About Prayer

 

One day, a good friend of mine called me - a doctor who had helped me more than once in some of my troubles related to poor health. And then she herself fell ill, seriously, and asked me to serve a prayer service for her health. I calmed her down as best I could and was about to go serve, but I stayed for a while... I felt something was wrong with me, and at night I almost couldn't sleep, and my thoughts were confused from fatigue. Well, what good, I thought, would my prayer do now! I can’t even pray! But I felt ashamed, and decided: I’ll go and serve simply because I promised, so as not to deceive.

I went, served, barely understanding what I was reading and what I was singing. I returned home, and immediately the phone rang - that same friend, the doctor. She suddenly felt better - both physically and, what’s more important, mentally. The fear that tormented her retreated.

Of course, this is not the only example of this kind of “coincidences” that we constantly notice in our lives while we pray, and which, as the late Bishop Vasily (Rodzianko) once said, do not happen when we stop praying. But for some reason, this one was especially memorable to me. Perhaps because this time it was especially difficult to call the prayer a prayer.

This is exactly how it is: when we stand hesitating before the icons and ponder whether to pick up a prayer book, open it, begin – at least read it, then much is decided at that moment: both in the lives of our loved ones and in our own.

Sometimes it is our prayer, so feeble, so scattered, that becomes for the Lord, in the words of Saint Theophan, a reason for mercy – so necessary. And sometimes it is precisely this that is lacking. And sometimes all this becomes completely, distinctly clear, is witnessed by life itself and the feeling of the heart. Sometimes (more often, of course) it remains hidden from us, to be revealed later – when everything is revealed at all.

Hegumen Nektariy (Morozov)