith, meaning spiritual help. What I say I say from experience. I mean frequent deliverance from sorrows of heart by the intercession and protection of the saints, especially by the intercession of our Lady the Mother of God. Perhaps some will say to this that here simple faith or firm confidence in one’s own deliverance from sorrow acts, not the intercession of saints before God. No. From what is this evident? From the fact that if I do not call upon in heartfelt prayer certain known saints (distinguishing none of them), if I do not see them with the eyes of my heart, then I receive no help whatsoever, however much I might nurture confidence in being healed without their help. I consciously, clearly sense that the help I receive is from the name of those saints I call upon because of living faith in them. This happens as it does in the ordinary order of earthly things. First I see my helpers in heartfelt faith. Then, seeing them thus, I ask them too with the heart, invisibly but distinctly to myself; then, receiving invisible help in a completely imperceptible way but felt by the soul, I at the same time receive a strong conviction that this help is precisely from them, as a sick person healed by a doctor is convinced that he received healing precisely from the doctor, not from another and not by himself, but from the doctor. All this happens so simply that one needs only eyes—to see.

102. If you call upon any saint doubting his closeness to you and that he hears you, and your heart is struck by oppression—overcome yourself, or better, overcome immediately with the help of the Lord Jesus Christ the slanderer (the devil) dwelling in your heart, call upon the saint with heartfelt certainty that he is near you in the Holy Spirit and hears your prayer: and immediately it will become easy for you. Heaviness and anguish of the heart in prayer come from insincerity, from falseness and deceitfulness of our heart, just as in ordinary conversation with people we feel inwardly awkward when we speak to them not from the heart, not truly, not sincerely. “It is hard for you to kick against the goads” (Act 26:14). Always and everywhere be true in heart and you will always have peace in your heart, but especially be true in communion with God and the saints: for the Spirit is truth (Jn 14:6).

103. It is remarkable—I rejoiced that I so often carry in my mind and heart and pronounce with my lips the name of God, the name of the Mother of God, the holy Angels and holy servants of God—all by name throughout the year, and especially those commemorated daily in church prayers or during water-blessing services. For the name remembered sincerely from the heart sanctifies us, enlivens and consoles us; so too the name of the Mother of God, the all-powerful Intercessor; and the saints, our intercessors before God, pray for us when we call upon them in prayer, and shine for us with their virtues in many ways. It is good to be in communion with God and the heavenly dwellers.

104. If we, sinners, beseech and implore the Lord for ourselves and for others; if, living on earth, the saints pray for others and obtain what they need from God for them, then how much more—when the saints transfer to eternity and are face to face with God. By virtue of the great intercessory sacrifice of the Son of God, the prayers of the saints have power through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, especially the prayers of His Most Pure Mother. This is the Lord’s reward for the merits of the saints.

105. It is remarkable—today I doubted—certainly because the evil one provoked it—about one phrase in one prayer, namely: You alone have authority to forgive sins through the prayers of Your Most Pure Mother and all the saints (Prayer 3 for the wife giving birth on the 1st), and I was ashamed in my reasoning: the enemy struck me down, troubled me during public prayer. In what was my thought false? I thought: how! God has authority to forgive sins through the prayers of His Most Pure Mother and saints, and not independently? And He does have authority independently, of course; one alone has power; but to honor the lofty virtues of the saints, especially of His Most Pure Mother, who are His friends, striving with all their might to please Him in earthly life, He accepts their prayerful intercession for us, the unworthy, for us who often ought to hold our lips because of great and frequent falls into sin. Recall Moses interceding for the Hebrew people and obtaining life for them from the angered Lord. Who will not say that even without Moses God could have spared His people—by granting them continuation of existence—but then God would be, so to speak, unjust, having given life to the unworthy when He Himself had determined they should die; but when Moses began to intercede—a righteous, meek, and humble man—then the eyes of the just God rested on the righteous one, on his love for God and his people, and for the sake of his merits the Lord had mercy on the unworthy, for the sake of the righteous on the unrighteous. So now through the prayer of His Most Pure Mother He has mercy on us, who for great and frequent sins and lawlessness would not by themselves be worthy of His mercy. “If Moses and Samuel stood before me, my heart would not go out to this people” (Jer 15:1), the Lord says to Jeremiah about the Judeans. From this is evident that the Lord accepts the intercession of the saints for wicked people when the sins of these latter do not exceed the measure of God’s patience.

106. From our own experience of living, heartfelt prayer, we can know that the saints are received into the closest communion with God. And by our own experience we know that in communion with God through prayer, faith, our mind is extraordinarily enlightened and receives the most expansive scope of action: at such times it sees what it does not see in its ordinary state. It follows that the saints, being in communion with God, moreover pure and separated from the body, have a most bright, far-seeing mind, and our heartfelt prayers they hear, and if they are pleasing to God and useful for us, they certainly fulfill them!

107. Holy Hierarch Father Nicholas, pray to God for us! On what basis do we ask the prayers of the saints for ourselves, and do they truly pray for us, and is their prayer for us effective? God Himself directly revealed His will to certain people who did not have closeness to Him—for example, Abimelech, who took Abraham’s wife, was commanded to ask Abraham to pray for him; Job prayed, by clear revelation of God’s will, for his friends; Moses, Samuel, Elijah prayed—all the prophets; the Lord Himself, according to His human nature, prayed to the Father in Heaven for Peter and all the disciples. The saints deserve to be intercessors for us before God through their virtues, through their merits as His servants. If on earth justice requires that a certain person close to God pray for others (e.g., a priest for people), why not also in heaven? All saints are alive with God and for us: seeing in God our needs, they sympathize with us and are ready, according to our prayers, to help us. Why specifically according to our prayers and not otherwise? So that it strengthens us in faith and prayer. Yet again: why do the living wish that others needing their help would ask them? Why not help without being asked?

108. When we call upon the saints in prayer, to pronounce from the heart their name means already to bring them near to your very heart. Ask then confidently and the prayers and intercession for yourself; and they will hear you and your prayer will present to the Ruler—swiftly, in an instant, as One existing everywhere and knowing all things.

109. The name of the saints, from articulate sounds, means as if the flesh of the saint or the saint itself… In a small form in our lips it is as if the beings of the higher and lower world are reflected: and all this through faith, by the Holy Spirit, who is alone the One existing everywhere and filling all things.

110. When calling upon or glorifying the holy servants of God, you must call upon or glorify them with all your heart, with the burning of your soul; so as to bring them closer to yourself, to draw near to them and as far as possible to become like them: for then they are with us and for us, when we call upon or glorify them with a pure heart, and they raise our prayers to God.

111. O Lord! In prayer to You concerning us we bring the saints, these spiritual fragrances, this myrrh of Your ointments. Receive their fragrant love and pure prayers concerning us and deliver us from the stench of sin, for our hearts are unclean and our lips defiled, and we are unworthy of sweet discourse with You. Everything in us is earthly and perishable, filthy, deceitful, while they, Your saints, are the purest myrrh; and above all, Your Most Pure Mother. Your spirit-bearing bright dwelling, purer than the light of the sun, more fragrant than all perfumes, for the fragrance of Her holiness, Her divine virtues fills heaven and earth.

112. You wonder how the saints from heaven attend to us when we pray to them. But as the rays of the sun from heaven bend down to us and shine everywhere—throughout all the earth, the saints are the same in the spiritual world as the rays of the sun in the material world. God is the eternal, life-giving Sun, and the saints are the rays of the spiritual Sun. As the eyes of the Lord constantly look upon the earth and upon those born of earth, so the eyes of the saints cannot but turn where the providential gaze of the Lord is turned upon creation and where their treasure is (their bodies, their deeds, their sacred places, the people devoted to them). “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Mt 6:21). You know how quickly, far, and clearly the heart sees (especially the things of the spiritual world); note this in all knowledge, especially in spiritual things, where much is assimilated only by faith (by sight of the heart). The heart is the eye of human being; the purer it is, the faster, farther, and more clearly it sees. But in the holy people of God this eye of the soul was even in life brought to possible purity for a human, and after their death, when they united with God, by God’s grace it became even more bright and wide-ranging in the limits of its vision. Therefore the saints see very clearly and far and wide, see our spiritual needs; see and hear all calling upon them from the whole heart—that is, those whose intelligent eyes are directly aimed at them and are not obscured or dimmed during the aiming by doubt and little-faith, when the eyes of the heart of the pray-ers coincide, so to speak, with the eyes of the called-upon. Here is mysterious vision. The experienced one understands what is being said. Therefore how easy to have communion with the saints! You need only to cleanse the sight of the heart, direct it firmly toward a certain saint, ask what is needed—and it will be. And what about the Lord in relation to sight! He is all sight, all light, all knowledge. He always fills heaven and earth and everywhere sees all things. “The eyes of the Lord are in every place, keeping watch on the evil and the good” (Prov 15:3).

On Prayer for Our Neighbor

113. Pray for the forgiveness of others’ sins as you pray for the forgiveness of your own sins, when they strike your soul with sorrow and tightness, prompting you with pain, brokenness of heart, and with tears to beseech God for mercy; likewise pray for others’ salvation as for your own. If you achieve this and make it a habit, you will receive from the Lord an abundance of spiritual gifts, gifts of the Holy Spirit. Who loves the soul that feels sympathy for the salvation of others, because the All-Holy Spirit Himself wants to save all of us in every way—only if we do not oppose Him, do not harden our hearts. “The Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express” (Rom 8:26).

114. If you wish to correct someone from their faults, do not think to correct him through your own means alone: we ourselves spoil the matter more through our own passions, for example through pride and the irritability stemming from it: but “cast all your anxiety on him” (Ps 54:23) and pray to Him, the One who searches our “hearts and minds” (Ps 7:10), from your whole heart that He might enlighten the mind and heart of the person; if He sees that your prayer breathes love and comes from your whole heart, He will certainly fulfill the desire of your heart and you will soon say, seeing the change in the one for whom you prayed: “this is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.” (Ps 76:11).

115. When you see that someone by the violence of the devil is thoroughly absorbed in some empty earthly thing (idée fixe), grieves deeply over it, constantly speaks about it, and arouses annoyance in you by it, do not become irritated by this, but firmly knowing that this illness of the spirit is from the enemy, be gentle and quiet with the sick person; immediately with calm, unshakeable faith turn to God in prayer and read the troparion to the Not-made-by-hands-of Image: We venerate Your most pure image, O Good One, asking forgiveness of our transgressions, O Christ God: for You have deigned in Your goodness to ascend the cross in the flesh, to save those whom You created from the slavery of the enemy. We cry out to You in thankfulness, Savior of all: You have filled all things with joy by coming to save the world.

116. When you see faults and passions in your neighbor, pray for him; pray for everyone, even for your enemy. If you see a brother who is proud and stubborn, acting arrogantly toward you or others, pray for him so that God may enlighten his mind and warm his heart with the fire of His grace. Say: O Lord, teach Your servant, who has fallen into devilish pride, gentleness and humility, and drive from his heart the darkness and burden of satanic arrogance! If you see one filled with malice, pray: O Lord, work good in Your servant through Your grace! If you see one given to avarice and greed, say: Our treasure is incorruptible, and our wealth is inexhaustible! Grant to Your servant, created in Your image and likeness, to recognize the deceitfulness of riches, and that all earthly things are vanity, shadow, and dream. As grass are the days of every man, or as a spider’s web, and You alone are our wealth, our rest, and our joy! When you see one filled with envy, pray: O Lord, enlighten the mind and heart of Your servant to know Your great, countless, and unsearchable gifts, which he has received from Your infinite mercies; in the blindness of his passion he has forgotten You and Your abundant gifts, and counts himself poor when he is rich in Your goodness. For this reason he looks with spiritual delusion upon the good things of Your servants, whom You, O inexpressible Goodness, bless with all, to each according to his strength and according to Your will. Remove, all-good Lord, the devil’s veil from the eyes of Your servant’s heart and grant him heartfelt contrition and tears of repentance and thanksgiving, so that the enemy may not rejoice over him, captured alive in his nets, and so that You may not turn him away from Your hand! When you see one who is drunk, say in your heart: O Lord, look with mercy upon Your servant, seduced by the deception of the belly and fleshly pleasure; grant him to know the sweetness of abstinence and fasting and the fruits flowing from them. When you see one passionate for food and placing his blessedness in it, say: O Lord, our most sweet food that never perishes but remains to eternal life! Cleanse Your servant from the stain of gluttony, which makes the flesh all and estranges it from Your Spirit, and grant him to know the sweetness of Your life-giving spiritual food, which is Your flesh and blood and Your holy, living, and active word! Thus, or in a similar manner, pray for all who sin, and dare not despise anyone for his sin or seek revenge against him, for by doing so you would only increase the wounds of the sinner. Correct him with counsel, threats, and punishment, which should serve as a means to end evil or to keep it within the bounds of moderation.

117. Glory to the Most Holy, consubstantial, and life-giving Trinity. When the devil pains my side with displeasure, hatred toward my neighbor over some worldly, fleshly matter, and it becomes heavy and tormenting for me, I rise up and lift the eyes of my heart toward the Trinity and I say: O Father, Son, holy Spirit, have mercy on me. And I myself gaze upon the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit as upon the very essence of the Most Holy Trinity, existing essentially everywhere, even in that single word alone. Look: at once it becomes light, and the enemy flees from the all-powerful, ever-worshipped Name like smoke vanishing away. Glory to You, holy and consubstantial, life-giving, undivided Trinity!

(Proclaimed at the beginning of Matins). Most Holy Trinity! Teach me to despise all earthly things, teach me to place my peace, contentment, and blessedness in You alone. And so that I might not become proud because of Your gracious attention to me, Most Holy Trinity, and the salvation You give me, may I remember that You graciously attend to every worm, every bird. Let me also recall that certain Christians who did many mighty works in God’s name will hear someday from the Lord the words: “Depart from Me,… I do not know you” (Mt 7:23,25:12), for their uneuangelical lives. Most Holy Trinity! Keep me from pride and teach me to think humbly! You are gracious to me and swift to hear my prayers and will save me. I can become proud because of Your mercy and turn Your infinite goodness and compassion into a pretext for self-praise, as if I myself were worthy of such attention, as if I had done some good. Cover me, most merciful Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, with the shelter of Your wings from every sin.

Concerning Prayer for the Dead

118. When you pray for the repose of the soul of the departed, compel yourself to pray for him with all your soul, remembering that this is your essential duty, not merely the duty of priests and clergy. Picture how necessary repose is for the departed and how he needs the prayers of the living for him, being a member of the one body of the Church. Picture how demons contest with the angels for his soul and how it trembles, not knowing what fate awaits it for eternity. Much weight has before the Master the prayer of faith and love for the departed. Picture again how necessary repose is for you when you are bound by the chains of sin, and how then you pray with such earnestness, with what sincerity, fervor, and strength you beseech the Lord and the Most Pure Mother of God, and how you rejoice and triumph when, after earnest prayer, you receive deliverance from sins and peace of soul. Apply this also to the soul of the departed: his soul also needs prayer – now yours, because it cannot pray fruitfully by itself; and his soul needs the repose which you can obtain for him through fervent prayer, with good works for the benefit of his soul, and especially through the offering of the bloodless sacrifice for him.

119. Pray for the departed as if your own soul were in hell, in the flames, and you yourself were suffering torment. Feel their sufferings in your heart and pray fervently—fervently for their repose in the place that is bright and fertile, in the place of coolness.

120. Pray to the Lord daily, morning and evening, for the repose of the departed forefathers, fathers, and brothers, so that the remembrance of death may live in you and the hope for future life after death may not fade in you, so that daily your spirit may be humbled by the thought of the swift passing of your life.

Repentance in Prayer

121. If you sin in anything before God, and we sin greatly each day, immediately say in your heart, with faith in the Lord who hearkens to the cry of your heart, with humble awareness and feeling of your sins, the psalm Have mercy on me, O God, according to Your great mercy, and read through the whole psalm with a true heart. If it does not work the first time, try again, but read it even more sincerely, even more feelingly, and then at once salvation will shine forth from the Lord and peace will come to your soul. Thus always repent: this is a sure, proven remedy against sins. But if you do not find relief, blame yourself; it means you prayed without contrition, without humility of heart, without a firm desire to obtain God’s forgiveness of your sins. It means the sin has wounded you only weakly.

122. Sometimes a person prays, apparently with great zeal, but his prayer brings him no fruit of peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. Why? Because, while praying from prepared prayers, he did not truly repent of those sins which he committed that day, by which he defiled his heart, this temple of Christ, and provoked the Lord. But if he would only remember them and repent with all sincerity, judging himself impartially, at once the “peace… that surpasses all understanding” (Phil 4:7) will dwell in his heart. In the Church’s prayers there is an enumeration of sins, but not all of them, and often the very ones are not mentioned for which we have bound ourselves. One must certainly enumerate them oneself in prayer with clear awareness of their seriousness, with a feeling of humility and heartfelt contrition. That is why in the evening prayers, when sins are enumerated, it is said: this or that which I have done wrong – meaning we are left to choose which sins to mention.

123. Repentance must be sincere and completely free, and not at all forced by time and custom or by the person hearing confession. Otherwise, it is not repentance. “Repent”, it is said, “for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Mt 4:17) – it has come near, that is, it has come itself; you do not need to search for it long; it seeks you, your free willingness – that is, repent yourselves with heartfelt contrition. “Those who were baptized… confessed their sins” (Mt 3:6) – that is, they themselves acknowledged their sins. And since our prayer is chiefly repentance and petition for the forgiveness of sins, it must always be truly sincere and completely free, not unwilling, forced by habit and custom. The same should be true of prayer when it is thanksgiving and praise. Gratitude presupposes in the soul of one who has received a gift the fullness of free, living feeling, flowing freely from the lips; “out of the abundance… of the heart the mouth speaks” (Mt 12:34). Praise presupposes wonder and amazement in one who contemplates the works of God’s infinite goodness, wisdom, and almightiness in the moral and material world, and therefore must naturally be an act completely free and reasonable. In general, prayer should be the free and fully conscious outpouring of the human soul before God. Before the Lord I pour out my soul (Prayer of Hannah, mother of Samuel).

124. In prayer there is need for sincere sorrow for your sins and sincere repentance – when enumerating sins mentioned in prayers, speak them feeling them with your heart as if they were your own. There is also need for a fervent desire not to commit those same sins again.

Concerning Overcoming the Flesh in Prayer

125. Why is prolonged prayer needed? So that by prolonged earnest prayer we might warm our hearts, which have grown cold and hardened in the prolonged tumult of worldly life. For it would be strange to think, much more to demand, that a heart grown dull in worldly affairs could quickly become penetrated with the warmth of faith and love for God during prayer. No, for this we need effort and effort, time and time. “The kingdom of heaven is taken by force, and those who use force seize it” (Mt 11:12). God’s kingdom does not come quickly into the heart when people so earnestly flee from it. The Lord Himself shows His will that we pray not briefly, presenting in example the widow who came long to the judge and troubled him with her requests (Lk 18:2-6). The Lord, our Father in heaven, knows before our asking what we need (Mt 6:8). But we do not know Him as we should; we are very devoted to worldly vanity, not to our Father in heaven. Therefore, in His wisdom and mercy He makes our needs a reason for our turning to Him. Turn, my wandering children, to Me now, to Me, your Father, with all your heart – if before you were far from Me, now at least warm your hearts with faith and love toward Me, which have been cold before.

126. Do not indulge the lazy flesh in prayer – do not hurry. The flesh, weary and troubled by holy work, hastens toward the end so as to rest or turn to fleshly, worldly deeds.

127. When you perform prayer, your rule, especially from a book, do not hurry from word to word without feeling the truth of it, without laying it on your heart. Make it, and always make it, your effort to feel in your heart the truth of what you are saying. Your heart will resist this – sometimes with laziness and hardened insensitivity to what you read, sometimes with doubt and disbelief, with some inner fire and tightness, sometimes with distraction and tendency toward some earthly matters and concerns, sometimes with remembrance of an offense from your neighbor and the feeling of vengeance and hatred toward him, sometimes with representation of worldly pleasures or with the pleasure of reading novels and generally worldly books. Do not be self-loving; overcome your heart; give it to God as an acceptable sacrifice: “Give Me, my son, your heart” (Prov 23:26). Your prayer will unite, join you with God and with all heaven, and you will be filled with the Spirit and with its fruits: righteousness, peace, and joy, love, gentleness, patience, and heartfelt compunction. Do you long to finish your prayer rule soon so as to give rest to your weary body? Pray with all your heart and you will sleep peacefully, healthily, and quietly. Do not rush to pray hastily: you will gain for half an hour of prayer a whole three hours of the most healthy sleep. Are you hurrying to service or work? Get up earlier; do not oversleep – and pray earnestly – you will gain peace, energy, and success in your affairs for the whole day. Does your heart yearn toward worldly vanity? Break it; let your treasure be not earthly vanity but God. Teach your heart to cling more through prayer to God than to the vanity of the world, so that you may not be ashamed in the day of your sickness and in the hour of your death – ashamed like one rich in worldly vanity and poor in faith, hope, and love, if you do not pray in this way.

128. Do not believe your flesh, threatening you with inability during prayer: it lies. Once you begin to pray, you will see that your flesh becomes obedient to you. Prayer will enliven even it. Always remember that your flesh is a liar.

129. For people who pray little, the heart is weak. So when they want to pray, their heart grows faint and weakens their hands, body, and thoughts, and it is hard for them to pray. You must overcome yourself: try to pray with all your heart, because it is good and easy to pray with all your heart.

130. Do not let the flesh and the enemy working through it overcome you in prayer; “do not deceive with your tongue, but speak truth in your heart” (Ps 14:3,2). Think and feel as you speak in prayer, not so that honey is on your tongue while ice is on your heart. If the enemy conquers once, after that you must defend yourself, your freedom from him, like conquered territory taken by the enemy, and your heart will turn away from the Lord. Neglect nothing in spiritual life; consider nothing small, unworthy of great attention: through small sins the devil leads to great ones. The main thing: always strive to be truthful in your heart. When it is difficult to struggle with the flesh, then show your firmness, then do not weaken in the struggle like a good soldier of Christ.

131. Fleshly indulgence, hardened insensitivity to all that is spiritual and sacred, is the oppression of the enemy, although the fleshly person does not consider it oppression because it benefits him. But those who wish to live spiritually consider it oppression because it does not allow God to reach our heart; it does not permit the grace of God to pour into our heart, which vivifies and enlightens our soul; it makes our soul unfruitful in the works of faith, hope, and love. You become somehow fleshly, without the spirit. O, how many different kinds of persecution there are! How you will grieve in your heart over this hardened insensitivity, how you will weep before the Lord – and it will pass. Your heart will grow warm and soften and become capable of spiritual contemplation and holy feelings.

132. Do not spare yourself for heartfelt prayer, even when you have spent the whole day in labors. Do not be negligent at all in holy prayer; tell the Lord everything from your heart. See – it is God’s work. You have put your hand to the plow; do not say you are not strong enough; having put your “hand to the plow, do not look back” (Lk 9:62). If you have allowed prayer to be neglectful, not from your whole heart, you will not sleep (if it is an evening prayer) until you weep out your sin before God. This does not happen with everyone, but with those who have progressed. See then – do not put your flesh above God; rather neglect its rest for His sake. Whatever prayer rule you have taken up, fulfill it (if it is a long rule, then fulfill the entire rule well; if it is a short one, do the same), fulfill it with complete conscientiousness, and do not divide your heart so that one part belongs to God and the other to your flesh. The zeal of the Lord God will not tolerate your deception, your self-pity. He will hand you over to the devil, and the devil will give your heart no peace because of your disregard for Him who is your true peace and who will always do this for your own good, to keep your heart close to God, because every insincere prayer removes the heart from God and turns it against the person himself; and on the other hand, every sincere prayer brings the human heart closer to God and makes it dear to God. Therefore, believe the word: if you hurry in prayer for bodily rest so as to rest sooner, you will lose both bodily rest and rest of soul. Ah! What labors, sweat, and tears it takes to bring our heart close to God! And will we really make prayer itself (negligent prayer) a means of moving away from God? And will not God be zealous about this? After all, He is sorry for us and for our former labors, and so He wants to make us absolutely turn to Him again with all our heart. He wants us always to belong to Him.

133. Just as after unworthy Communion, so also after unworthy, cold prayer it is equally bad in the soul. This means that the Lord does not enter our heart, offended by our heartfelt disbelief and coldness, and permits evil spirits to nest in our heart so as to make us feel the difference between His yoke and their heavy, unbearable yoke.

Concerning Darkness and the Devil’s Schemes in Prayer

134. During prayer there are sometimes moments of deadly darkness and heartfelt oppression; stemming from disbelief of the heart (disbelief is darkness), do not lose heart in these moments, but remember that if the divine light has been cut off in you, it always shines in all its brilliance and majesty in God, in God’s Church, heavenly and earthly, and in the material world, in which His “eternal power and divinity” (Rom 1:20) are visible. Do not think that truth has weakened: it can never weaken, because truth is God Himself, and everything that exists has its foundation and cause in Him. Only your weak, sinful, dark heart weakens in truth, which cannot always bear the strain of its light and is not always able to receive its purity – only when it is cleansed or has been cleansed from sin, the first cause of spiritual darkness. The proof is closest at hand, from yourself. When the light of faith or the truth of God lives in your heart, it is at peace, firm, strong, alive; but when it is cut off, it is restless, weak, like a reed shaken by the wind, lifeless. Pay no attention to this Satanic darkness. Drive it from your heart with the sign of the life-giving cross.

135. There are hours in the lives of faithful Christians when God seems to abandon them – hours of diabolical darkness. At such times the person cries out from the depths of his heart: Why have You turned Your face from me, O unfailing Light? For a foreign darkness, evil and wretched, that belongs to Satan has covered me, my whole soul. It is hard for my soul to be in his tormenting darkness, which gives a foretaste of the torments of dark hell. Turn me back, O Savior, toward the light of Your commandments and set right my spiritual path. I earnestly beseech You.

136. When during prayer despondency and sadness take hold of your heart, know that this comes from the devil, who strives in every way to trip you up in prayer. Be strong, be brave, and by remembrance of God drive away the deadly sensations. Notice: if not in thoughts, then in the heart the enemy often struggles and blasphemes the name of the all-powerful God. What is blasphemy of the heart against God? Doubt, disbelief, despair, impatience with God’s punishments and murmuring – all these are passions. By disbelief in God’s truth and goodness the enemy spits forth blasphemy against God’s truth, goodness, and almightiness; by despair, also against His goodness. In general, through the outburst of human passions the enemy blasphemes God’s all-good providence and truthfulness.

137. Here you are praying, your prayer is proceeding successfully, you have an inner witness that the Lord hears it and is pleased with it. Your thoughts are at peace; it is light and sweet in your heart. But then, toward the end of your prayer, because of the slightest weakness of your heart and thoughts, something heavy is cast into your heart – a fire that weakens the heart – and you feel both an extreme heaviness of prayer and aversion to it instead of the former ease and inclination toward it. Do not despair, friend – this is the enemy’s deception, who loves to mock us, especially at the end of our pious activities, so that we might fall into despair and count all our previous labors in holy work as lost. Learn from this to never quench the Spirit even for a moment throughout your prayer – pray in spirit and truth unfailingly and do not flatter the Lord in prayer with even one word; that is, do not speak any word falsely, hypocritically. Let your entire prayer be one expression of truth, a trumpet of the Holy Spirit, and let no word serve the enemy’s lie, let it not be an instrument of the devil. And concerning the removal of the enemy’s burden from your soul and the extinction of his fire, pray earnestly to the Lord, acknowledging your fault before Him from your heart – hypocrisy during the prayer – and you will receive relief and peace. Do not hurry; speak everything calmly and do so. You will make it! The enemy hurries and troubles you, for there is no sense in troubled haste.

138. For the purification and enkindling of our prayer, the Lord permits the devil to tormentingly inflame our inmost being so that we, feeling a foreign fire within us and suffering from it, might strive to bring into our heart, through humble prayer, God’s fire, the fire of the Holy Spirit, which vivifies our hearts.

139. During home and public prayers, against the devil’s cunning and distraction of thoughts, remind yourself of the simplicity of truth and say to yourself: simply – that is, I believe all that is asked in the simplicity of the heart, and I ask for all simply, but your, my enemy, cunning, your blasphemies, abominations, fantasies – I reject. The beginning, foundation, and source of all your thoughtfulness, your word, and your activity should be humility, awareness of your nothingness and the fullness of Godhead, which created and fills all and “works all in all” (1Cor 12:6). Whoever is infected with pride is inclined to show contempt for everything, even for things holy and divine. Pride mentally annihilates or defiles every good thought, word, deed, and every creation of God. This is the deadly breath of Satan.

140. When, during the reading of canons and akathists to the Savior and the Mother of God, and a canon to your Guardian Angel, and during prayer reading, the devil whispers to your heart: it is false, false, it is far-fetched, far-fetched – and will steal from your heart the power (truth) of the words of prayer, then be “as deaf and hear not – a fool” (Ps 37:14; 1Cor 3:18), agreeing not even for a moment in your heart with the enemy’s lie and not reasoning with his false wisdom, and believe firmly in the truth of the full completeness of the Church’s prayers and hymns. Know that this is the utterance of the Holy Spirit spoken through the mouths of holy people who proclaimed praises fitting for the Savior, the Mother of God, and the saints – and our infirmities and wretchedness. Remember that “the Church is… the pillar and foundation of the truth” (1Tim 3:15).

141. During prayer, sometimes you feel a certain alienation from God and despair. You should not be drawn into this feeling – it is from the devil. Rather, you must say in your heart: “I do not despair of my salvation, wretch that I am, but trusting in Your boundless compassion, I come forward and cry out: if there is for me hope of salvation, if Your love for mankind overcomes the multitude of my lawlessness, be my Savior” (Prayers for Holy Communion 1 and 4).

142. When, during spoken prayer, the devil tries to undermine the words with a rain of the finest thoughts, say: the dominion of the Savior is in every word and sound.

143. Again, during prayer, it happens that our heart, in opposition to God, is ashamed before people of the words of prayer or of God Himself, pronouncing prayers lazily, not from the heart. We must trample underfoot this godless, people-pleasing, diabolical shame and fear, and pronounce prayers from the soul and aloud, in the simplicity of heart, imagining before ourselves the one God alone and counting everyone else as if they did not exist. “Whoever is ashamed of Me and of My words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him the Son of Man will also be ashamed when He comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels” (Mk 8:38).

144. The devil usually enters us through a single false thought or thought, and sinful desire, and then acts in us and troubles us: so simple is he. Does not the Lord God of spirits enter us even more easily through a single true thought and holy love, and be with us, act in us, and be all things for us? Therefore, pray without doubt: just as thinking is easy, so prayer should be easy.

145. Pay no attention to the enemy’s obscuring, fire, and oppression during the performance of prayer, and stand firm in your heart on the very words of prayer with confidence that they contain hidden treasures of the Holy Spirit.

146. Even holy people of God have been overtaken by diabolical despair and despondency. What then of us sinners? O, the enemy often wounds us with heartfelt degradation and cruel despair. We need to constantly turn to the Lord and be with Him every moment so that diabolical malice and despair might not overtake us. There is another way to free ourselves from diabolical despair – the broad path of worldly peace and pleasures – but God forbid every Christian from that, so as to free themselves from diabolical despair in such a way. It is better to go by the narrow path, endure despair, and constantly seek help and deliverance from the Lord Jesus Christ, who gladdens those who labor for their salvation for His sake, than to go down the broad path, smooth path of the world and there, by the pleasures of the flesh, purchase freedom from the spirit of despair. The enemy has driven many from the narrow and saving path onto the wide and smooth but destructive path by means of the spirit of despair.

147. During prayer, when faced with strong temptations from the devil, cast all your sorrow upon the Lord, knowing that He cares for you. In prayer, only believe in the Lord, that He is at your right hand, and all things will be possible for you.

148. The more powerful and effective the means that unite us with God (prayer and repentance), the more the destroyer, God’s adversary, directs destructive actions against it – our destroyer, who uses for this everything: our body, inclined to laziness, and the weakness of the soul, its attachment to earthly goods and cares, doubt, so close to all – disbelief, disbelief, foul, cunning, and blasphemous thoughts, heaviness of heart, obscuring of the mind – all is directed, by the enemy’s action, upon the inattentive, to trip us up in prayer, on this ladder ascending us to God. That is why there are very few sincere, zealous pray-ers; that is why very few do penance – confess and receive Communion. Christians might not have confessed and taken Communion at all, perhaps half would not, if civil law did not require everyone to go to confession and Holy Communion annually. Those who examine such things know all this.

Concerning Prayer Before Icons

149. Insofar as you begin to pray in spirit and truth before a holy icon, for example, of the Savior, to that extent is the spirit of the one depicted on the icon drawn to the icon – so that if your faith in the presence of the face written on the icon has reached the point where you see that face as alive, then it is truly present there by grace. An example: miracle-working icons that spoke, wept tears, blood, and so forth. That is precisely why all of them have an extraordinarily alive and expressive look. What is impossible for God, who can animate stone and form a human from it? Just as miraculously, He can do this with a painted image. “All things are possible to him who believes” (Mk 9:23), and to the believer the Highest One comes wondrously. He joins Himself to the sign of the life-giving cross and works wonders.

150. Icons of the Savior in every Orthodox home represent His omnipresence, His dominion in every place, and images of the saints represent the presence or nearness to us of the saints through God’s grace, as members of the one body of the Church, united under the one Head, Christ.

151. If I pray to my God with heartfelt, living, perfect faith, then I am near not only to Him, as a son to a Father living in one home with me, but also to all the celestial powers of heaven, to all the saints reigning in the heavens; they are not further from me than my icons, before which I pray. Therefore, we have a beautiful custom of having icons of the Lord, of His Most Pure Mother, of the Archangels, our Guardian Angel, and the saints in our homes, and of praying before them: their nearness to our bodily eyes signifies an even greater nearness to our spiritual sight, armed with unwavering faith. Nearness: “there is joy in heaven” and “over one repentant sinner” (Lk 15:7,10), as in a parent’s home brothers rejoice when the brother who had offended the father is sorry for disrespecting the parent through his bad behavior.

152. In bowing to icons, I first of all honor in them God who begat without beginning the Son-Image, His living Word, which gave corporeal being to God the Father’s infinite thought, creating all the worlds and all creatures that existed in God’s thought, and man, created in God’s image and likeness. Second, I honor the image of God incarnate. Third, I respect myself, my image of an immortal, godlike person, called to be a sharer of divine nature, one with the Lord, a temple of the Holy Spirit. Moreover, I am involuntarily impelled to honor icons because I see in them the manifestation of God’s saving power for the faithful and punishing for the unfaithful, as I also see and feel this same power in the image of the Cross of the Lord, which by its miraculous power is called the Cross-Worker. For all these reasons, icons take the place of the very faces they bear the names of. The faces of saints on our icons present to us the nearness in spirit of God’s holy ones, who all are alive in God and in the Holy Spirit are always near us by our heartfelt faith and prayer to them. For what can be far from God’s Spirit, who is omnipresent and fills all things and “penetrates all rational” (endowed with reason), “pure, most subtle spirits” (Solom 7:23)? “There is joy before the Angels of God over one repentant sinner” (Lk 15:10). This means that not only to God but also to the Angels are opened the dispositions of our souls. Standing before You and before Your terrible and holy Angels, I bring forth my wicked and lawless deeds, revealing and reproaching them (Prayer 4 for Communion).

153. If anyone asks you why you pray to lifeless icons, what benefit you get from them, tell them that we get incomparably more benefit from our icons than from even the best and most charitable person. Tell them that from icons always comes grace-filled power and help to our souls, delivering us from sins, sorrows, and sicknesses, especially from the icons of the Savior and the Mother of God. Tell them that a single heartfelt glance at them with faith, as at the living and present among us, saves us from cruel sorrows, passions, and spiritual darkness. If touching the garments of the Savior and handkerchiefs of the apostles made the sick whole, then all the more are the faces of the Savior and the Mother of God powerful to heal the faithful from every sorrow, through faith in the Lord and the Mother of God.

154. You look at the icon of the Savior and see that He gazes at you with the most radiant eyes – this gazing is the image of the fact that He truly gazes upon you with eyes brighter than the sun, hears all your heartfelt desires and sighs. The image is an image; in its outlines and signs it represents what cannot be drawn or marked, but is grasped only by faith. Believe then that the Savior always looks upon you and sees all of you – with all your thoughts, sorrows, sighs, with all your circumstances, as on the palm of His hand. “Behold, on My hands I have written your walls, and you are ever before Me”, says the Lord (Is 49:16). How much consolation and life is in these words of the all-mighty Provider! Therefore, pray before the icon of the Savior as before Him Himself. The philanthropist, present by His grace and by His eyes written on it, truly gazes upon you: “on every place His eyes look” (Prov 15:3), that is, also on the icon; and by the ear depicted on it, He hears you. But remember that His eyes are God’s eyes, and His ears are the ears of God the omnipresent.

155. As you see on the icon the face of the Mother of God, so the Most Pure Mother of the Sleepless Eye (the Lord) sees your whole soul, all your thoughts, feelings, intentions, undertakings, all your passions, weaknesses, shortcomings, and certainly your virtues, all your sighs, tears, all your reverence, thanksgiving, praise, all your hidden and manifest prayers. Wondrous is Her knowledge, for She is the Mother of the All-knowing and Omnipresent One who created our hearts.

Concerning Actions Accompanying Prayer

156. I offer to the Lord, to the Lady, or to an Angel and a saint, physical light, so that the Master might give me grace-filled light, spiritual light, through their prayers, and might lead me from the darkness of sin into the light of God’s knowledge and virtue. I offer physical fire so that the fire of the grace of the Holy Spirit might kindle in my heart and the fire of the passions might be consumed in my wretched heart. I offer a lamp with desire so that I myself might become a burning and shining lamp to all in the house of the Church. Behold, for this reason I place candles before icons – that is what I think when I light a lamp in its candle-stand. I confess that I place candles before icons with the hope of receiving spiritual benefits from those holy and most holy persons whose faces are painted on the icons. I confess to my spiritual self-interest. However, such is the law of reciprocity – to expect a gift for a gift: “in the measure by which you measure”, it is said, “it will be measured to you” (Mt 7:2). I am a weak, fleshly, sinful person, what I have, I am glad to give; not always being able to offer to my Lord or His Most Pure Mother or to God’s Angel or a saint a burning heart filled with faith and love, I will at least, as a fleshly, material person, bring a material gift to the heavens – a burning candle. May the Lord look down from heaven upon the small gift of my zeal, and may He give me in return abundantly: He alone is rich, I am poor and needy. He is in unapproachable light, I am in darkness. I am weak in faith: may He give me the gift of faith. I am poor in love: may He enrich my heart with this priceless treasure of heaven. I am powerless for all good: may He give me strength. On my part, there is a desire for heavenly goods and a material pledge: may the gift-giving Lord give me in return, through the prayers of the Most Pure Mother of God, the Angels and His saints, all that is needful for salvation.

157. When praying, do everything reasonably. When you pour oil into a lamp, imagine that the Life-Giver supports your life every day and hour, every moment of your life by the Holy Spirit, and as if daily through sleep in the bodily sense, and through prayer and God’s word in the spiritual sense, pours into you the oil of life by which your soul and body burn. When you light a candle before an icon, remember that your life is like a burning candle: it will burn down and go out, or some make it burn faster than it should through passions, much eating, wine, and other pleasures.

158. For burning before the Lord during prayer, do not spare wax candles: remember that you are burning it before the One living in unapproachable light and enlightening you from His light. Your candle is like a whole burnt offering to the Lord; let it be a gift to God from a perfect heart. May it remind you that you yourself should be a burning and shining lamp. “He was”, it is said of John the Forerunner, “a burning and shining lamp” (Jn 5:35).

159. When you make the sign of the cross, believe and constantly remember that your sins are nailed to the cross. When you fall into sin, at once condemn yourself sincerely and make the sign of the cross on yourself, saying: O Lord! You who nailed our sins to the cross, nail to the cross also my present sin and “have mercy on me… according to Your great mercy” (Ps 50:3) – and your sin will be cleansed. Amen.

160. When you make the sign of the cross, we place the upper end of the cross – on the forehead – in the image of the Father, who is uncreated Reason; the lower end – on the belly – in the image of the Son, born before all ages from the womb of the Father; and the crossbar on the shoulders and arms – in the image of the Holy Spirit, who is the arm or strength of the Lord, or the hand of the Lord, as it is said: “The arm of the Lord to whom is it revealed” (Jn 12:38; Is 53:1), or: “the hand of the Lord came upon me” (Ezek 3:22) – that is, the Holy Spirit. There is also an image in man of the Holy Trinity: the thinking mind – an image of God the Father; the heart, in which the mind dwells and images itself – an image of the Son of God, the hypostatic Wisdom of God; the lips, through which comes what is in the thoughts and on the heart, are an image of the Holy Spirit. “He breathed and said to them: Receive the Holy Spirit” (Jn 20:22). “When” from the heart “evil thoughts come out,… adultery, sexual immorality,… slander” (Mt 15:19), this is the evil spirit dwelling in man speaking. But when “a good person brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart” (Lk 6:45), this is an image of the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father through the Son. Great is man! Not without reason is it said: “I said: ‘You are gods, and all of you are sons of the Most High’” (Ps 81:6). “If he called them gods, to whom the word of God came – and Scripture cannot be set aside – what about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world? Why then do you accuse me of blasphemy because I said, ‘I am God’s Son’?” (Jn 10:35-36) Do not look at man, especially a Christian, except as at a son of God, converse with him as with a son of God by grace in Christ Jesus, our Lord.

Concerning Moderation in Prayer

161. If you do not have firm, shameless faith in God as the All-good and All-powerful, do not hastily approach to ask Him for the giving of some good. Otherwise, the devil will strike and wound you with faithlessness or disbelief in the possibility of your prayer being fulfilled, and you will depart from God’s face ashamed, despondent, and gloomy. Do not be frivolous, but first “sit down and figure out”, according to the Lord’s word, your “wealth” of the soul, or weigh your faith – whether “it is sufficient for completion”. And if it is not, the demons, seeing your inconsistency, will begin to mock you, saying: “This man began to build and could not finish” (Lk 14:28-30). So, before prayer, consider the degree of your faith and, having found it sufficient, living, firm, and shameless, approach boldly to the throne of grace, “so that you may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (Hebr 4:16).

162. Be moderate in all religious matters, for virtue measured according to strength, circumstances of time, place, and preceding labors, is prudence. It is good, for example, to pray from a pure heart, but as soon as there is no correspondence between prayer and strength (energy), different circumstances, place and time, and preceding labor, then it is already not a virtue. Therefore, the apostle Peter says: “Show in your goodness… knowledge” (that is, do not be led solely by your heart); “and in knowledge, self-control; in self-control, perseverance” (2Pet 1:5-6).

Concerning the Jesus Prayer

163. Two forces, completely opposite to each other, influence me: a good force and an evil force, the force of life and the force of death. As spiritual forces, both are invisible. The good force, by my sincere free prayer, always drives away the evil force, and the evil force is powerful only through the evil hidden in me. To avoid suffering from the endless provocations of the evil spirit, one must constantly have the Jesus Prayer in one’s heart: Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me! Against the invisible devil – the invisible God, against the strong – the Strongest.

164. Having Christ in your heart, fear lest you lose Him, and with Him the peace of your heart; it is bitter to begin anew, the efforts to cling to Him again after falling away will be difficult and bring many bitter tears to many. Hold with all your strength to Christ, acquire Him, and do not lose your holy boldness before Him.

165. Christ, brought into the heart by faith, sits in it with peace and joy. Not without reason is it said of God: You are holy and dwell in the holy ones.

166. All my troubles occur in my invisible thought and in my invisible heart, therefore I need an invisible Savior as well, leading our hearts. O, my strength, Jesus, Son of God! O, light of my mind! Peace, joy, breadth of my heart – glory to You. Glory to You, my Deliverer from invisible enemies, warring against my mind and heart and killing me at the very source of my life, at my most sensitive spot.

167. With the mental eyes of my heart I see how I mentally breathe Christ into my heart, how He enters into it, and suddenly brings peace and sweetness to it. O, may I never remain alone without You, Life-Giver of mine! It is bad for me without You.

168. In prayer, hold to this rule: it is better to speak five words from the heart than thousands of words with the tongue. When you notice that your heart is cold and prays unwillingly – stop, warm your heart with some living image – for instance, your wretchedness, your spiritual poverty, destitution, and blindness, or an image of God’s great blessings every moment toward you and toward all mankind, especially toward Christians – and then pray without hurrying, with warm feeling. Even if you do not manage to read all prayers in time, there is nothing wrong; but you will gain much more benefit from a slow and warm prayer than if you had read all prayers quickly, without feeling. I wish to speak five words with my mind than thousands of words with my tongue. When you notice your heart is cold in prayer, warm it through some living representation – for example, your wretchedness, your spiritual poverty and blindness; or an image of God’s great, continuous blessings to you and to all mankind, particularly to Christians – and then pray without haste, with warm feeling. If you do not succeed in reading all the prayers in time, no harm is done; but you will gain incomparably more benefit from unhurried and warm prayer than if you had read all prayers quickly and without sympathy. The Lord does not abandon those who labor for Him and stand long before Him; in the measure they measure, He measures to them, and corresponding to the abundance of true words in their prayer, He sends into their soul abundance of light, spiritual warmth, peace, and joy. It is good to pray long and continuously, but “not everyone can receive this word, but only those to whom it has been given…. The one who can accept this should accept it” (Mt 19:11-12). For those unable to sustain prolonged prayer, it is better to perform brief prayers with a burning soul.

169. You cannot overcome a single passion or sin without grace-filled help. Therefore, always ask for help from Christ the Savior. He came into the world for this very purpose, He suffered, died, and rose so as to help us in all things, to save us from sin and from the violence of the passions, to cleanse our sins, to give us in the Holy Spirit the power to do good deeds, to enlighten us, to strengthen us, to bring us peace. You say: how can one be saved when at every step sin stands and you sin at every moment? The answer is simple: at every step, every moment, call upon the Savior, remember the Savior and you will be saved, and you will save others.

170. It is bright and warm and peaceful for me when I turn my entire soul toward the spiritual Sun, the Sun of Righteousness, Christ my God. The ice of my heart melts, its dullness and rust are removed, darkness vanishes, spiritual death flees, heavenly life reigns, nothing earthly occupies me.

171. When you pray to God, imagine His nearness only in this way: that you breathe Him in every moment, move, are enlightened, find peace, are comforted, and are strengthened – in short, live by Him, according to Scripture: “by Him we live and move and have our being” (Act 17:28). The One who gives all life, breath, and everything. “Near you is God (His Word) on your lips and in your heart… If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in Him in your heart, you will be saved” (Rom 10:8-9).

172. When you are very young, or live the life of a sinful world, then you know Christ the Savior and the enemy of God and mankind – Satan most malevolent – only by name, and you think that Christ is far from you – in heaven – while the devil is somewhere, only not close and not around you. Although you hear that he is evil, you think that his evil does not touch you. But when you are mature and enter into the life of spiritual struggle, when you serve God with a pure conscience, then you will experience on your heart both the good yoke of the Savior and the heavy, unbearable yoke of Satan, whom he mercilessly insults us.

173. When you pray to the Lord, gaze with the eyes of your heart inward, into your soul; the Lord is there, in your thoughts and in the movements of your heart that are righteous, as well as outside you and in every place. He is near you, on your lips and in your heart, not only in the heavens or in the abyss.

174. Our heart dies each day a spiritual death. Warm, tearful prayer is its revival, the beginning of its breathing. If you do not pray daily with spiritual warmth, it is easy to die spiritually soon.

175. When darkness of wretchedness – doubt, despair, confusion, disturbance – covers you, then call upon only with all your heart the sweetest name of Jesus Christ. In Him you will find everything: both light and confirmation, both hope and consolation, peace – you will find in Him the very goodness, mercy, abundance – you will find all this in one name, enclosed as if in some rich treasure chest.

The Father John’s Prayerful Addresses

176. The human soul is a free force, for it can become either a good or an evil force, depending on the direction you give it. O Lord! All-powerful Force! Strengthen my weak soul in every virtue. On the unmovable rock of Your commandments, establish my heart, weak for all good. O Lord! And I daily, through experience, know that without You I am nothing; without You I cannot do any good. Without You, there is only evil in me in its various forms. Without You, I am a lost son. O, inexpressible Goodness, fill my heart with Your goodness. Most of all I pray: grant me to love You with all my heart and my neighbor as myself. May I not be malevolent, proud, scornful, disobedient, but may I be harmless, humble, respectful with tenderness and obedient. Amen.

177. O Lord! May Your gifts, both spiritual and material, not be idle in us and among us. Give them saving and beneficial movement. Do this in all. May Your talents increase, O Lord, through the active effort of each of us.

178. Do not permit me, O Lord, even for a moment to do the will of Your enemy and mine – the devil – but may I constantly do Your will alone, O God and King of mine. You alone are my true King. Through whom kings reign, grant me to obey You, to fear You always sincerely and firmly. “Come, let us bow down and kneel, let us kneel before the Lord our God, and let us serve Him with fear and rejoice in Him with trembling” (Ps 94:6,2:11). O Lord! Grant me to see my sins so that I might not despise sinners like myself and not harbor evil in my heart against them for their sins, and condemn myself according to my desert as the greatest sinner, myself toward my carnal self – always harbor implacable malice. “If anyone does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters – yes, and even life itself – such a person cannot be My disciple”, says the Lord (Lk 14:26).

179. O, infinitely great Benefactor, my Savior! When I imagine the infinite corruption of my nature through sin and the many-fold passions, and at this my spirit fails and grows sad, then – as soon as I remember You, that You came to renew what sin has corrupted in my nature, and to give my dishonor, my shame, angelic nobility, even higher than angelic – the nobility of the Son of God, for faith in You, for rebirth through water and the Spirit, and for receiving Your Holy Mysteries – my spirit at once leaps up from sadness, shakes off the disgrace of the passions, and is filled entirely with gratitude toward You. Glory to You, infinite Goodness and Power, Son of God!

180. Glory to You, All-holy, life-giving Spirit, who proceed from the Father and ever rest in the Son (Sticheron for the feast of the Holy Trinity), inseparable from the Father and Son! Glory to You, Son of God, “who by God’s Spirit cast out demons” (Mt 12:28; Lk 11:20) and through Him arrange our salvation, sanctify, strengthen, enlighten us! Glory to You, O Father, who art always pleased with us in the Son, through the Holy Spirit! Undivided Trinity and Single Godhead – have mercy on us!

181. Holy Spirit, living, personal, sovereign, living bond between Father and Son – have mercy on me!

182. Holy Spirit, life-giving and unifying all creation, especially rational creation, strength of all creation – have mercy on me!

183. Captivate me, Lord, in the sweet captivity of Your Holy Spirit, so that “as rivers toward the south” (Ps 125:4), my words might flow to Your glory and for the salvation of Your people! Grant me this sweet and mighty internal impulse to express freely on paper the fullness of spiritual visions and feelings! May my tongue be “the pen of a ready scribe” (Ps 44:2) – of the All-holy Spirit!

184. O Lord! Grant me a simple, harmless, open, believing, loving, generous heart, a worthy vessel for You, the All-good One!

185. I look only at You, O Lord, with the eyes of my heart; I believe in You without doubt. You Yourself know what and how to give me. You are the treasury of every good, You are the overflowing goodness upon all, wisdom, almightiness. And toward You do I look, O Lady, take my defense and have mercy on me yourself.

186. Save us, Your people, O Lady! Save us, Your kinfolk! Save us, O Mother of Life and Mother of all us, though we are unworthy to call You our Mother! Cleanse us, sanctify us, establish us, and save us through Your prayers!

187. Good Lady! Show and continually show Your dominion over me and Your people, those who fear God and are virtuous – by delivering us, through our prayer, from foul, cunning, and blasphemous thoughts, from all sins and passions, and from all the schemes of demons, as a good Mother of God.

188. Virgin Mary – Most gracious Lady of all the sons and daughters of mankind, as the Daughter of God the Father, who is love, Mother of God-the-Word – our love, chosen Bride of the All-holy Spirit, who is the single-minded love of the Father and the Word. How not to turn to such a Lady and not to hope for all spiritual goods from Her!

189. I thank You, O Lord, O Master and Judge of mine, that You teach me to pray to You simply, and You hear me when I cry out to You, and from my sins and sorrows You save me, and set my feet on broad ground. Behold, I called out to You in the sin of my cunning with the words of Church prayer: O Lord, our God, who have granted mankind forgiveness through repentance… and as soon as I finished it, peace and ease settled in my soul. June 29, 1864.

190. O compassionate Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, I thank You from all my heart because You heard my prayer about loving my neighbor and contempt for worldly things, and poured peaceful, reasonable, sweet love into my heart. Establish, O God, this in me through the prayers of the Most Pure Lady our Mother of God, and may I be Your child, O Lord, and Her child most truly. July 26, 1864, 11 o’clock in the evening.

191. O Lord! You came to save us through faith in You – behold, I believe that You are my Savior; save me. You came to renew my nature corrupted by sin – renew me, who have corrupted myself through passions and desires; renew me both in soul and in body, so that I might be pure of heart and strong of body for the glory of Your name. You came to deliver us from the work of the enemy – deliver me from the work of the all-evil, unclean, foul, and abominable foe, warring in my members and by violence drawing me toward sin. You came to enlighten us – enlighten my heart darkened by passions. You came to gather the scattered – gather my thoughts scattered by the enemy. You came to strengthen us in our infirmity and said: My strength is made perfect in weakness, and Your apostle says: “Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me” (2Cor 12:9). Behold, I am extremely weak and cannot do any good without You. I cannot even think, feel, or desire anything good without You, nor speak, nor act; I am absolutely powerless for any good without You. Give me grace, give me light and strength to think and feel what is good and easily accomplish it, speak and do what is pleasing to You. Behold, I give my whole life to You, O Christ, my God, my Savior, my Renewer; cleanse me, sanctify me, and save me. “Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me” (Ps 50:12). Help me: my destruction without You is near and swift at every hour.

192. Morning Prayer. O God! Creator and Master of the world! Look with mercy upon Your creation, adorned with Your divine image in these morning hours, so that Your eye, brighter by countless times than the rays of the sun, might enliven and enlighten my soul, dark and deadened by sin. Take from me despair and laziness; grant me gladness and spiritual vigor, so that in the rejoicing of my heart I might glorify Your goodness, holiness, Your boundless greatness, Your infinite perfections at every hour and in every place. For You are my Creator and Master of my life, O Lord, and You alone are worthy of glory from Your rational creations at every hour, now and ever and to the ages of ages. Amen.

193. When you receive healing from any illness, offer the following brief hymn of thanksgiving to the Lord: Glory to You, O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Only-begotten Father, who alone “heal every disease and every sickness among the people” (Mt 4:23), because You had mercy on me, a sinner, and delivered me from my illness, not permitting it to develop and kill me according to my sins. Grant me from now on, O Lord, the strength to firmly do Your will for the salvation of my wretched soul and for Your glory with Your unbeginning Father and Your consubstantial Spirit, now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen.

194. Glory to You, Savior, All-powerful Force! Glory to You, Savior, Omnipresent Force! Glory to You, Womb most compassionate! Glory to You, Hearing always open to the prayers of me, the wretched one, in order to have mercy on me and save me from my sins! Glory to You, Eyes most radiant, constantly gazing upon me with love and seeing all my hidden things! Glory to You, glory to You, glory to You, O sweetest Jesus, my Savior!

195. O Lady, Mother of God! You whose love for Christians surpasses the love of every earthly mother, every wife, hear us in our prayers and save us! May we remember You constantly! May we pray to You always with zeal! May we always resort without delay and without doubt under the shelter of Your holiness.

196. You alone know the cares, labors, and sweat of Your saints for their purification, for pleasing You. O Father of all, You know Your saints. Teach us to imitate them in our lives so that we also might be in union with all through love.

197. The Lord is so holy, so simple in His holiness, that even a single cunning or unclean thought deprives us of Him, so sweet and very sweet, so pure and most pure, peace and light of our souls. Hence all the saints are light, all a single fragrance, like the light of the sun, like the very pure air. O Lord, grant me this simple holiness!

198. O Lord! I am a wonder of Your goodness, wisdom, and almightiness, inasmuch as I have been brought by You from nothingness into being, inasmuch as I am preserved by You in being until now, inasmuch as I have, through the goodness, compassion, and philanthropy of Your Only-begotten Son, to inherit eternal life, if I remain faithful to You, inasmuch as by the awesome sacred offering of Yourself by Your Son in sacrifice, I have been raised from a terrible fall, redeemed from eternal destruction. I glorify Your goodness, Your infinite might, Your wisdom. But complete the wonders of Your goodness, might, and wisdom upon me, the wretched one, through the judgments You know, save me, Your unworthy servant, and lead me into Your eternal kingdom, grant me to inherit endless life, the day without evening.

199. O Lord! I confess before You that life and health and strength of spiritual and bodily powers are not found in a dacha, not in the forest, but in You in the temple, chiefly in the Liturgy and in Your life-giving Mysteries. O, the greatest blessedness of the holy Mystery! O, life-giving holy Mystery! O, inexpressible love – the divine Mystery! O, wondrous and unceasing providence of the Lord God concerning our salvation and deification – the divine Mystery! O, foretaste of eternal life – the divine Mystery!

200. My Lady, Most Holy Mother of God. Before the Liturgy I prayed to You that You would obtain for me the grace to perform it with great power, for God’s glory, for the salvation of the world and my own. You have arranged all well. I thank You, all-good Helper, Swift to Hear, unfailing hope.

201. O Lord, I thank You from all my heart for the grace-filled breathings of Your Holy Spirit during public and home worship, for the cleansing of sins, for compunction, peace and tears, for fatherly consolation, for boldness, for strength.

202. O Lord! Always grant me a gentle heart, a clear, straight, gentle gaze. So be it! – Glory, O Lord, to the change made in me by Your right hand. I thank You, that You have taken from me the burning thorns of my passions and my oppression, my shame and my weakness, and have given me peace, stillness, freedom, strength, and boldness. Establish in me what You have made. Glory to the power of faith, glory to the power of prayer: for truly, whatever I ask of You in prayer with faith, I receive according to Your word (Mk 11:24). I thank You, O Lord, that so many times You raise me from the dead (2Cor 1:9), and the kingdom of death and sin in me You destroy.

203. O Lord! Teach me and strengthen me with Your Holy Spirit to live in mutual love; subdue the outbursts of passions that hinder heavenly, evangelical love, and make our hearts dead to earthly pleasures. Grant me, O Lord, always to prefer all earthly goods to Your grace, Your peace, Your truth, and Your holiness and to remain in it always, all the days of my life, until my last breath.

204. I thank You, O Lord, because You give me new life each time when I with tears of repentance and thanksgiving perform the divine Liturgy and partake of the most pure and life-giving Mysteries of Yours. To Your holy Mysteries I owe the continuation of my existence until now, the purity of my paths, and my good reputation among Your people. May Your great name be glorified ever more and more in me and in all Your people, in whom Your holy name is invoked – and throughout all Your world; may Your kingdom come, the kingdom of truth, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit, into all our hearts, as You said: “I will dwell in them” “and walk among them”, “and I will be their God, and they will be My sons and daughters” (2Cor 6:16,18; Lev 26:12; Jer 3:19), and may Your holy, wise, all-good, and all-perfect will be done, as in heaven so on earth, in all Your people and in me, the sinner, because our own will is erring, short-sighted, sinful, ruinous, unloving, evil, envious, proud, lazy, pleasure-loving, avaricious, and stingy.

205. O Lord! Grant me always to stretch forth to You my petition for the whole world and all the fullness of the Church always with all-embracing love, sincere, for I am, by Your grace, an intercessor for all and for my own sins. Grant me, O Lord, God the Father, to contemplate Your inexpressible love for the world, which gave us Your beloved Son, the Only-begotten. Grant me, O God, Son of God, to contemplate Your self-emptying in the world and on the cross for our salvation. Grant me, O God, Holy Spirit, to contemplate Your grace, abundantly poured out and being poured out upon the world for the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ, often filling my wretched heart. O Holy Trinity, grant me always to glorify You without ceasing in heart and lips, and more in deeds.

206. O, invisible Benefactor of mine, by whom I live without ceasing! You are listening to me, fulfilling the desires of my heart in good things, saving me from my sins, from the wickedness of invisible enemies, providing for my fate, enlightening me, helping me, my glory, my strength, my support – when shall I see You? When shall I see my Benefactor and Creator face to face? But you, my enemy, the devil, constantly flooding my soul with sin, deceitful, sly, malevolent, constantly killing me, darkening me, weakening me, covering my face with shame and dishonor – when shall I be completely delivered from you through the grace, compassion, and philanthropy of my Lord, Jesus Christ? When will every possibility be taken from you to pour the poison of your malice into my heart?

207. O, how bitter were my sins to You, O Christ my Savior, O my God, when You were struck on the cheek, beaten, spat upon, Your head pierced with thorns and nailed to the cross – when You hung in unspeakable torments on the cross for me, delivering me from the most bitter, unspeakable torments of hell! But I should remember this very self-emptying of Yours, these sufferings more often so as not to sin and to zealously fulfill every virtue, to love You with all my heart, to fulfill Your saving commandments! Yet I often forget this terrible sacrifice offered for me by the Only-begotten Son of the heavenly Father, consubstantial with Him and coeternal. Grant me, O Lord, a pure heart and unshakeable repentance for salvation; grant me the remaining time of my life to please You!

208. O Lord! I thank You from all my heart, that without number You saved me from dishonor, violence, cruelty of passions, and extinguished the burning arrows cast into me by the cunning one, and protected my soul with peace and refreshed it with the dew of Your grace. Glory to You, Most merciful and All-powerful, that I remain whole and unharmed by Your grace until now, despite the countless deceits against me of invisible and all-evil foes seeking to devour me. I know, O Lord, that You will deliver me from all their schemes and plots and save me through the judgments You know, into Your heavenly kingdom, and not only me, but all who live piously and are beset by evil spirits. For Yours is the will to have mercy and save both those who wish salvation and even those who do not. Whether I wish it or not, save me (Prayer from evening prayers, St John of Damascus).

209. I thank You, O Joy of mine, O Lord of glory, because You took my form through the Incarnation from the Most Pure Virgin and honored and exalted and deified mankind. I thank You because from corruption again to incorruptibility You lead me, my filth You cleanse, my weaknesses and sicknesses You heal, my sorrows You turn into joy, the oppression of sins You transform into the scope of Your righteousness, which comes from faith and heartfelt repentance. You drive away the darkness of the passions and grant me Your spiritual light, You remove confusion and send down peace from above, You remove timidity and grant me courage with boldness. Glory to Your mercy!

210. Grant me, O Lady, purity of heart, simplicity of heart, filial trust, dedication and love toward You always, now and ever and to the ages of ages. Amen.

211. O Lord! Teach me to give alms willingly, with kindness, with joy, and to believe that in giving it, I do not lose but gain infinitely more than what I give. Turn away my eyes from people with cruel hearts who do not sympathize with the poor, who meet poverty with indifference, who condemn, reproach, stigmatize it with shameful names, and dishearten my heart so as not to do good, so as to make me also hard-hearted toward poverty. O, O Lord my God! How many such people there are! O Lord, restore the work of charity! O Lord, may all my charity go for good, not for harm! O Lord, receive Yourself charity in the persons of Your poor people! O Lord, be pleased to raise up a house for the poor in this city, as I have prayed to You so many times, O all-good, all-powerful, wise, and wondrous One (and it was raised).

212. O Lord! Grant that Your temple, for all who enter it with faith, fear of God, and reverence, impart enlightenment of souls, cleansing of sins, sanctification, peace, health, quietness of soul – strengthen faith, hope, and love, contribute to the amendment of life, success in all good undertakings and deeds, mutual love, pure Christian life, softening of hearts, and the end of self-love, hardness of heart, covetousness, greed, envy, malice, gluttony, drunkenness, debauchery – these vices, so harmful in public life and undermining its foundations. Grant this, grant, O Lord, to all who love to visit Your temple, and incline even those who do not love it to love it and amend their hearts and deeds. For the time is near and the judgment is at the doors for all people of every rank and condition, every sex and age, and all face a matter of infinitely great importance – to give an account at Christ’s dread judgment.

213. My Master, O Lord Jesus Christ! My swift, most swift, never-shamefaced Protector! I thank You from all my heart that You heard me graciously – when I in darkening, oppression, and enemy fire cried out to You – most swiftly, powerfully, graciously delivered me from my enemies and granted my heart space, ease, light! O Master, how I suffered from the schemes of the foe, how timely You showed me help, and how manifest was Your all-powerful help! I glorify Your goodness, O well-listening Master, hope of the hopeless. I glorify that You did not put my face to complete shame, but graciously delivered me from the darkening and disgrace of hell. How then can I ever afterward lose hope in Your hearing and compassion for me, the wretched one? I will, I will always call upon Your sweetest name, O my Savior; and You, O infinite Goodness, just as You always, so also in the future save me according to Your boundless compassion, for Your name is Philanthropist and Savior!

214. How good You are, O my Lord, and how near to us – so near that we can always converse with You and be consoled by You, breathe You, be enlightened by You, find peace in You, find spaciousness of heart in You. O Lord, teach me the simplicity of love toward You and toward my neighbor, so that I might always be with You, so that they might always have peace in You, O Lord! Do not permit me even for a moment to commit adultery with the most abominable and all-evil enemy – the devil – by any wickedness, pride, envy, stinginess, covetousness, gluttony, lust, blasphemy, despair, or falsehood. May I be wholly Yours always.

215. O my infinite Sweetness, O Lord Jesus Christ, what sweetnesses have You not given me to taste in my temporal existence. I thank You, O my Mercy, O my Sweetness. But if earthly sweetnesses are so numerous, varied, and pleasant, what must heavenly, spiritual sweetnesses be like! They are truly infinite, innumerable, unimaginably pleasant. Do not deprive me, O much-merciful, all-generous Lord, of Your heavenly sweetnesses which You have prepared for those who love You. Do not deprive them to others of Your people either. Grant them all to know You, O Lord, our Sweetness. After all, You, this sweetness of ours, are everywhere and on earth – that is, Your work is every sweetness. Yet, grant me, O Lord, to bear with good cheer the sorrows of life as well. They are necessary for my many-suffering flesh, for my old self. O Philanthropist! Teach us all to bear them with good cheer and grant them to know their necessity. “Rejoice in suffering” (Rom 12:12). “In the world you will have tribulation” (Jn 16:33).

216. O Lord! I am Your vessel; fill me with the gifts of Your Holy Spirit. Without You I am empty of all good, or rather full of all sin. O Lord! I am Your ship – fill me with the cargo of good deeds. O Lord! I am Your ark; fill it not with the deceit of avarice and pleasures, but with love toward You and toward Your animate image – mankind.

217. O, name most sweet, most holy name, all-powerful name, the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Victory of mine, O Lord, glory to You! O Lord, we are Your members; we are one body. You are our Head. O Lord, may all passions flee from us, may demons flee from us. O Lord! Grant us the grace of love, never failing. O Lord! May we show respect and love for one another, as for You Yourself, as deified by You.

218. Glory, O Lord, to the never-weakening power of Your cross. When the foe oppresses me with a sinful thought and feeling, and I, without freedom in my heart, make the sign of the cross with faith several times, at once my sin falls away from me, and the oppression vanishes, and I go out into freedom. Glory to You, O Lord! O Lord: may nothing fleshly, material tear me away from You. May I always be with You. How good it is to be with You!

219. O, Trinity, our God! Simple Essence, who created our soul in Your image, so that in You life and our peace in Your name! O Trinity, Nourisher and Hope of ours! Grant us to place our hope always in You alone, to find in You alone life and rest. O Trinity! You are as a mother who carries all on Your arms and nourishes all from Your hands, as a most tender mother! You never forget and will never forget us, for You Yourself have said: “Even if a mother forgets” her child – “I will not forget you” (Is 49:15) – that is, I will never cease to nourish, protect, defend, and save you. Yet You Yourself have said: “I will not leave you or forsake you” (Hebr 13:5). Why then are we concerned about food, why are we greedy, overeat, dainty? Why do we grudge sharing with our neighbor? O, wretchedness! O, blindness! O, foul self-love! O, unlove toward God and neighbor! For in the face of our neighbor is God – and we wish God Himself His own gifts! Remember how generously the spirit-bearing prophet Elisha rewarded the Shunnamite woman, who received him into her house with her whole soul and simply offered him hospitality! He asked her a son from God through God’s Son, and then, when the son died, he raised him.

220. As long as the holy Mysteries we receive will remind us that “though many, we are one body” (1Cor 10:17), and as long as there is no mutual heartfelt unity among us as members of the one body of Christ? As long as we will lawlessly rule in life, war with one another, envy one another, bite and torment one another, grieve and devour one another, condemn and abuse one another? As long as there is no Spirit of Christ in us – the spirit of gentleness, humility, harmlessness, sincere love, self-denial, patience, chastity, self-control, simplicity and sincerity, contempt for the earthly, entire striving toward the heavenly? Master, O Lord Jesus Christ, enlighten our eyes, and may Your good Spirit guide us all to the land upright. Give us Your Spirit!

221. On the 15th of August, on the day of the Dormition of the Mother of God in the year 1898, I was blessed to see for the first time in a dream, face to face, the Queen of Heaven and to hear Her most sweet, blissful, encouraging voice: “Most dear children of the heavenly Father” – at a time when I, aware of my wretchedness, was looking upon the Most Pure face of Her with trembling and with the thought: will not the Queen of Heaven reject me from Herself with anger? – O, face most holy and most kind! O, blue eyes, so blue and dove-like, good, humble, calm, majestic, heavenly, divine. I will not forget you, wondrous eyes! – The vision lasted a moment. Then She departed from me unhurriedly and vanished. I saw behind Her the departure of the heavenly Visitant…

Excerpts From the Diary for the Biography of Father John of Kronstadt

I glorify the boundless mercy and forbearance of God toward me and all mankind. For seventy years I have sinned every day and repented, and the Lord had mercy on me, did not punish me according to all His justice, waiting for my amendment each day. The days of my youth passed, and in the higher educational institution, in the Academy, I became more attentive to my inner world. Having become a priest, I lived not without sin, but increasingly deepened the meaning of my calling, and the Lord each day had mercy on me, granting me tears of repentance, making me worthy of frequent Communion of the Holy Mysteries. My service to the holy Church, the performance of prayers and the Mysteries was not without stumbling. Invisible enemies strongly fought and captured me, troubled me, especially during the performance of the Mysteries – the struggle was for spiritual life and death. I repented, wept, conquered and overcame, receiving forgiveness. In the first years of my priesthood, I did not often, not every day, celebrate the Liturgy, and therefore often weakened spiritually. Then, seeing the benefit of daily celebration of the Liturgy and Communion of the holy Mysteries, I began to serve daily and receive Communion. And throughout all the years of my priesthood and service to God, how much mercy I received from Him! – there is no number. I thank the Lord for the wondrous evening and morning prayers and the rule before holy Communion. How much the Lord gave me tears of purifying compunction, what streams of mercy He poured upon me, and this every day – even now! What shall I render to the Lord for all these mercies? My sins have multiplied more than the sand of the sea, and I still live, and still repent, not ceasing to sin in deed, word, thought, laziness, neglect, lack of self-control, and every sin inherent to man. O God, be merciful to me, a sinner, still and more! Be patient with me, grown old in iniquities, and cleanse me from every defilement of flesh and spirit. Amen.

O Lord, I experience daily the repulsion from You of the spirit of earthly delusion, which deadens me, darkens me, torments me with vanity. Constantly I must war with myself, with my desires and the enemy’s delusion, and mortify all passions, counting them absurd, senseless, and destructive, and prefer all to You alone and love You alone. O, how cunning, sleepless, active the enemy is for our destruction! And we do not soon perceive his schemes, but afterward, when he becomes extremely tiresome and hateful. We often find ourselves in his delusion. O Lord, deliver us from the evil one. The solitary life is blessed, uplifted by divine longing (Antiphon).

O Lord, fill all my being, and may every ill-will flee far from me, let it not touch me even for a moment. Let me be entirely in You and with You, sufficing Good. You are my life. You are my peace, You are my blessedness, You are my light, my strength, and my glory. Amen.

O Lord, do not let me dream of myself as if I were better than anyone of the people, but think of myself as the worst of all and judge no one, and judge myself strictly.

My holy Guardian Angel instructs me daily and hourly on the path of salvation. I see this with the eyes of my heart, sense it, and thank God and God’s appointed guardian.

Each day the Lord recreates and renews me through the celebration of the Liturgy and the reception of the holy life-giving Mysteries. I see this, feel this, sense this divine miracle and thank the Creator and my Recreator, who recreates me anew, heals me, brings me peace. What shall I bring, or what shall I render to You, O Lord? I have nothing of my own that is good; all is Yours. Teach me to love You ardently, O Lord my God.

The Trinity – my life, my light, my peace, my deliverance, my salvation, my beauty, my health, my contentment, my providence for me and for all creation, my strength and glory, my broad renewal. She is everything for me; I envy no one; I wish everyone well and beseech God to grant all what is needful for them, and for the rich a generous heart and a compassionate one.

I would wish to see the primordial Goodness, Brightness, Beauty, infinite Wisdom, Power, creating all and sustaining and governing all, but I am not ready, my heart is not pure. “Having such promises, let us purify ourselves from all defilement of body and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God” (2Cor 7:1).

In my old age (79 years), each day is a special mercy of God, each hour and each minute. My physical strength has been exhausted, but my spirit is alert and burns for my beloved Bridegroom, the Lord Jesus Christ. I have received so many pledges of mercy from God in this life; I hope also in the future life after death. And death is a birth into eternal life through God’s mercy and philanthropy.

Glory to God! Fifty-two years have been fulfilled of my priesthood by God’s grace and mercy; I am still alive, though ailing. For so many years of grace-filled priesthood I cannot thank the Lord, the One in Trinity. As I could, as I was able, as I labored, I served, but erred greatly, weakened much, was fought against greatly by the enemy. Cover, O Lord, all my sins with Your mercy.

What shall I render to You, O Lord, for having granted me the mercy to be born and raised in the Orthodox faith and Church and in my dear, priceless homeland, Russia, in which from ancient times the Orthodox Church has been planted. – I thank and glorify You as best I can, by Your grace!

O Lord! There are no words in human speech worthy to thank You for all the countless blessings revealed through Your goodness to me, a sinner, throughout all my life, which has passed before Your Face, O merciful Father! Even now, behold, in my seventy-ninth year, You preserve and save me each day, and now especially in the sight of my enemies, seeking to devour me because I am Your servant, though unworthy. But grant me, O Lord, the grace to thank You completely and to acquire the life purified by repentance created for me, grant me to escape the delusion of multiform sin, fighting and wishing to steal me away from You. Grant me to glorify You loudly, loudly in this godless world. Amen.

Discourse of July 28, 1907 1

In one of the morning prayers to God the Almighty, we read: “and save us and lead us into Your eternal kingdom, for You are my Creator and the Provider and Giver of all good.” Today at morning prayer I paid special attention to these words. They contain important and instructive thoughts. We are all sinners, we have no freedom from sins; we are all, like all things and beings in the world, and our bodies are corruptible and transient, disappearing. Yet our soul is eternal and desires eternal existence and strives to perpetuate itself somehow; believing and pious souls have a yearning for eternal life and consider this life as a swift sleep and a fleeting dream. We Christians, from the book of the Gospel, which is the Word of eternal and abiding truth, are taught to believe in eternal life, and each day we say to ourselves: I believe in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come. Christ our God is the resurrection and the life. He has given us eternal life. Christ is risen from the dead, by death has trampled down death, and to those in the tombs He has given life. – So, dear brethren and sisters, there is a kingdom of eternal light, eternal life, eternal love, eternal truth, eternal peace, eternal beauty, eternal inconceivable and unimaginable blessedness for those who have prepared themselves for the age to come. This is an infallible truth. But equally true is the truth that to this kingdom of peace, truth, and love we must prepare ourselves here. The Gospel teaches us this preparation, the Church teaches us. We must teach ourselves here true faith and all Christian virtues: love, simplicity, gentleness, humility, goodness, and mercy, harmlessness, temperance, and the beginning and end of all virtue – prayer always. Without prayer a Christian, like a fish without water, cannot live.

Let us then, dear brethren and sisters, prepare for the eternal kingdom through faith, prayer, and virtue. Amen. Glory to God!

The following sermon of Father John is printed from his manuscript. Until now, this sermon has not been known in print.

Scripture Index

Every Scripture reference identified in this book, sorted in canonical Bible order. Tap a reference to jump to the verse where it appears.

Genesis
Genesis 1:285. The Word in Prayer (5.1)
Leviticus

Leviticus 26:1220. The Father John’s Prayerful Addresses (20.29)

1 Samuel

1 Samuel 18:3610. On Prayer to the Saints (10.2)

1 Samuel 19:123. Prayer – Breath of the Holy Spirit (3.3)

Job
Job 42:810. On Prayer to the Saints (10.2)
Psalms

Psalms 7:1011. On Prayer for Our Neighbor (11.2)

Psalms 37:1415. Concerning Darkness and the Devil’s Schemes in Prayer (15.7)

Psalms 44:220. The Father John’s Prayerful Addresses (20.8)

Psalms 50:317. Concerning Actions Accompanying Prayer (17.4)

Psalms 50:1220. The Father John’s Prayerful Addresses (20.16)

Psalms 54:2311. On Prayer for Our Neighbor (11.2)

Psalms 76:1111. On Prayer for Our Neighbor (11.2)

Psalms 81:62. On the Nature, Significance, and Power of Prayer (2.30); 17. Concerning Actions Accompanying Prayer (17.5)

Psalms 98:610. On Prayer to the Saints (10.2)

Psalms 120:3–58. On the Lord’s Prayer (8.1)

Psalms 125:420. The Father John’s Prayerful Addresses (20.8)

Proverbs

Proverbs 15:310. On Prayer to the Saints (10.18); 16. Concerning Prayer Before Icons (16.6)

Proverbs 23:262. On the Nature, Significance, and Power of Prayer (2.9); 14. Concerning Overcoming the Flesh in Prayer (14.3)

Isaiah

Isaiah 49:158. On the Lord’s Prayer (8.2); 20. The Father John’s Prayerful Addresses (20.44)

Isaiah 49:1616. Concerning Prayer Before Icons (16.6)

Isaiah 53:117. Concerning Actions Accompanying Prayer (17.5)

Isaiah 55:115. The Word in Prayer (5.6)

Jeremiah

Jeremiah 3:1920. The Father John’s Prayerful Addresses (20.29)

Jeremiah 15:110. On Prayer to the Saints (10.2, 10.11)

Ezekiel

Ezekiel 3:2217. Concerning Actions Accompanying Prayer (17.5)

Wisdom

Wisdom 7:2316. Concerning Prayer Before Icons (16.4)

Matthew
Matthew 3:613. Repentance in Prayer (13.3)
Matthew 4:1713. Repentance in Prayer (13.3)

Matthew 4:2320. The Father John’s Prayerful Addresses (20.18)

Matthew 6:814. Concerning Overcoming the Flesh in Prayer (14.1)

Matthew 6:2110. On Prayer to the Saints (10.18)

Matthew 6:328. On the Lord’s Prayer (8.2)

Matthew 7:27. On the Conciliality of Prayer (7.2); 10. On Prayer to the Saints (10.1); 17. Concerning Actions Accompanying Prayer (17.1)

Matthew 9:229. On Prayer to the Theotokos (9.8)

Matthew 10:19–206. Prayer in the Church (6.3)

Matthew 11:1214. Concerning Overcoming the Flesh in Prayer (14.1)

Matthew 11:282. On the Nature, Significance, and Power of Prayer (2.25)

Matthew 12:2820. The Father John’s Prayerful Addresses (20.5)

Matthew 12:3413. Repentance in Prayer (13.3)

Matthew 12:365. The Word in Prayer (5.3)

Matthew 15:82. On the Nature, Significance, and Power of Prayer (2.9)

Matthew 15:1917. Concerning Actions Accompanying Prayer (17.5)

Matthew 18:207. On the Conciliality of Prayer (7.10)

Matthew 19:11–1219. Concerning the Jesus Prayer (19.6)

Mark

Mark 8:3815. Concerning Darkness and the Devil’s Schemes in Prayer (15.10)

Mark 9:235. The Word in Prayer (5.3); 16. Concerning Prayer Before Icons (16.1)

Mark 11:2420. The Father John’s Prayerful Addresses (20.27)

Luke

Luke 1:375. The Word in Prayer (5.3, 5.6, 5.10)

Luke 2:358. On the Lord’s Prayer (8.3)

Luke 6:4517. Concerning Actions Accompanying Prayer (17.5)

Luke 6:468. On the Lord’s Prayer (8.6)

Luke 9:6214. Concerning Overcoming the Flesh in Prayer (14.8)

Luke 11:2020. The Father John’s Prayerful Addresses (20.5)

Luke 14:2620. The Father John’s Prayerful Addresses (20.3)

Luke 14:28–3018. Concerning Moderation in Prayer (18.1)

Luke 15:1016. Concerning Prayer Before Icons (16.4)

Luke 18:2–614. Concerning Overcoming the Flesh in Prayer (14.1)

Luke 20:3810. On Prayer to the Saints (10.5)
Luke 22:318. On the Lord’s Prayer (8.3)
John

John 5:3517. Concerning Actions Accompanying Prayer (17.3)

John 8:398. On the Lord’s Prayer (8.1)

John 10:35–3617. Concerning Actions Accompanying Prayer (17.5)

John 12:3817. Concerning Actions Accompanying Prayer (17.5)

John 14:610. On Prayer to the Saints (10.8)

John 14:9–103. Prayer – Breath of the Holy Spirit (3.4)

John 14:136. Prayer in the Church (6.4)

John 14:158. On the Lord’s Prayer (8.6)

John 14:232. On the Nature, Significance, and Power of Prayer (2.4)

John 16:3320. The Father John’s Prayerful Addresses (20.40)

John 17:217. On the Conciliality of Prayer (7.1, 7.4); 10. On Prayer to the Saints (10.6)

John 20:2217. Concerning Actions Accompanying Prayer (17.5)

Acts

Acts 17:282. On the Nature, Significance, and Power of Prayer (2.12); 19. Concerning the Jesus Prayer (19.9)

Acts 26:1410. On Prayer to the Saints (10.8)

Romans

Romans 1:2015. Concerning Darkness and the Devil’s Schemes in Prayer (15.1)

Romans 2:117. On the Conciliality of Prayer (7.6)

Romans 8:265. The Word in Prayer (5.6); 11. On Prayer for Our Neighbor (11.1)

Romans 10:8–919. Concerning the Jesus Prayer (19.9)

Romans 12:1220. The Father John’s Prayerful Addresses (20.40)

Romans 14:176. Prayer in the Church (6.9)

1 Corinthians

1 Corinthians 3:1815. Concerning Darkness and the Devil’s Schemes in Prayer (15.7)

1 Corinthians 6:175. The Word in Prayer (5.3)

1 Corinthians 8:12. On the Nature, Significance, and Power of Prayer (2.10)

1 Corinthians 10:1720. The Father John’s Prayerful Addresses (20.45)

1 Corinthians 12:615. Concerning Darkness and the Devil’s Schemes in Prayer (15.6)

2 Corinthians

2 Corinthians 1:920. The Father John’s Prayerful Addresses (20.27)

2 Corinthians 7:121. Excerpts From the Diary for the Biography of Father John of Kronstadt (21.8)

2 Corinthians 9:72. On the Nature, Significance, and Power of Prayer (2.24)

2 Corinthians 12:920. The Father John’s Prayerful Addresses (20.16)

Ephesians

Ephesians 1:224. Prayer – Standing Before the Holy Trinity and the Multitude of Heavenly Powers (4.3)

Ephesians 4:257. On the Conciliality of Prayer (7.6)

Ephesians 4:272. On the Nature, Significance, and Power of Prayer (2.17)

Philippians

Philippians 4:713. Repentance in Prayer (13.2)

1 Timothy

1 Timothy 3:1515. Concerning Darkness and the Devil’s Schemes in Prayer (15.7)

Hebrews

Hebrews 4:1618. Concerning Moderation in Prayer (18.1)

Hebrews 13:520. The Father John’s Prayerful Addresses (20.44)

Hebrews 13:167. On the Conciliality of Prayer (7.12)

James

James 1:67. On the Conciliality of Prayer (7.7)

James 1:177. On the Conciliality of Prayer (7.6)

James 5:167. On the Conciliality of Prayer (7.7)

1 Peter
1 Peter 5:75. The Word in Prayer (5.4)
2 Peter

2 Peter 1:5–618. Concerning Moderation in Prayer (18.2)

Jude

Jude 1:203. Prayer – Breath of the Holy Spirit (3.1)

The Author: Saint John of Kronstadt

Saint John of Kronstadt (1829–1908) was a Russian Orthodox archpriest, pastor, and spiritual writer, and one of the most beloved and influential figures of the late Russian Church. A married parish priest rather than a monk or a bishop, he became renowned across the whole empire for his fervent celebration of the Divine Liturgy, his ministry of prayer and healing, and his tireless charity among the poor of Kronstadt.

He was born Ioann Ilyich Sergiev to a poor clerical family in the far north of Russia, in the village of Sura in the Arkhangelsk province. He was educated at the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy, and in 1855 was ordained to serve at Saint Andrew’s Cathedral in Kronstadt, the naval town near the capital, where he would remain for more than half a century. He gave himself to the destitute of the town, founding the House of Diligence to give work and dignity to the poor, and thousands sought him out for confession, counsel, and prayer.

He is best remembered for his spiritual masterwork My Life in Christ, a collection of reflections drawn from his diaries on prayer, repentance, and the Eucharist, marked throughout by a vivid sense of the reality of God and of the Church’s Mysteries. His many sermons, catechetical talks, and later diaries—among them A Living Ear of Wheat and his Lenten preaching—extend the same ardent, experiential piety, and everywhere his eucharistic realism is stated without reserve.

He reposed in 1908 and was mourned throughout Russia. He was glorified by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia in 1964 and by the Moscow Patriarchate in 1990, and is commemorated on 20 December and on 1 June, the day of his glorification. His writings remain a standard of modern Orthodox spiritual life.

Colophon

In the World of Prayer
by John of Kronstadt.

This edition was produced by
Royal Archives.

The cover features
The Vision to the Youth Bartholomew
by Mikhail Nesterov (Russian, 1862–1942), Wikimedia Commons, which is in the public domain.

The text is set in Palatino and Georgia.

The first edition of this ebook was released on
August 16, 2026.

Table of Contents

- Title Page
- Copyright
- Introduction
- In the World of Prayer

- On the Nature, Significance, and Power of Prayer

- Prayer – Breath of the Holy Spirit

- Prayer – Standing Before the Holy Trinity and the Multitude of Heavenly Powers

- The Word in Prayer
- Prayer in the Church
- On the Conciliality of Prayer
- On the Lord’s Prayer
- On Prayer to the Theotokos
- On Prayer to the Saints
- On Prayer for Our Neighbor
- Concerning Prayer for the Dead
- Repentance in Prayer
- Concerning Overcoming the Flesh in Prayer

- Concerning Darkness and the Devil’s Schemes in Prayer

- Concerning Prayer Before Icons
- Concerning Actions Accompanying Prayer
- Concerning Moderation in Prayer
- Concerning the Jesus Prayer
- The Father John’s Prayerful Addresses

- Excerpts From the Diary for the Biography of Father John of Kronstadt

- Discourse of July 28, 1907 1
- Scripture Index
- The Author: Saint John of Kronstadt
- Colophon