After your mind and heart get accustomed to turn
to God through prayer books, you should try to do it in your own way. Your aim
is to make your soul capable of entering, so to say, a conversation with the
Lord, lifting up your mind and heart and opening up in confession to Him,
telling what there is in your soul and what it needs. We must teach our souls to
do so.
So what can we do to succeed in that mastering
this knowledge? The first way is to pray by the book with awe, attention and
deep emotion. For it is from the heart filled with devout feelings and prayers
that your own prayer will begin to emanate and be addressed to God. But there
are also other ways leading to the desired result in prayers.
The first way to teach your soul to recourse
frequently to God is meditation, or devout contemplation over divine
ways and deeds: thinking about God’s mercy, justice, wisdom, creation and Providence, about granting us salvation through Christ, about the
Grace and the Word of God, about sacred mysteries and Heavens. Those thoughts
will unfailingly fill your soul with devout awe towards God, which directly
turns the whole of the being of a man to God and is hence the direct way to
teach your soul to be lifted up to God. Having finished your praying,
especially in the morning, sit down and begin thinking about that or this God’s
way or deed and trying to tune your soul respectively. Join Holy Saint Dimity
of Rostov saying, "Visit me, sacred Godly thinking, and we will
be absorbed in contemplating great acts of God," - this will touch your
heart and your soul will start pouring itself in a prayer. With little effort
you will be able to achieve a lot. You must just have a will and persistence to
do it. For example, beginning to think of God’s Grace will show you that both
your spiritual and bodily being is endowed with God’s mercies, and you will
fall down before Him overwhelmed with gratitude. Start thinking about God’s
omnipresence and you will understand that wherever you are, you are facing God
and God is facing you. Then you will be filled with devout awe. Think of the
Truth of God and you will get convinced that no bad deed goes without
punishment. Then you will certainly decide to cleanse out all your sins through
your hearty repentance and humbleness. Begin thinking of God’s all-knowing and
you will understand that everything in you is open to God’s eye. Then you will
definitely become strict to yourself in everything, so that you would not in
any way offend God who sees everything.
The second way to teach your soul to turn to God
is based on devoting every deed, big or small, to the glory of God. For,
if according to the commandment of the Apostle (1 Cor. 10:31), we make it a
rule for ourselves to do everything, even eat and drink, to the glory of God,
then no matter what we are doing we will certainly remember God, and not just
remember, but fear to do something that could anger God. That would make us
turn to God with fear and ask Him prayerfully to grant us help and
enlightenment. And since we are always doing something, we will constantly turn
to Him in prayer and thus almost always we will learn the skill of addressing
God in prayer. This way we will learn in practice to turn to God more often
during the day.
The third way to teach our souls to pray is to
appeal frequently to God from our hearts during the day saying short
petitions concerning the needs of our souls and the things we are doing at
the moment. When beginning to do something, say: "Bless me, O Lord!"
Finishing the work, say: "Glory to Thee, O Lord!" If a passion
inflames you, fall down before God in your heart saying the following:
"Save me, O Lord, I am perishing!" When overcome with disconcerting
thoughts call out: "Lead me your way, O Lord," or "Do not let my
feet go astray." If you are downcast by sin getting despondent, exclaim
like the tax collector did: "O, God be merciful to me a sinner!" And
that way you should act in all situations. Or you can just repeat: "Lord
have mercy!," "Holy Lady Theotokos, save me!," "Angel of
God, my holy guardian, protect me!" Or you can say some other similar
words calling God’s name, you should do it often and try to make words come out
of your heart as if they are squeezed out of it. When we do that, we will have
often the lifting up of our hearts to God, frequent addressing God, frequent
prayers and that would translate into the ability to converse intelligently with
God.
Thus, there are three more ways, besides setting a
praying practice for yourself, that will lead us to the prayerful spirit. They
are:
- to devote some time in
the morning to Godly thinking
- to do everything
devoting it to the glory of God
- and to appeal to God
more often with short invocations.
After we thoroughly ponder over spiritual ideas in
the morning, sacred thoughts tune us to remember God all day long. Those
thoughts in their turn would direct all our actions, both external and
internal, to the glory of God. Through this procedure our soul would become
predisposed to send up its short prayerful invocations to God. Those three
things - Godly thinking, doing everything to the glory of God and frequent
appeals to Him — are the most effective ways to learn an intelligent and hearty
prayer. Those who practice this will soon master the skill of ascending to God
in their hearts. Thus, a soul will begin entering the sphere of the Sublime so
inherent to it — through heart and thoughts in this life and actually will be
admitted to appear before God in the other life.
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