Category: PRAYER

  • One factor contributing to unclean thoughts is anxiety
    coupled with lack of dependence on God; for this reason,
    many students complain of domination by unclean thoughts during examination periods — their busiest time of year. In their anxiety, they try to escape from reality by resorting to unclean thoughts. A strong remedy against such thoughts is prayer, so that the Lord may grant you peace, internal joy, and reliance on Him.

    From Heart to Heart
    Fr. Tadros Y. Malaty

  • “When I wish to rest, I pray. I realized that the only effective way to get some rest is through praying. Therefore, pray and study.”

    —St. Paisios of Mount Athos

  • To leave off praying is the same thing as deserting one’s post. The gate stands open for the ravaging hordes, and the treasures one has gathered are plundered.

    Way of the Ascetics
    Tito Colliander

  • “When you are weary of praying and do not receive, consider how often you have heard a poor man calling, and have not listened to him.”

    —St. John Chrysostom

  • From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.

    It is, no doubt, impossible to prevent his praying for his mother, but we have means of rendering the prayers innocuous. Make sure that they are always very ‘spiritual’, that he is always concerned with the state of her soul and never with her rheumatism. Two advantages will follow. In the first place, his attention will be kept on what he regards as her sins, by which, with a little guidance from you, he can be induced to mean any of her actions which are inconvenient or irritating to himself. Thus you can keep rubbing the wounds of the day a little sorer even while he is on his knees; the operation is not at all difficult and you will find it very entertaining. In the second place, since his ideas about her soul will be very crude and often erroneous, he will, in some degree, be praying for an imaginary person, and it will be your task to make that imaginary person daily less and less like the real mother—the sharp-tongued old lady at the breakfast table. In time, you may get the cleavage so wide that no thought or feeling from his prayers for the imagined mother will ever flow over into his treatment of the real one. I have had patients of my own so well in hand that they could be turned at a moment’s notice from impassioned prayer for a wife’s or son’s ‘soul’ to beating or insulting the real wife or son without a qualm.

    The Screwtape Letters
    C. S. Lewis

  • We do not envy those who have the capacity to pray, whereas we are filled with envy of the possessors of goods, of those who know wealth and fame. Strange that we resign ourselves to someone’s salvation and not to what fugitive advantages he may enjoy.

    The Trouble With Being Born
    Emil Cioran

  • O Lord, in your time and as you will, open to me the mystery of my innermost self, created in your Holy Image. Teach me too about the tendencies in me that distort that self.

    How to Be a Sinner
    Peter Bouteneff

  • Let us then give diligent heed to the study of the Scriptures. For if you do this the Scripture will expel your despondency and engender pleasure, extirpate vice and make virtue take root, and in the tumult of life it will save you from suffering like those who are tossed by troubled waves. The sea rages but you sail on with calm weather for you have the study of the Scriptures for your pilot; for this is the cable which the trials of life do not break asunder. Now events themselves bear witness that I lie not.

    Saint John Chrysostom
    HOMILY TWO, After Eutropios, having been found outside the church, was taken captive
    On the Vanity of Riches

  • After this do we not feel shame, and hide our faces, at seeing that righteous man for twenty years persevering and not desisting; we ourselves after a first or second petition often fainting and indignant? And yet he indeed had in large measure liberty of speech towards God, and all the same he felt no discontent at the delay of the giving, but remained patient, whereas we—laden with countless sins, living with an evil conscience, displaying no good will towards the Master—if we are not heard before having spoken, are bewildered, impatiently recoil, desist from asking. On this account we always retire with empty hands.

    Who has for twenty years besought God for one thing, as this righteous man did? Or rather who for twenty months only?

    Saint John Chrysostom
    On the Power of Prayer and Forgiveness
    Homilies on Profitable Subjects

  • Consider what privileges you enjoy who have been initiated into the Mysteries, with what company you offer up that mystic hymn, with what company you cry aloud the “Thrice Holy Hymn.” Teach “them that are without” that you have joined the chorus of the Seraphim, that you are ranked as a citizen of the commonwealth above, that you have been enrolled in the choir of angels, that you have conversed with the Lord, that you have been in the company of Christ. If we regulate ourselves in this way we shall not need to say anything when we go out to those who are left behind: but from our advantage they will perceive their own loss and will hasten hither, so as to enjoy the same benefits themselves. For when, merely by the use of their senses, they see the beauty of your soul shining forth, even if they are the most stupid of men, they will become enamored of your goodly appearance. For if corporeal beauty excites those who behold it, much more will symmetry of soul be able to move the spectator and stimulate him to equal zeal. Let us then adorn our inward man, and let us be mindful of the things which are said here when we go out: for there especially is it a proper time to remember them. And just as an athlete displays in the lists the things which he has learned in the training school, even so ought we to display in our transactions in the outside world the things which we have heard here.

    Saint John Chrysostom
    If Thine Enemy Hunger, Feed Him
    Homilies on Profitable Subjects