Orthodox Elders on How We Can Learn to Pray

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In order to learn to pray we should start to pray!

Metropolitan Athanasios of Limassol, the Church of Cyprus:

There is a Greek proverb: “Appetite comes with eating.” In order to learn to pray we first must force ourselves to pray. The Lord in the Gospel says, The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force (Mt. 11:12).

In order to learn to pray we should start to pray! Through our efforts prayer will be in action inside us. And in each one of us it will work in a unique way because we are all unique, and prayer is the expression of every individual soul in its communion with God.

What helps us pray? The fulfilment of the commandments. Once we have broken any commandment, we “stumble” in prayer. The Church sacraments, especially confession and Communion, were given us to help us improve. Staying in the spirit of obedience, concentration and silence also has a salutary effect on our prayer…

And then prayer begins to work in us. Elder Ephraim of Katounakia used to say: “My prayer directs me, and not vice versa.” And prayer will guide us where the Lord wants us to go.

You just need to start praying

Schema-Archimandrite Iliy (Nozdrin):

The prayer of every human being is of cosmic importance—that is, it has an effect not only on somebody individually, or his family and immediate circle of friends, but also on the entire world. Likewise, every sin brings the universe closer to its destruction.

If we take care of our bodies, nourishing, clothing and protecting them, then how can we fail to take care of our souls? The life of the soul is sustained by prayer.

You just need to start praying. When a baby is born, he receives all-round care from its parents. Likewise, when a person is born into spiritual life, God helps him in everything in the initial stage.

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A hidden persecution of Christianity has arisen

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Concerning John the Baptist the Lord said: Elias is come already, and they knew him not. Why was this? Because they did not heed the paths of God and were not interested in them: they had a different mentality, different tastes, different views on things. Outside the range of Divine things, their shrewdness was in play, but within this range they did not understand anything due to their estrangement from it.

One’s inner mentality forms a feeling for things, which immediately notices and determines what is familiar to it, no matter how concealed it may be. An artist, scientist and economist look at one thing with equal attention, but each makes a judgment about it in his own way—one according to its beauty, the second according to causal relations, the third according to gains from it. So with the Jews: as was their disposition, so they judged about John, and then about the Saviour; but since they were disposed not according to God, they did not understand them, who carried out the work of God.

Similarly, now people have begun to not understand the Forerunner and the Lord—and do with them what they like. A hidden persecution of Christianity has arisen, which has begun to openly break through, like recently in Paris. What was done there on a small scale, is what we must expect with time in big proportions…

Save us, O Lord!

Thoughts for Each Day of the Year by St. Theophan the Recluse
Friday. 8th Week after Pentecost.

Fear evil like fire

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Fear evil like fire. Don’t let it touch your heart even if it seems just or righteous. No matter what the circumstances, don’t let it come into you. Evil is always evil. Sometimes evil presents itself as an endeavor to God’s glory, or as something with good intentions towards your neighbor. Even in these cases, don’t trust this feeling. It’s a wrong labor and is not filled with wisdom. Instead, work on chasing evil from yourself…

Gloomy feelings usually develop deep in the heart. Someone who hasn’t learned how to control them will be gloomy and pensive most of the time and it will be hard for him to deal with himself and other people. When they come close to you, sustain yourself with inner strength, happiness and innocent jokes: and they will leave you soon. This is from experience.

Lord, give me strength to love everyone like myself and never to get angry or work for the devil. Give me strength to crucify my self-esteem, my pride, my greed, my skepticism and other passions. Let us have a name: a mutual love. Let us not worry about anything. Be the only God of our hearts, and let us desire nothing except You. Let us live always in unifying love and let us hate anything that separates us from each other and from love. So be it! So be it! If God showed Himself to us and lives inside us as we in Him (according to His eternal Word), wouldn’t He give us everything? Would He ever trick us or leave us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? (Romans 8:32). Now be comforted, my dear, and know nothing but love. These things I command you, that ye love one another (John 15:17).

St. John of Kronstadt

Vladyka Evlogy (Smirnov)

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His very name is translated as “blessing.” He was always sent to the most difficult sites on the Church front. He raised Moscow’s Danilov Monastery from the ruins—the first monastery handed over to the Russian Orthodox Church after the tumultuous years of Soviet authority—then he revived Optina Hermitage from the same desolation. Then he spent three decades peacefully ruling the Vladimir and Suzdal Diocese, which he received in a difficult state of division.

On July 22, our Church bid farewell to an epochal man, a metropolitan who could easily kneel in the middle of a working day just to teach humility to his employees and spiritual children—Vladyka Evlogy (Smirnov).

He used to reflect:

“How weary I have grown of all this fuss. I’m so tired”—his face so bright, his gaze far away, as if he were already looking toward the place where he has now gone—to the Lord, where they don’t speak, but sing.

“Life doesn’t stand still, but extends into time like a speeding arrow,” he wrote in his spiritual journal, “and invariably passes into eternity.”

Read more about vladyka Evlogy (Smirnov): https://orthochristian.com/133577.html

St. John of Rila: The Fruits of Faith and Non-Faith

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Thine angelic life hath been the foundation of repentance, the prescription of compunction, the model of consolation and spiritual perfection, O venerable father John, who abode in prayers, fasting and tears. Entreat Christ God in behalf of our souls. (Troparion to St. John of Rila)

Today the Eastern Orthodox Church celebrates the glorious memory of our Venerable Father John of Rila, the earthly angel and heavenly man. From earliest youth he labored in mind, heart, and with all the power of his will to address the Christian’s main task: to put aside the old man with his pernicious deeds and to put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness (Ephesians 4:24). Thanks to his firm and unrelenting determination and to the grace of God, which is always ready to assist the true laborer, he resolved this task triumphantly and gloriously, attaining the glorious crown of incorruptible life.

The fact is, my dear brothers and sisters, that from our very conception and birth we have all inherited the filth and corruption of sin, which separates us from God the source of life; it decays and gradually destroys our entire being, both soul and body, plunging us into eternal darkness and torment, corrupting the body and turning it into earth.

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The covenant which the Serb people made with God

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Fr Justin (Popovic) of Chelije writes:

Holy martyr king Lazar Saint Sava’s ideal and plan for his whole nation was: ‘Give up everything for Christ, but Christ for nothing.’ No one has ever realized this ideal and plan to such a full extent as the holy and great martyr, Tsar Lazar. He brought it about for his whole nation when he decided in favor of the Heavenly Kingdom and offered up himself as a sacrifice on the field of Kosovo, together with the whole Serbian people. He did this from the purely evangelic reasons recorded in our folk epic:

‘The earthly kingdom lasts only for a brief time,
But the heavenly kingdom always and forever.’

“We die with Christ, to live forever”, he told his soldiers. That Kosovo’s declaration and testament is regarded as the covenant which the Serb people made with God – and sealed with martyrs’ blood. Since then all Serbs faithful to that Testament regard themselves as the people of God, Christ’s New Testament nation, heavenly Serbia, part of God’s New Israel.

Source: “The Mystery and the Meaning of the Battle of Kosovo”

Constant cheerfulness

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Our whole modern outlook is to look below to find the causes, the secondary causes. The whole Christian outlook is to look above, and that is why such people as St. Gregory as we can see by reading their writings and their lives—are constantly cheerful. This does not mean that they are overly happy, but rather that they are in a state of deep happiness, because they are constantly looking above and keeping in mind, with determination and constancy, to get to a certain place, which is heaven, and thus they see all the details in the world in that light. If what they see has to do with evil, with the nets of demons, with worldliness, with boredom, with discouragement, or just with ordinary details of living, all that is secondary and is never allowed to be first. In fact, we are told by the Holy Fathers that we are supposed to see in everything something for our salvation. If you can do that, you can be saved.

In a pedestrian way, you can look at something like a printing press which does not operate. You are standing around and enjoying yourself, watching nice, clean, good pages come out printed, which gives a very nice sense of satisfaction, and you are dreaming of missionary activity, of spreading more copies around to a lot of different countries. But in a while it begins to torture you, it begins to shoot pages right and left. The pages begin to stick and to tear each other on top. You see that all those extra copies you made are vanishing, destroying each other, and in the end you are so tense that all you can do is sort of stand there and say the Jesus Prayer as you try to make everything come out all right. Although that does not fill one with a sense of satisfaction (as would watching the nice, clean copies come out automatically), spiritually it probably does a great deal more, because it makes you tense and gives you the chance to struggle. But if instead of that you just get so discouraged that you smash the machine, then you have lost the battle. The battle is not how many copies per hour come out: the battle is what your soul is doing. If your soul can be saving itself and producing words which can save others, all the better; but if you are producing words which can save others and are all the time destroying your own soul, it’s not so good.

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Filaret-esque practice: UOC comments on OCU’s claims to the Lavra

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The Ukrainian Orthodox Church responded to the OCU’s intention to establish a new “monastery”.

The Legal Department of the UOC commented on the decision of the “synod” of the OCU dated May 23, 2022, which created a religious organization with the name “Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra” and filed a petition to the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine to transfer one of the temples of the Upper Lavra to the use of the OCU. The text of the commentary is published by the Information and Education Department of the UOC.

“By its decision to establish the ‘OCU’ monastery in the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, the ‘Synod of the OCU’ actually duplicates the name of the UOC monastery that currently operates in the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra. Also, this decision is further proof to the predatory policy of church looting at the level of the ‘Holy Synod of the OCU’, which was put in place since the beginning of the military aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine and consists in the illegal seizure of temples and religious organizations belonging to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. The practice of creating parallel church structures with a similar or identical name was launched under Filaret (Denisenko) with the aim of raider seizure of the property of religious communities,” the commentary says.

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