The Lenten Prayer of St. Ephraim the Syrian
Of all Lenten hymns and prayers, one short prayer can
be termed the Lenten prayer. Tradition
ascribes it to one of the great teachers of spiritual life – St. Ephraim the Syrian.
Here is its text:
“O Lord
and Master of my life! Take from me the spirit of sloth, faint-heartedness,
lust of power, and idle talk. But give
rather the spirit of chastity, humility,
patience, and love to Thy servant. Yea, O Lord and King! Grant me to see my own
errors and not to judge my brother; For Thou art blessed unto ages of ages.
Amen”.
This prayer is read twice at the end of each Lenten
service Monday through Friday (not on Saturdays and Sundays for, as we shall
see later, the services of these days do not follow the Lenten pattern). At the
first reading, a prostration follows each petition. Then we all bow twelve
times saying: "O God, cleanse me a sinner." The entire prayer is
repeated with one final prostration at the end.
Why does this short and simple prayer occupy such an
important position in the entire Lenten worship? Because it enumerates in a
unique way all the "negative" and "positive" elements of
repentance and constitutes, so to speak, a "check list" for our
individual Lenten effort. This effort is aimed first at our liberation from
some fundamental spiritual diseases which shape our life and make it virtually
impossible for us even to start turning ourselves to God.
The basic disease is sloth. It is that strange laziness and passivity of our entire
being which always pushes us "down" rather than "up" – which constantly convinces us that no change is possible and therefore
desirable. It is in fact a deeply rooted cynicism which to every spiritual
challenge responds "what for?" and makes our life one tremendous
spiritual waste. It is the root of all sin because it poisons the spiritual
energy at its very source.
The result of sloth is faint-heartedness. It is the state of despondency which all spiritual
Fathers considered the greatest danger for the soul. Despondency is the
impossibility for man to see anything good or positive; it is the reduction of
everything to negativism and pessimism. It is truly a demonic power in us
because the Devil is fundamentally a liar. He lies to man about God and about
the world; he fills life with darkness and negation. Despondency is the suicide
of the soul because when man is possessed by it he is absolutely unable to see
the light and to desire it.
Lust of
power! Strange as it may
seem, it is precisely sloth and despondency that fill our life with lust of
power. By vitiating the entire attitude toward life and making it meaningless
and empty, they force us to seek compensation in, a radically wrong attitude
toward other persons. If my life is not oriented toward God, not aimed at
eternal values, it will inevitably become selfish and self-centered and this
means that all other beings will become means of my own self-satisfaction. If
God is not the Lord and Master of my life, then I become my own lord and master – the absolute center of my own world, and I begin to evaluate everything in
terms of my needs, my ideas, my desires, and my judgments. The lust of power is
thus a fundamental depravity in my relationship to other beings, a search for
their subordination to me. It is not necessarily expressed in the actual urge
to command and to dominate "others." It may result as well in
indifference, contempt, lack of interest, consideration, and respect. It is
indeed sloth and despondency directed this time at others; it completes
spiritual suicide with spiritual murder.
Finally, idle
talk. Of all created beings, man alone has been endowed with the gift of
speech. All Fathers see in it the very "seal" of the Divine Image in
man because God Himself is revealed as Word (John, 1:1). But being the supreme
gift, it is by the same token the supreme danger. Being the very expression of
man, the means of his self-fulfillment, it is for this very reason the means of
his fall and self-destruction, of betrayal and sin. The word saves and the word
kills; the word inspires and the word poisons. The word is the means of Truth
and it is the means of demonic Lie. Having an ultimate positive power, it has
therefore a tremendous negative power. It truly creates positively or
negatively. When deviated from its divine origin and purpose, the word becomes
idle. It "enforces" sloth, despondency, and lust of power, and
transforms life into hell. It becomes the very power of sin.
These four are thus the negative "objects"
of repentance. They are the obstacles to be removed. But God alone can remove
them. Hence, the first part of the Lenten prayer; this cry from the bottom of
human helplessness. Then the prayer moves to the positive aims of repentance
which also are four.
Chastity! If one does not reduce this term, as is so often and
erroneously done, only to its sexual connotations, it is understood as the
positive counterpart of sloth. The exact and full translation of the Greek "sofrosini" and the Russian "tselomudryie" ought to be whole-mindedness. Sloth is,
first of all, dissipation, the brokenness of our vision and energy, the
inability to see the whole. Its opposite then is precisely wholeness. If we
usually mean by chastity the virtue opposed to sexual depravity, it is because
the broken character of our existence is nowhere better manifested than in
sexual lust - the alienation of the body from the life and control of the
spirit. Christ restores wholeness in us and He does so by restoring in us the
true scale of values by leading us back to God.
The first and wonderful fruit of this wholeness or
chastity is humility. We already
spoke of it. It is above everything else the victory of truth in us, the
elimination of all lies in which we usually live. Humility alone is capable of
truth, of seeing and accepting things as they are and therefore of seeing God's
majesty and goodness and love in everything. This is why we are told that God
gives grace to the humble and resists the proud.
Chastity and humility are naturally followed by patience. The "natural" or
"fallen" man is impatient, for being blind to himself he is quick to
judge and to condemn others. Having but a broken, incomplete, and distorted
knowledge of everything, he measures all things by his tastes and his ideas. Being
indifferent to everyone except himself, he wants life to be successful right
here and now. Patience, however, is truly a divine virtue. God is patient not
because He is "indulgent," but because He sees the depth of all that
exists, because the inner reality of things, which in our blindness we do not
see, is open to Him. The closer we come to God, the more patient we grow and
the more we reflect that infinite respect for all beings which is the proper
quality of God.
Finally, the
crown and fruit of all virtues, of all growth and effort, is love – that love which, as we have
already said, can be given by God alone – the gift which is the goal of all
spiritual preparation and practice.
All this is summarized and brought together in the
concluding petition of the Lenten prayer in which we ask "to see my own
errors and not to judge my brother." For ultimately there is but one
danger: pride. Pride is the source of
evil, and all evil is pride. Yet it is not enough for me to see my own errors,
for even this apparent virtue can be turned into pride. Spiritual writings are
full of warnings against the subtle forms of pseudo-piety which, in reality,
under the cover of humility and self-accusation can lead to a truly demonic pride.
But when we "see our own errors" and "do not judge our
brothers," when, in other terms, chastity, humility, patience, and love
are but one in us, then and only then the ultimate enemy – pride – will be
destroyed in us.
After each petition of the prayer we make a
prostration. Prostrations are not limited to the Prayer of St. Ephraim but
constitute one of the distinctive characteristics of the entire Lenten worship.
Here, however, their meaning is disclosed best of all. In the long and difficult
effort of spiritual recovery, the Church does not separate the soul from the
body. The whole man has fallen away from God; the whole man is to be restored,
the whole man is to return. The catastrophe of sin lies precisely in the
victory of the flesh – the animal, the irrational, the lust in us – over the
spiritual and the divine. But the body is glorious; the body is holy, so holy
that God Himself "became flesh." Salvation and repentance then are
not contempt for the body or neglect of it, but restoration of the body to its
real function as the expression and the life of spirit, as the temple of the
priceless human soul. Christian asceticism is a fight, not against but for the
body. For this reason, the whole man – soul and body – repents. The body participates
in the prayer of the soul just as the soul prays through and in the body.
Prostrations, the "psycho-somatic" sign of repentance and humility,
of adoration and obedience, are thus the Lenten rite par excellence.
An article by Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann
