There has been a Q&A column on the website of
FOMA Magazine for a long time. Every reader can ask a question and receive a
personal response from a priest. However, there are questions that cannot be
answered in a letter: they deserve a lengthy answer. A couple of weeks ago, we
received an interesting question, “How can you tell a false prayer from the
genuine one?”
We forwarded our reader’s question to Archpriest Pavel
Velikanov, the rector of St Paraskevi Church of the Holy Trinity and St Sergius
Lavra in Sergiyev Posad, and the editor-in-chief of Bogoslov.ru portal.
1. A good prayer always has a reliable source
Most prayerbooks
contain prayers composed by saints and tested by centuries-long practice of
church life. These prayers help to set one’s soul to the right pitch of
conversation with the Lord and his saints. Unfortunately, people are often
looking for “simple” and “easy” prayers and expect to resolve their problems
through them.
There are quite a
few prayers that aim to meet practical needs, e.g., childbirth, marriage, or
career. It isn’t evident that the authors of these prayers are holy and
spiritually advanced. Almost all “time-tested” prayers have an author.
Recently, there has been an influx of “anonymous” prayers, composed by
no-one-knows-whom and no-one-knows-where with grave dogmatic errors and wrong
moral and spiritual teachings.
Books of prayer
must have an imprimatur “Recommended for publication by the Publishing Council
of the Russian Orthodox Church,” whereby the Church guarantees that the prayers
fit into the tradition of spiritual life of the Orthodox Church. There is
another kind of endorsement, which states, “Allowed for publication by the
Publishing Council of the Russian Orthodox Church”, which means that there
isn’t anything that disturbs one’s inner peace or contradicts the tenets of
Christianity in that prayerbook but there might be some prayers that are not
used by the entire Church.
Check if the
prayers that you find online correspond to the printed books that have these
imprimaturs. There are many websites that distribute prayers of dubious
content.
2. Don’t be addicted to the search of new prayers
You should remember
that the most important and the most essential prayer of every Christian is the
Eucharistic prayer, i.e., the central and the most important part of the
Liturgy, during which the Sacrament of the Divine Eucharist is performed. It
doesn’t ask God to grant any privileges for yourself and your family. It boils
down to our participation in the building of God’s Kingdom here and now, which
happens when we celebrate the Liturgy, when we take communion, when we become
able to hold the Divine fire and to carry it into the world. Anyone who loves
and understands church worship will never seek or invent new prayers because
our church worship has everything that a human might request from God, and even
more.
3. If you pray
together with other people, do it in church
Joint prayers, or
the so-called prayers of agreement, can happen outside the church in two cases.
First, if it’s the prayer of the “home church”, i.e., the family. Second, if
it’s impossible to pray in a church for some reason (illness, distance, etc.)
If people gather in someone’s house to pray for no apparent reason and without
a priest’s blessing, or agree to read certain prayers at a certain time, the
question is why can’t they do so in the church, led by a priest?
It is worth
mentioning that we literally pray in agreement when we come to church and take
part in the service. We gather “in the church” (1 Cor. 11:18) and turn into a
Eucharistic community by joint prayer and participation in the Liturgy. We must
also remember that there are molebens, akathists, panikhidas, and other divine
services performed in the church, and we shouldn’t disregard them, either.
4. True prayer results in humility and obedience, not
self-righteousness and egoism
By its very nature,
a prayer must bring a person closer to God. What does it mean? God is holy.
Accordingly, getting closer to God means getting closer to holiness. The fruit
of real and genuine prayer will be expressed in two ways. First, the desire to
obey God, that is, obedience. Second, humility, that is, realizing that you are
unable to get saved by your own power, and that you need God’s help badly in
all other matters. Humility doesn’t mean self-deprecation. It doesn’t mean that
you should enjoy being guilty of everything and at all times. Humility is the
pursuit of God. It is when you commend yourself in God’s hands so that He could
come and start managing your life as He pleases.
If someone becomes
self-righteous and self-centered as a result of his prayer and the cocoon of
his self-sufficiency doesn’t break loose, then his prayer is wrong and false.
5. Prayer must be free from self-excitement
If we become too
emotional, sentimental, and affectionate during prayer, it may mean that we’re
heading straight down the path towards the dangerous condition known in
Orthodoxy as prelest (devil’s charm), that is being short-circuited on one’s
own self and self-deceitful. When we fall prey to this devil’s charm, it might
appear that if prayer makes us so enthusiastic, we must be spiritually sound
and close to holiness already. The devil often warps one’s perception of
reality in order to rob one of the saving fruit of a genuine prayer. Of course,
there are special inspirational phenomena that happen during a real prayer,
too. They happen when God’s grace touches a person’s heart. However, these
phenomena can’t be predicted or achieved by artificial self-excitement.
6. Prayer mustn’t make you ecstatic
Needless to say,
shamanic mumbo-jumbo is strictly forbidden during prayer. More importantly, we
have to emphasize that we mustn’t repeat a prayer mechanically and aimlessly,
without understanding its meaning and without a penitential feeling, as if it
were a mantra or a spell, until you reach an ecstatic state of altered
conscience.
End of Part I
By Archpriest Pavel Velikanov
Translated by The Catalog of Good Deeds
CONVERSATION