Tag Archives: Prayer

Prayer By Night

night.jpg

Pray by night. Pray alone. Pray using no book, no image, no thought. Just stay awake for ten minutes after you wake up to have a glass of water, after your child or a nightmare wakes you. Stand there in the dark, and make no move or sound. Make time stand still, capture that moment and bring it before Christ as your humble offering: this is me; this is who I am; THIS is who You must save.

night2

In fact, it may be useful to even forget that you need to pray. Most of us have such terribly deformed ideas about what prayer is, that it is better to simply forget you are meant to pray. Just stand there and look into the darkness outside your window. Other times, make a prostration and even close your eyes while you are on the floor; and stay there; wait there. Keep your body in a state of tension, but your mind empty. Say nothing. Think nothing. Imagine nothing. Do not pray. Do not move. Just wait for His presence. Wait for Him to notice your silence, your stillness, your death. Wait for Christ, and He will come, because Love forces Him.

20131001-IMG_9385

This is the advantage of praying at this time; night is a shield against thoughts, against images and feelings. Try to be present in that moment, try to be aware of the silence that surrounds you, let the void of that darkness embrace you, let it enter you and fill you with peace and silence. There is something almost sacramental in this hidden silence and stillness before Christ. This darkness, this solitude, this instinctive awareness of one’s mortality, they all force one to open up in ways which would be impossible by daytime.

Be aware that you are awake before Christ while the world lies asleep, defenseless and vulnerable. You are awake before Christ, fighting for the world; you have become an intercessor for this fallen, sleeping world which is one with you, and for which Christ has died.

night3

Ten minutes alone with Christ, night after night, will change your life. When you wake up and you face the worries of the new day, there is something in you that rejoices – you and Christ share a secret, you and Christ share a fight. Your soul knows that it has been fed, and it also knows that, whatever happens during the day, the night will always return with its silence and its stillness. You will live through the day waiting for the night, because when the night falls, you will again bring yourself as an offering before your Creator, and your Creator will feed you once more.

Source: Father Seraphim http://www.mullmonastery.com/monastery-blog/prayer-by-night/

Remove The Sandals From Your Feet

land1

Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees.

— Revelation 7:3

trees50

The saints embrace the whole world with their love.

— St. Silouan the Athonite

On the Holy Mountain of Athos, the monks sometimes put up beside the forest paths special signposts, offering encouragement or warning to the pilgrim as he passes. One such notice used to give me particular pleasure. Its message was brief and clear: “Love the trees.”

tree63

Fr. Amphilochios, the geronta or “elder” on the island of Patmos when I first stayed there, would have been in full agreement. “Do you know,” he said, “that God gave us one more commandment, which is not recorded in Scripture? It is the commandment “love the trees.” Whoever does not love trees, so he believed, does not love God. “When you plant a tree,” he insisted, “you plant hope, you plant peace, you plant love, and you will receive God’s blessing.” An ecologist long before ecology had become fashionable, when hearing confessions of the local farmers he used to assign to them a penance, the task of planting a tree. During the long summer drought, he himself went round the island watering the young trees. …

tree11

Fr. Amphilochios was by no means the first spiritual teacher in the modern Greek tradition to recognize the importance of trees. Two centuries earlier, the Athonite monk St. Kosmas the Aetolian, martyred in 1779, used to plant trees as he traveled around Greece on his missionary journeys, and in one of his “prophecies” he stated, “People will remain poor, because they have no love for trees.” We can see that prophecy fulfilled today in all too many parts of the world. …

tree13

“Love the trees.” Why should we do so? Is there indeed a connection between love of trees and love of God? How far is it true that a failure to reverence and honor our natural environment — animals, trees, earth, fire, air, and water — is also, in an immediate and soul-destroying way, a failure to reverence and honor the living God?

tree12

Let us begin with two visions of a tree. Edward Carpenter, in Pagan and Christian Creeds [records] a partial vision of a tree. “It was a beech, standing somewhat isolated, and still leafless in quite early Spring. Suddenly, I was aware of its skyward-reaching arms and up-turned finger-tips, as if some vivid life (or electricity) was streaming through them far into the spaces of heaven, and of its roots plunged in the earth and drawing the same energies from below. The day was quite still and there was no movement in the branches, but in that moment the tree was no longer a separate or separable organism, but a vast being ramifying far into space, sharing and uniting the life of Earth and Sky, and full of amazement.”

tree1              tree2

… Two things above all are noteworthy in Edward Carpenter’s “partial vision.” First, the tree is alive, vibrant with what he calls “energies” or “electricity”; it is “full of most amazing activity.” Second, the tree is cosmic in its dimensions: it is not “a separate or separable organism” but is “vast” and all-embracing in its scope, “ramifying far into space … uniting the life of Earth and Sky.” Here is a vision of joyful wonder, inspired by an underlying sense of mystery. The tree has become a symbol pointing beyond itself, a sacrament that embodies some deep secret at the heart of the universe. The same sense of wonder and mystery — of the symbolic and sacramental character of the world — is strikingly manifest in Peaks and Llamas , the master-work of that spiritual mountaineer, Marco Pallis.

tree61

Yet there are at the same time certain limitations in Carpenter’s tree-vision. The mystery to which the tree points is not spelt out by him in specifically personal terms. He makes no attempt to ascend through the creation to the Creator. …

tree100

Let us turn to a second tree-vision, which is by contrast explicitly personal and theophanic: “Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then He said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” He said further, “I am the God of your Father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.”  (Ex 3:1-6)

tree68

Comparing the experience of Moses with that of Carpenter, we observe three things: in the first place, the vision described in Exodus reaches out beyond the realm of the impersonal. The burning bush at Horeb acts as the locus of an interpersonal encounter, of a meeting face-to-face, of a dialogue between two subjects. God calls out to Moses by name, “Moses, Moses!” and Moses responds, “Here I am.” “Through the creation to the Creator”: in and through the tree he beholds, Moses enters into communion with the living God.

land2

In the second place, God does not only appear to Moses but also issues a practical command to him: “Remove the sandals from your feet.” According to Greek Fathers such as St. Gregory of Nyssa, sandals or shoes — being made from the skins of dead animals — are something lifeless, inert, dead and earthly, and so they symbolize the heaviness, weariness, and mortality that assail our human nature as a result of the Fall.

tree99

“Remove your sandals,” then, may be understood to signify: Strip off from yourself the deadness of familiarity and boredom; free yourself from the lifelessness of the trivial, the mechanical, the repetitive; wake up, open your eyes, cleanse the doors of your perception, look and see! And what, in the third place, happens to us when in this manner we strip off the dead skins of boredom and triviality? At once we realize the truth of God’s next words to Moses: “The place on which you are standing is holy ground.” Set free from spiritual deadness, awakening from sleep, opening our eyes both outwardly and inwardly, we look upon the world around us in a different way.

tree6

So we enter the dimensions of sacred space and sacred time. We discern the great within the small, the extraordinary within the ordinary, “a world in a grain of sand … and eternity in an hour,” to quote Blake once more. This place where I am, this tree, this animal, this person to whom I am speaking, this moment of time through which I am living: each is holy, each is unique and unrepeatable, and each is therefore infinite in value.

tree8

Combining Edward Carpenter’s living tree, uniting earth and heaven and the burning bush of Moses, we can see emerging a precise and distinctive conception of the universe. Nature is sacred. The world is a sacrament of the divine presence, a means of communion with God. The environment consists not in dead matter but in living relationship. The entire cosmos is one vast burning bush, permeated by the fire of divine power and glory. …

*

For more Orthodox ecology of Transfiguration, theophanic transparency, pellucid double vision and Zen ‘haeccitas’, read the full article THROUGH CREATION TO THE CREATOR by Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia

 at http://incommunion.org/2004/12/11/through-creation-to-the-creator/

Thin Places

   grand4

  • Thin Places: “Thin Places,” comes from a Celtic Christian concept. The Celts believed that physical locations existed in which God’s presence was more accessible than elsewhere, places where heaven and earth seemed to touch, where the line between holy and human met for a moment, “the places in the world where the walls are weak”, “those rare locales where the distance between heaven and Earth collapses”, as Eric Weiner puts it in his spirituality travelogue, Man Seeks God. For such a ‘thin place’ for me visit my blog post on the Holy and Life-Givng Cross Orthodox parish at Lancaster.

grand2

grand3

“This is a difficult post for me to write … I have always believed that Art and Nature are two vital ways to make our  prayer come to life, two ways to lead us ‘into’ knowing God.  And yet, I feel God has offered me such a rare gift at the end of a very tough year that I need to give myself time to allow it to sink in before I fully understand what I was given. … I was on a day-tour of the Grand Canyon.

IMG_1859
The sense of unmanageable Beauty one has before the wilderness of the Grand Canyon is just that: a true revelation of God, a true revelation of the correct relationship we are to have with Him. When I was there, facing this extraordinary demonstration of what authentic creativity is, all I felt was silence: a thick blanket of silence that covered my heart, my brain, my body… Before God’s presence, one goes numb, afraid to even breathe, afraid to approach it or draw near in any way. My eye-sight is not worthy to touch such beauty, my voice is not real, authentic enough to even whisper a prayer; all of one’s senses go silent, paralysed before such overwhelming power.

grand5

And yet, my heart continued to pray in a different way. Deep down, my being seems to hide a different kind of worship, a different kind of relating to Christ. I don’t know when and how I learnt it; it just exists, the way instincts simply exist. Before such beauty, one discovers how different we are from what we’ve learnt to think we are – we are so much deeper, so much more beautiful, so much more able to worship and truly pray. It’s as if we were created with a set of spiritual senses and abilities, which we later – for some painful reason – fail to recognise in ourselves and fail to develop. We waste so much of our own being, we are so removed, so distant from our real selves… We learn to adapt to this world, and we end up replacing our spiritual senses with material ones.

grand6

Then, in moments like these, we find ourselves face to face with His presence, and a sort of engine just starts working again in our hearts – all by itself, with no input, no doing of our own.

grand1

I was simply present; I was in awe at the presence of my true self as much as I rejoiced in God’s presence. There was nothing but silence in me; yet, this silence was as alive, as ‘eloquent’ in its worship as the most grace-filled moments I’ve been blessed with the Holy Altar.”

IMG_1935

Temet Nosce

know-thyself

Legion

Lord, hear my voice, my present voice I mean,
Not that which may be speaking an hour hence
(For I am Legion) in an opposite sense,
And not by show of hands decide between
The multiple factions which my state has seen
Or will see. Condescend to the pretence
That what speaks now is I; in its defence
Dissolve my parliament and intervene.
*
Thou wilt not, though we asked it, quite recall
Free will once given. Yet to this moment’s choice
Give unfair weight. Hold me to this. Oh strain
A point – use legal fictions; for if all
My quarrelling selves must bear an equal voice,
Farewell, thou has created me in vain.

*

“And He asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many.” Mark 5:9 (KJB)

*

*

As the Ruin Falls

All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.
I never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:
I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.
*
Peace, re-assurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin:
I talk of love –a scholar’s parrot may talk Greek–
But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.
*
Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack.
I see the chasm. And everything you are was making
My heart into a bridge by which I might get back
From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.
*
For this I bless you as the ruin falls. The pains
You give me are more precious than all other gains.

*

“Selfishness cries to Thee: My Father! But Love cries: Our Father!” — St. Nikolai Velimirovic

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Lords_Prayer_Religious

A favourite scene by an all-time favourite film-maker of spiritual quest: The Sacrifice (Offret) by A.Tarkovsky 1986 – PRAYER: The Lord’s Prayer. The scene poignantly illustrates the power of faith and self-sacrifice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4z8Y-NpW1c

The Sacrifice, Tarkovsky’s swan song, tells in esoteric terms of Christian iconography, masterly mise-en-scène, and astounding use of sound composition, of a literary critic, once an actor (Josephson), who promises to give up everything ‘that connects him with the world’ in a bid to save it from the impending nuclear holocaust he hears announced on television.

Numb, Joyless, Desolate

 

theotokos2

 

Mother of God,

Here I stand now praying

Before this ikon of your radiant brightness,

Not praying to be saved from a battlefield;

Not giving thanks nor seeking forgiveness for the sins of my soul,

Nor for all the souls.

Numb, joyless and desolate on earth;

But for her alone, whom I wholly give you.

*

Hymn on the morning of our Lady’s Nativity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqsMBX9Kxm4

The Pearl

pearl3

O Lord, Almighty, aid me! Grains of sand

Their way inside me ceaselessly find

Afflictions provoke my widow heart

Harass me, vex me, pester and grind.

*

May your beautiful veil over

My soul drape, Thy Love wrap.

Forgive, hapless soul,

Pardon, evade the trap.

*

O, may resentment and anguish desert,

O, may my wounds be moulded to pearls.

Thy Grace, Redeemer, my soul of thorn

Heal, pray, aid me, suffer Thy nails.

*

Like Your Glory Resplendent on Cross,

Assist me, Redeemer, to die with Thee.

O, bless, sweet Jesus, restrain, impede

Prevent me an oyster barren to be!

*

THE PEARL: SEVEN HYMNS ON THE FAITH

By St. Ephraim of Syria — Translated by J.B. Morris

http://www.voskrese.info/spl/pearl.html

” …Shadowed forth in thy beauty is the beauty of the Son,
Who clothed Himself with suffering when the nails passed through Him.
The awl passed in thee since they handled thee roughly,
As they did His hands;
And because He suffered He reigned,
As by they sufferings thy beauty increased … “

(c) University of Exeter, Fine Art Collection; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

Mud and Wax

This week, my Lord, mud I became,

Broken and fractured, cracked mud.

All my bones, Out of joint,

Mud I became, cracked mud.

*

Too fierce the heat,

Too scorching inferno.

The sun beat down

Beat down on me.

*

Oh, through fire I went

And I dried

Withered away

And I cracked.

Mud Cracks

Oh, would Your Grace softly wrap me,

When I walk through fire and tears

Oh, would my heart not crack but soften

Melt at Your fire like wax.

melted-candles

Might Your blaze thaw me and melt me,

Mould me like wax under the seal

Engrave me, Heavenly Jeweller, Engrave Your signet

Seal Thy Icon upon my heart.

god's seal

Bless me, my Master, Your struggling servant,

Render me Holy, Bridegroom Divine.

‘Holy to LORD’, Redeemer Celestial

My Prince of Peace, UnBounded Love.

A Thorn on the Road

tree of life

Prayers by the Lake (I) 

By St. Nikolai Velimirovic

Who is that staring at me through all the stars in heaven and all the creatures on earth?

Cover your eyes, stars and creatures; do not look upon my nakedness. Shame torments me enough through my own eyes.

What is there for you to see? A tree of life that has been reduced to a thorn on the road, that pricks both itself and others.

….

heaven

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSH7UolJsuU

Dawn

freshstart1

16 And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up: and, as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and stood up for to read.

17 And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written,

18 The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised,

19 To preach the acceptable year of the Lord.

20 And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him.

21 And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears. (Luke 4:16-21)


renewal2

A Prayer at the Dawn of the Liturgical Year (2)

Today

*

Today, my Lord, You stood in my soul,

Stood in my soul, so much amiss.

A fresh opportunity to offer,

A hand to raise me from the abyss.

*

Who can be poorer than me, my Master?

Broken? Captive? More wounded, or blind?

O, whose footsteps stray faster?

In egoism and in sin?

*

Many a time have I heard  Thy promise,

Many a time Your grace missed.

And, all the time, You stood there,

My offence in the midst.


*

Today, my Lord, You stood in my soul,

You stood there, in front of me,

Ransom to offer to your Bride,

 Too Costly a price to pay Thee.

*

May I acquiesce long-suffering Jesus,

In Consecration my pledge renew.

Might my ears mystically hear,

“This scripture today to you came true”

*

Insp. from The Year of Grace of the Lord, by A Monk of the Eastern Church (Lev Gillet)