The Holy Guardian Angel

Chapter VIII

Prayers to Begin With

The prayers themselves, in full, and what they say

A Protestant who has prayed all his life may discover, on his first evening as a catechumen, that he does not know how to pray. He has been handed a small black book and asked to read aloud, standing, words composed by a Syrian deacon in the fourth century and a Damascene monk in the eighth, in an order somebody else fixed, at an hour somebody else appointed, facing a direction somebody else chose. Everything in his formation tells him this is the wrong end of the stick — that prayer is the heart's own speech, and that the moment it is read off a page it has stopped being prayer at all. That objection is serious and it deserves an answer before a single prayer is printed, and the answer is not that written prayer is a concession for the spiritually lazy. So this chapter does two things. It answers the objection, and then it gives the prayers: the full text of each one, what it says, who wrote it where that is known, and who is said to have written it where it is not — so that a reader who wants to can close the page tonight, stand up, and begin.

Icons, a cross, and the things of a prayer corner

The objection should be put at its strongest, because it is not a weak one and most of the people who make it are not lazy Christians. It runs like this. Prayer is the speech of a child to his father, and a child does not read his father a script. The moment words are supplied from outside, prayer stops being the movement of a heart toward God and becomes the recitation of someone else's movement, which is at best a memory of prayer and at worst a performance of it. Worse, Christ appears to have said so Himself: "And when you pray, do not use vain repetitions as the heathen do. For they think that they will be heard for their many words." A Protestant who has watched a congregation mumble a printed text in a monotone, or who has seen a rosary counted out on a bus, has seen exactly what he thinks that verse is about. And the prayers recorded in Scripture look to him like his own: Hannah pouring out her soul until Eli thought she was drunk, David improvising in caves, Paul breaking into doxology mid-sentence. None of it looks like reading.

And when you pray, do not use vain repetitions as the heathen do. For they think that they will be heard for their many words.Matthew 6:7, NKJV

Some of that has to be conceded outright, and conceded before anything is claimed back. A rule of prayer can become a mechanical thing, and it does so constantly. There are Orthodox Christians who have said the morning prayers every day for thirty years and could not tell you what is in them. The Fathers say this more bluntly than any Protestant critic does: St. John Climacus warns against measuring prayer by its length, the desert tradition prizes short prayer said with attention over long prayer said without it, and St. Theophan the Recluse, writing to Russian laypeople in the nineteenth century, told them repeatedly that a rule recited with the lips while the mind is elsewhere is not prayer but the shell of it, and that it is better to stop and go back than to finish on time. Nobody in the Orthodox tradition holds that reading words out of a book is automatically prayer. The claim is narrower and harder to dismiss: that a written prayer said with attention is prayer, and that for most people most of the time it is better prayer than what they would have produced on their own.

The case begins with the fact that the objection has to explain the Lord's Prayer, and it is difficult to explain. The disciples asked Christ to teach them to pray. He did not describe a disposition or recommend sincerity. In Luke's account He said, "When you pray, say," and then He gave them the words, and the verb is an imperative with a direct object. Matthew's version is slightly more open — "In this manner, therefore, pray" — and it is fair to say that Matthew's phrasing can be read as giving a pattern rather than a formula. But two things settle the matter historically. First, the two accounts are of the same instruction, and Luke's reports it as a text. Second, we know what the first Christians did with it. The Didache, a Syrian church manual that most scholars date to the end of the first century or the beginning of the second, quotes the prayer in full, in a form very close to Matthew's, and instructs Christians to pray it three times a day. That is the oldest piece of Christian liturgical instruction we possess outside the New Testament, and what it prescribes is a fixed text at fixed hours.

So it was, as He was praying in a certain place, when He ceased, that one of His disciples said to Him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples.” So He said to them, “When you pray, say: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name.”Luke 11:1–2, NKJV

Which brings the argument back to Matthew 6:7, because that verse cannot mean what the objection needs it to mean. The word translated "vain repetitions" is battologeo, a rare verb whose sense is closer to babbling or piling up syllables; the parallel clause explains it — "for they think that they will be heard for their many words." The target is named: the heathen, and specifically the pagan assumption that a god is worn down by volume, that the right number of divine names strung together in the right order compels a result. Elijah's contest on Carmel gives the picture: the prophets of Baal calling from morning until noon. And then, two verses later, Christ hands His disciples a prayer of some sixty words in Greek and tells them to say it. If verse 7 forbade fixed forms, verse 9 would be the fastest self-contradiction in Scripture. What verse 7 actually forbids is the idea that prayer works by accumulation, and that prohibition falls on the man reciting a printed prayer without attention and on the man extemporizing at length to impress the room, in exactly equal measure.

Then there is the Psalter, which is the single hardest fact for the objection to absorb. One hundred and fifty prayers, written down, arranged, set to music, assigned to choirmasters, canonized as Scripture. They are not descriptions of prayer; they are prayers, in the first person, composed by one man for another man to say. God gave His people a prayer book and put it in the middle of the Bible. And Christ prayed it. At the Last Supper, Matthew records that they sang a hymn before going out to the Mount of Olives, which in a Passover meal means the Hallel psalms. On the Cross He prayed Psalm 21 [22]:2 — "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" — and died with Psalm 30 [31]:6 in His mouth, "Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit." At the moment of the greatest extremity any human being has undergone, the Son of God prayed a text that had been written down a thousand years earlier by somebody else. Whatever one concludes about prayer books, that has to be accounted for.

The Orthodox claim is not that written prayer is superior to spontaneous prayer, and no Orthodox priest will tell a convert to stop talking to God in his own words. The claim is that a Christian who prays only what occurs to him will, within a year, be praying a narrower set of things than the Church prays, and that the narrowing will follow the shape of his own temperament so closely that he will not notice it. He will pray about what is on his mind. He will not pray for his enemies on a Tuesday when nobody has wronged him, he will not ask to be shown his own sins, and he will not pray for the dead or for the sick he has never met or for a good defense before the dread judgment seat of Christ. The prayer book asks for those things whether or not he feels like asking for them, which is the whole of its usefulness.

The apostolic practice points the same way. Acts 3:1 has Peter and John going up to the temple at the ninth hour, and Luke calls it "the hour of prayer" — an appointed hour, kept by two apostles after Pentecost, in a building they had every theological warrant to abandon. In Acts 10:9 Peter goes up on the roof to pray about the sixth hour. Acts 2:46 has the believers in the temple daily. The first Christians did not experience the freedom of the Gospel as freedom from a structure of prayer; they inherited a Jewish structure of fixed hours and fixed texts, and they kept it, and the Church's cycle of daily services grew directly out of it. Paul, who had more reason than anyone to break with Jewish forms, tells the Ephesians and the Colossians to speak to one another in psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, and tells the Corinthians that in the assembly everything is to be done decently and in order. Order, in a first-century congregation, meant known texts.

Finally there is the plain pedagogical point, which any honest person can test. Written prayer teaches you to pray for what you ought rather than only what you feel, and it teaches you a vocabulary you did not have. A man praying entirely out of his own head at thirty is praying with the theological range he happened to acquire by thirty. A man praying the Church's prayers is saying sentences composed by Basil the Great, John Chrysostom, Ephrem the Syrian and John of Damascus, and after a few years those sentences begin to be the way he thinks — which is why converts often notice that their spontaneous prayer changes, and becomes more Trinitarian, more penitential and less anxious, without their having tried to make it so. Orthodoxy has never opposed the two kinds of prayer. The prayer books themselves tell you to add your own petitions at the end, out loud, in your own words; the standing counsel is that the rule is where you begin and not where you are confined.

On translations. There is no single authorized English text of the Orthodox prayers. The version a reader meets depends on his jurisdiction and on which press printed his book: the Holy Trinity Monastery prayer book from Jordanville, the Antiochian and Greek Archdiocese texts, the Orthodox Church in America's translations and the various monastery editions differ in wording, in the older or newer idiom, and occasionally in which prayers are included at all. This chapter uses widely printed traditional English renderings, with Thee and Thou, because that is still what most prayer books in the reader's hands will say. Where a particular wording is disputed or a translation choice is significant, it is flagged. Use the book your parish uses.

Orthodox prayer at home happens in a place, and the place is a corner of a room with icons in it. At a minimum there are two: Christ and the Theotokos, with Christ to the viewer's right, which is the same arrangement as the icon screen in the church, so that the wall of the house repeats the wall of the temple in miniature. Most households add the patron saints of the family, the saint whose name each member bears, and whatever else has accumulated. In front of them stands a lampada, an oil lamp with a floating wick, or a candle; in Russian households the lamp is often kept burning on the eve of feasts and through Bright Week. A hand censer is common but not necessary. The corner is not decoration and it is not a shrine in the pagan sense; it is the place where the household turns when it prays, and its function is mainly to stop you from praying wherever you happen to be sitting, which in practice means not praying.

The corner faces east if the building allows it. This is one of the oldest Christian customs we can document, and it is older than most of the architecture. Tertullian around 200 refers to Christians praying toward the east; Origen discusses it; and St. Basil the Great, in his treatise On the Holy Spirit written in 375, lists turning toward the east in prayer among the unwritten traditions the Church had received and kept without a scriptural command, which is a striking thing for him to put in writing in the middle of an argument about the authority of tradition. St. John of Damascus gives the standard reasons in the fourth book of On the Orthodox Faith: that paradise was planted eastward in Eden, that Christ ascended eastward and the angels said He would return as He went, and that the Lord Himself compared His coming to lightning that comes out of the east. If a flat cannot face east, it cannot, and no confessor will treat that as a spiritual problem.

Orthodox Christians pray standing. This is worth saying plainly because it is the first physical difference a Protestant notices, and it is not asceticism for its own sake: the tradition treats the body as a participant in prayer rather than a container for it, so the standing, the crossing, the bowing and the prostrating are the prayer as much as the words are. The old, the ill, the pregnant and the exhausted sit, and the tradition is not sentimental about this either — St. Ambrose of Optina is remembered for making sick people lie down, and every parish has a chair in the corner. But the default is upright, and a beginner should try it before deciding he cannot.

Now the part that decides whether any of this survives contact with life. The single most repeated piece of practical advice in Orthodox spiritual writing is that a small rule kept is worth more than a large rule abandoned, and it is repeated because the failure it warns against is almost universal among converts. The pattern is fixed: a catechumen reads a book, adopts the full morning and evening prayers with a canon and an akathist and five hundred Jesus Prayers, keeps it for eleven days, misses a day, misses a week, and then does not pray at all for four months while feeling that he has failed at Orthodoxy. St. Theophan the Recluse and St. Ignatius Brianchaninov both write against this at length, and every living elder whose sayings have been published says some version of the same thing. The correct opening move is almost insultingly small. Five minutes. The beginning prayers, the Lord's Prayer, one printed prayer, and the names of the people you are carrying.

The rule proper is a morning rule and an evening rule. What the printed books contain is more than a beginner will do: the Russian morning prayers run from the Publican's prayer through the Trisagion prayers, Psalm 50, the Creed, a sequence of prayers by Macarius the Great and Basil the Great, prayers to the Theotokos and to the guardian angel, an invocation of one's own patron saint, the troparion of the Cross, and the commemoration lists for the living and the dead — twenty to thirty minutes read slowly. The evening prayers are similar in shape and end with the examination of conscience and the prayers before sleep. A layman's actual rule is normally a selection from this, made by someone else.

That is the second structural point, and it is the one most foreign to a Protestant. The rule is set by a priest or spiritual father, and not chosen off a menu. There are two reasons, and the second matters more than the first. The first is competence: a beginner cannot judge his own capacity, and will reliably choose either far too much out of zeal or far too little out of embarrassment. The second is that the point of the rule is partly the obedience. A rule you designed yourself, you can renegotiate at midnight when you are tired, and you will. A rule you were given, you keep or you go and say you did not. Practically, this means a catechumen should ask his priest what to pray and should say honestly how much time he actually has, including the fact that he has small children or works nights.

And the rule is a floor, not a ceiling. Nobody is forbidden to pray more; the rule is the minimum you are held to, the thing you do on the bad days when you feel nothing, and its whole value lies in being fixed. On a good evening you may stand there for an hour. The rule is what happens on the other kind of evening.

The body: bows, crossings and prostrations

The sign of the cross: Right hand: thumb, index and middle finger joined to confess the Trinity, the last two folded into the palm to confess the two natures of Christ. Forehead, stomach, right shoulder, then left. The right-before-left order is the point at which Eastern practice differs from Western, and it is not a trivial difference of taste but simply a different tradition of the gesture, attested for many centuries in both directions.
Bow from the waist: Greek metania, Slavonic poyasnoy poklon. The sign of the cross, then a bow from the waist, usually touching the fingers toward the floor. This is the ordinary gesture and the one used most.
Prostration: Slavonic zemnoy poklon, an earthly bow; Greek proskynesis. The sign of the cross, then down onto the knees, the palms flat on the floor and the forehead to the ground between them, then up. It is one continuous motion and not a posture held. In Orthodox practice one does not remain kneeling for long stretches; one goes down and gets up.
Where practice varies: Greek and Slavic parishes differ in how much of this the laity do at which service, how many prostrations accompany the prayer of St. Ephrem, and whether prostrations are made after receiving communion. Old Believer and Russian Old Rite practice differs again, and preserves a much heavier use of prostrations and a different form of the finger position. Watch what the people around you do.

There are days when prostrations are not made, and the rule is ancient enough to be conciliar. Canon 20 of the First Council of Nicaea, in 325, directs that prayer be offered standing and not kneeling on the Lord's Day and through the fifty days of Pentecost, on the grounds that these are days of the Resurrection, and Canon 90 of the Council in Trullo in 692 repeats and details it. So the practical rule is: no prostrations on Sundays, none from Pascha until Pentecost, and in common practice none on the great feasts. Prostrations return at the kneeling prayers of Pentecost Vespers, which is precisely why those prayers are famous — the Church kneels for the first time in fifty days, and everyone in the building feels the change. During Great Lent the pattern inverts and the weekdays are full of them.

On kneeling. A Protestant convert often finds it strange to be told that kneeling is discouraged on Sundays, since kneeling is the posture he associates with reverence. The Orthodox logic is not that kneeling is irreverent but that it is penitential, and that Sunday is not a penitential day. In practice many Greek and Antiochian parishes in America have absorbed a certain amount of Western kneeling, and in some places the laity kneel during the epiclesis at the Liturgy even on Sundays. The canons say what they say; local practice is what it is; ask the priest, and do not make it a cause.

Almost every Orthodox service and almost every private rule opens with the same short sequence, called in English the usual beginning and in the books the Trisagion prayers. A newcomer hears it so often that within a month he knows it without having tried to learn it, which is part of the design. It is the vestibule of the whole tradition, and every piece of it is doing something.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Glory to Thee, our God, glory to Thee. O Heavenly King, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, Who art everywhere and fillest all things, Treasury of good things and Giver of life: come and abide in us, and cleanse us from every impurity, and save our souls, O Good One. Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us. (Three times, with the sign of the cross and a bow at each) Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, both now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen. All-holy Trinity, have mercy on us. Lord, cleanse us from our sins. Master, pardon our iniquities. Holy One, visit and heal our infirmities for Thy name's sake. Lord, have mercy. (Three times) Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, both now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen. Our Father, Who art in the heavens, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.The usual beginning, in a traditional English rendering. Wording varies between jurisdictions and presses.

The invocation of the Name is the formula of Matthew 28:19, and it is made with the hand and not only with the mouth. Crossing yourself before prayer is a boundary marker: it ends the previous activity and states under whose authority the next one is undertaken. Then comes a line that a Protestant may walk straight past, and should not. "Glory to Thee, our God, glory to Thee" is the smallest possible enforcement of an order of priority. Before anything is asked, God is praised, and praised for nothing in particular — not for a mercy just received, simply for being God. Almost all spontaneous prayer begins with a request, because requests are what prompt people to pray. This sequence makes that impossible.

Next, and this is the theologically weightiest piece, the Church asks the Holy Spirit to come before she says anything else. "O Heavenly King, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth" is built almost entirely out of the Gospel of John: the Comforter, the Paraclete, is John 14:16 and 14:26, and the Spirit of Truth is John 16:13. The reason it stands at the head of everything is Romans 8:26 — "we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered." Orthodox prayer therefore begins by conceding incompetence and asking the Third Person to supply what is missing. It also, in a few words, makes a series of claims about the Spirit that the fourth century fought over: that He is King, that He fills all things, that He is the Giver of life, which is the phrase the Council of Constantinople put into the Creed in 381, and that He can be addressed directly and asked to dwell in a man.

There is one period of the year when this prayer is omitted, and knowing why explains a great deal about how Orthodox time works. "O Heavenly King" is the troparion of Pentecost — it is the hymn of the feast of the Spirit's descent. From Pascha until Pentecost the Church is liturgically standing inside the fifty days, waiting for what has not yet happened in the calendar, and so she does not sing it. From Pascha to Ascension it is replaced by "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life," said three times. Between Ascension and Pentecost the beginning simply starts at the Trisagion. Then, at Vespers on the evening of Pentecost, at the kneeling prayers, it comes back, and it is one of the most quietly dramatic moments in the year: the Church kneels for the first time in fifty days and asks the Spirit to come and abide, having just heard read that He has.

The Trisagion itself — "Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us" — is a triple ascription of holiness with a petition attached, built on the seraphic hymn of Isaiah 6:3 and Revelation 4:8. Orthodox theology understands it as addressed to the Trinity, one holiness for each Person, which is why it is followed immediately by "Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit." Byzantine tradition tells the story that it entered the services at Constantinople under the Patriarch Proclus, around 438 or 439, after an earthquake, when a boy was caught up and heard the angels singing it and the people added the petition; the story is recorded in later Byzantine sources and should be told as what it is, a tradition rather than a documented event. What is documented, and far more interesting, is the fight over it. In the late fifth century Peter the Fuller, the Monophysite patriarch of Antioch, added the words "who wast crucified for us," which turns the hymn from an address to the Trinity into an address to Christ and implies that the divine nature suffered. The Chalcedonian Church rejected the addition and rejects it still, and the Syriac and Armenian churches use it to this day with a Christological reading. A newcomer singing nine words in a parish hall is standing inside a fifteen-hundred-year-old argument about who exactly suffered on the Cross.

"All-holy Trinity, have mercy on us" then addresses the Trinity as one and, most commentators hold, the three Persons in turn: Lord, cleanse us; Master, pardon us; Holy One, visit and heal us. It is read both ways in the tradition, and the ambiguity does no harm. Then "Lord, have mercy," three times — Kyrie eleison, the shortest and most-repeated sentence in Eastern Christianity. It is worth saying what it asks. The Greek eleos is the word the Septuagint translators chose again and again to render the Hebrew hesed, the covenant loyalty of God to His people. So "Lord, have mercy" is not principally a convict's plea for a suspended sentence; it asks God to act toward the one praying in accordance with who He has bound Himself to be. That is why it can be said forty times in a litany without becoming absurd.

The Lord's Prayer

Three things in the Orthodox English text will look unfamiliar to a Protestant, and all three are defensible from the Greek. The first is "in the heavens," plural, which is what Matthew 6:9 says: en tois ouranois. The second is "forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors," rather than trespasses. Matthew's noun is opheilemata, debts, and the Orthodox text keeps it; "trespasses" comes into English from Tyndale and the Book of Common Prayer by way of Matthew 6:14–15, where the word is paraptomata. The third is the ending: "deliver us from the evil one." In Greek, apo tou ponerou is ambiguous in form — the genitive is identical for the masculine and the neuter, so it can mean from evil or from the evil one — and the Eastern tradition has consistently read it as personal, the devil rather than an abstraction. The Fathers who comment on it, including St. John Chrysostom in his homilies on Matthew, take it that way, and the Orthodox translations follow.

The fourth petition contains a word that may not exist anywhere else in Greek. Epiousios, rendered "daily" in almost every English Bible, appears in the Lord's Prayer in Matthew and Luke and effectively nowhere else in the surviving language; Origen, writing in the third century and reading Greek as his native tongue, says outright that the word is not in ordinary use and appears to have been coined. So "daily" is a guess, and a settled one, but a guess. The candidates are worth knowing, because each is a different prayer. Taken from epi + ousia, being or substance, it means the bread we need for existence — Jerome rendered it supersubstantialem in Matthew, which is why the Latin tradition carries a eucharistic reading. Taken from epi + ienai, to come, it means the bread of the coming day: give us today tomorrow's bread, which is a prayer either for the bread of the Kingdom or for freedom from anxiety about tomorrow, and which sits remarkably well beside Matthew 6:34 a few verses later. The Orthodox liturgical tradition does not resolve it and has never needed to. It reads the petition for literal bread, for the Eucharist, and for the age to come all at once, and a man saying it in English is asking for all three whether he knows it or not.

And then the doxology. "For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages" is not part of the prayer as the Orthodox pray it privately; it is the priest's exclamation after it. This is one of the few places where Orthodox practice will strike a Protestant as oddly truncated, since he has said "For thine is the kingdom" as part of the Lord's Prayer all his life. The textual situation is in fact on the Orthodox side. The doxology is absent from the earliest Greek manuscripts of Matthew, including Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, which is why modern Protestant translations footnote or bracket it; but a short form of it appears in the Didache at the end of the second century's turn, "for Thine is the power and the glory forever." The likeliest account, and the one most textual critics give, is that the Church was accustomed to sealing the prayer with a doxology in worship and that the liturgical ending migrated into the manuscripts of Matthew. In the Byzantine Liturgy it never migrated. The people say the prayer the Lord gave, and the priest seals it, which preserves in the shape of the service the distinction that the manuscripts record.

A practical point for someone praying alone. Several exclamations in the prayer book belong to a priest, and a layman does not say them. Where the book gives the priestly ending, a layman reading at home says instead: "Through the prayers of our holy fathers, O Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us. Amen." This is the standard substitution in Slavic practice and appears in most English prayer books as a rubric. It is a small thing, and it embodies something the tradition is careful about: a layman praying at home is not performing a liturgy.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.The Jesus Prayer, full form

It shortens as it is needed. "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me." "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy." "Lord Jesus, have mercy." "Lord, have mercy." "Jesus." For another person, the name goes in: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on Thy servant N." The short forms are not degraded versions of the long one; they are what the prayer becomes when it is being said often, and the tradition has always used them interchangeably. What must not happen is that it stop being a sentence addressed to somebody.

Look at what the words are. "Lord" is Kyrios, the word the Septuagint uses for the divine Name, so the first syllable is already a confession of divinity. "Jesus Christ" is the human name and the messianic office. "Son of God" is Peter's answer at Caesarea Philippi, which Christ said had been revealed to him by the Father and on which He said He would build the Church. "Have mercy on me, a sinner" is the publican in the temple. So the prayer is the Council of Nicaea and Luke 18 in eleven words: the whole dogmatic confession of who Christ is, followed by the only appropriate response of the man making it. This is why Orthodox writers are emphatic that it is not a mantra. A mantra works by sound and repetition regardless of meaning; the Jesus Prayer is a doctrinal statement and a request, and if the meaning drops out of it, what is left is not a lesser form of the practice but a different practice altogether.

Where it comes from

The Gospels contain the prayer almost verbatim, in the mouths of people who were desperate. The blind man outside Jericho hears that Jesus is passing and cries out, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!" — and when the crowd tells him to be quiet he shouts it louder, which the tradition reads as instruction. The two blind men in Matthew 9:27 cry the same words. The Canaanite woman says, "Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David!" and keeps saying it through a rebuff that would silence most people. The ten lepers, standing at a distance, call out, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!" And the publican, not lifting his eyes, says the thing that Christ declares went home: "God, be merciful to me a sinner." In every case the form is a name, a title and a petition for mercy, and in every case the petition is granted.

Then he cried out all the more, “Son of David, have mercy on me!”Luke 18:39, NKJV

There is a detail here worth pausing on, because it shows the Church doing something deliberate. The men in the Gospels say "Son of David." The prayer says "Son of God." The blind man was confessing the Messiah of Israel, which was as much as he could know standing in the road before the Resurrection; the Church prays afterward, and confesses what the centurion confessed at the Cross and Peter confessed at Caesarea. The prayer is the Gospel cry with the post-Resurrection confession substituted into it. And the last words are not the blind man's but the publican's, which means that the man praying it is asked to identify himself with the character in the parable whom Christ commends, and not with the one who prayed accurately about himself and went home unjustified.

The other scriptural root is the command to pray without ceasing. 1 Thessalonians 5:17 is three words in Greek, adialeiptos proseuchesthe, and it is not obviously possible. Luke 18:1 says men ought always to pray and not lose heart. Romans 10:13 says whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved, and Philippians 2:9–11 says that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow. The monastic tradition took the command literally and asked what kind of prayer could actually be continuous, and concluded that it would have to be short enough to be said while working and simple enough to be said while tired. That is the practical origin of every short repeated prayer in Christian history, East and West.

The history is longer and less tidy than popular accounts suggest, and the honest version is better. The earliest documented practice is not the Jesus Prayer but the repetition of a psalm verse: St. John Cassian, writing in Gaul in the 420s and reporting what he had learned from the Egyptian monks, devotes the ninth and tenth Conferences to prayer and recommends the ceaseless repetition of Psalm 69 [70]:2, "O God, make haste to deliver me; O Lord, make haste to help me," as the formula a monk should carry in every circumstance. The specific invocation of the name of Jesus as a continuous prayer appears clearly in the fifth century in St. Diadochos of Photiki, whose hundred texts On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination instruct the monk to give the mind nothing to hold but the words Lord Jesus. The fixed eleven-word form we now use cannot be documented that early; it settled over centuries, and the pieces are demonstrably ancient while the wording is not.

By the seventh century the practice is established on Sinai. St. John Climacus, abbot of the monastery at Sinai, wrote The Ladder of Divine Ascent around 600, and in the step on stillness he gives the instruction that later writers quote more than any other: that the remembrance of Jesus should be joined to the breath, and that a man who does this will understand what stillness is for. St. Hesychios and others in the same tradition develop it. Then comes the piece a beginner should know about and leave alone: a short treatise called The Method of Holy Prayer and Attentiveness, transmitted under the name of St. Symeon the New Theologian, which describes a bodily technique — sit on a low stool, bow the head, direct the gaze toward the middle of the body, slow the breathing, and search inwardly for the place of the heart. Scholars generally judge that it is not by Symeon and that it belongs to the thirteenth century, and this matters, because the most physically prescriptive text in the tradition is also the one with the weakest pedigree.

In the fourteenth century all of this came to a head, and the result is dogma. Hesychia means stillness, and hesychast was the name for monks who practiced this kind of prayer, chiefly on Mount Athos, where St. Gregory of Sinai taught it in the early 1300s. Barlaam the Calabrian, a Greek scholar formed in Western intellectual habits, attacked them: he found the bodily technique grotesque, called them omphalopsychoi, men with their souls in their navels, and argued that the light they claimed to see could not be God, since God in His essence is unknowable. St. Gregory Palamas, an Athonite monk who became Archbishop of Thessalonica, answered with a distinction that has organized Orthodox theology ever since: God's essence is indeed unknowable and unparticipable, but His energies are God Himself acting, uncreated, and genuinely communicated to men — so the light of Tabor which the apostles saw at the Transfiguration was God, seen with bodily eyes, and what the hesychasts experienced was of the same order. Councils at Constantinople in 1341, 1347 and 1351 vindicated Palamas. The point for a reader of this chapter is blunt: a dispute about what monks experience while saying this prayer produced a binding doctrinal definition, which is why the Jesus Prayer cannot be treated as a devotional option at the edge of Orthodoxy.

The prayer reached the modern world through a printed book. In 1782 St. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and St. Macarius of Corinth published in Venice an anthology of ascetic texts on inner prayer spanning the fourth to the fifteenth centuries, called the Philokalia, the love of the beautiful. St. Paisius Velichkovsky translated a selection into Church Slavonic as the Dobrotolubiye, printed in 1793, and his disciples carried it into the Russian monasteries — which is the direct line to the elders of Optina and to the nineteenth-century Russian revival. St. Theophan the Recluse later produced a much expanded Russian version. It is a genuinely strange fact that the recovery of the Jesus Prayer in Russia runs through a Greek book printed in a Venetian press.

Then there is The Way of a Pilgrim, which is how most English-speaking readers first meet the prayer, and about which something honest has to be said. It is a Russian narrative of unknown authorship, first published at Kazan in 1881, in which a wandering peasant is taught the prayer by an elder and works up to three thousand repetitions a day, then six thousand, then twelve thousand, after which the prayer begins to say itself in him. It is a beautiful book and it has brought a great many people to this practice. It is also a poor manual. The counting is the part readers remember and the part the tradition is most cautious about; the numbers belong to a man with no job, no family and nothing to do but walk, and Russian spiritual writers of the same century warned repeatedly against treating a quota as the measure of prayer. Read it as a story about a man, which is what it is, and not as a schedule.

How it is actually prayed

Slowly, aloud or under the breath, with the mind inside the words. The tradition describes three stages and is careful about how they are related. The first is the prayer of the lips: you say it, and your attention wanders, and you bring it back, and this goes on for years and is not a failure. The second is the prayer of the mind, where the nous — the perceiving faculty, which is not quite the same as the reasoning intellect — is gathered into the words so that saying it and attending to it are one act. The third is what the Fathers call the prayer of the heart, the descent of the mind into the heart, where the prayer continues below the level of deliberate effort. The tradition is unanimous that the third is a gift and not an achievement, that it cannot be produced by technique, and that a man who sets out to obtain it is looking at the wrong thing. What is asked of a beginner is only the first, done honestly.

The prayer rope is the tool. In Greek it is a komboskini, usually black wool knotted in a loop of thirty-three, fifty, one hundred or three hundred knots, sometimes with a bead every twenty-five and a tassel or small cross at the end; in Slavic use it is a chotki or vervitsa and may be leather or beads. Each knot is one prayer, and the fingers move without the eyes, which is the whole purpose: you are not counting, you are being kept from having to remember where you are. Each knot is tied as a series of interlocking crosses, and the tradition tells a story about this — that an angel taught the knot to one of the early Egyptian monks, St. Pachomius in the usual telling, after the demons kept untying his woolen cord. That is a story the monasteries tell, and it should be received as such. A beginner's use of it is unglamorous: thirty-three knots, morning and evening, three or four minutes, said while standing in front of the icons.

The warning

Every serious Orthodox treatment of this prayer comes with a warning attached, and a chapter that printed the prayer without the warning would be misrepresenting the tradition. The Greek word is plani, the Russian prelest, usually translated spiritual delusion; the Russian word carries the sense of being charmed or seduced by something attractive, which is nearer the mark than delusion, because the condition does not feel like error. It feels like progress. The pattern the Fathers describe is consistent: a man begins the prayer, and after some weeks or months he begins to experience warmth in the chest, sweetness, light, a sense of presence, occasionally voices or visions; he concludes that he has been given something; and the diagnostic symptom appears, which is that he becomes unteachable. He begins to instruct others. He cannot take correction from his priest. St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, a nineteenth-century Russian bishop who wrote more extensively on this than anyone in the modern period, is unsparing: the beginner should expect nothing, seek no experience whatever, and treat any vision, voice, light or sensation as suspect on principle and report it.

It is worth admitting how this looks from the outside, because the objection is intelligent. A Protestant reading St. Ignatius may reasonably conclude that he is looking at a system engineered to suppress religious experience — that a tradition which tells you in advance to distrust everything you might feel has insulated itself against falsification and against the Holy Spirit in one move. There is something in that, and the Orthodox answer is not that the risk is imaginary. The answer is that the tradition is not against experience; it produced the fourteenth-century definition that God Himself is genuinely experienced, and it canonized men who saw uncreated light. What it is against is self-certified experience — the man who is the sole judge of what has happened to him. The whole architecture of confessor, rule and obedience exists so that there is someone else in the room, and the reason the Fathers are harsh about prelest is that they had all watched it destroy people.

Which is why the breathing and posture techniques are not for a beginner, and not for anyone without a guide. The texts that describe them — the treatise under Symeon's name, parts of Gregory of Sinai, the relevant sections of the Philokalia — were written for monks who were living under obedience in a community, who saw their elder regularly, and who were embedded in an oral tradition that supplied the corrections the written text omits. Detached from that, the technique is a physiological exercise that a sincere enthusiast can use to produce sensations in himself and then interpret theologically, which is the shortest road into delusion the tradition knows. The counsel given to laypeople in the modern Orthodox literature is uniform and dull: say the words, attend to them, do not manipulate your breathing, do not look for the heart, do not increase the number without permission, and tell your confessor what happens. A layman who does that for ten years will not have gone wrong, whatever else he has or has not received.

The words "a sinner" at the end are standard in the Slavic books and are frequently absent from Greek ones, where the prayer often ends simply "have mercy on me." Both forms are entirely traditional, and the shorter one is probably older. Some add "the sinner" with the definite article, on the model of 1 Timothy 1:15. Use the form your parish uses and do not switch back and forth; the reason for consistency is practical, since a prayer said thousands of times becomes a single motion and changing the words interrupts it.

What follows is a working selection: the prayers a layman is most likely to be given in his first year, each with its full text, what it says, and where it comes from. Where the author is known, he is named. Where the attribution is what the service books say rather than what can be demonstrated, that is said too, because the difference matters and because a convert who later discovers the difference on his own is entitled to feel he was handled carelessly.

The Prayer of St. Ephrem the Syrian

O Lord and Master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth, faint-heartedness, lust of power and idle talk. (Prostration) But give rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience and love to me, Thy servant. (Prostration) Yea, O Lord and King, grant me to see my own transgressions and not to judge my brother, for blessed art Thou unto the ages of ages. Amen. (Prostration)The Lenten prayer of St. Ephrem the Syrian, in the English rendering most common in American parishes

It is the prayer of Great Lent, said at every weekday service from the Sunday of Forgiveness through Holy Week, and omitted on Saturdays and Sundays because those days keep a festal character even in Lent. Four things are asked to be taken away and four to be given, and they are matched: sloth against chastity understood as integrity rather than merely continence, faint-heartedness against humility, lust of power against patience, idle talk against love. Then the hinge, which is the whole prayer: grant me to see my own transgressions and not to judge my brother. Everything before it is preparation for that one request, and it is the request the tradition treats as the actual content of repentance — not remorse, not resolve, but sight. Lent exists to produce it, which is why this prayer and not a more exalted one is the prayer of the season.

The prostrations are part of the text, one after each of the three parts, and in Russian practice there is a fuller form in which twelve bows from the waist are made between the parts with the petition "O God, cleanse me a sinner" at each. Old Rite practice differs again and uses thirteen. Two notes on accuracy. First, the lists of vices are not the same in Greek and Slavonic: the Greek names idle curiosity or meddling where the Slavonic names despondency, and some Greek manuscripts have love of money where others have love of power, which is why English translations vary so widely on this prayer in particular. Second, the attribution. St. Ephrem, a deacon of Nisibis and Edessa who died in 373, wrote voluminously in Syriac, and the vast Greek corpus circulating under his name contains a great deal that is certainly not his. This prayer is universally called his and has been for many centuries, and it cannot be traced to his authentic Syriac works. It is the Church's prayer, kept under Ephrem's name.

Psalm 50 [51]

Have mercy on me, O God, according to Thy great mercy; and according to the multitude of Thy compassions blot out my transgression. Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I know mine iniquity, and my sin is ever before me. Against Thee only have I sinned and done evil in Thy sight... Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from Thy presence, and take not Thy Holy Spirit from me... A sacrifice unto God is a broken spirit; a heart that is broken and humbled God will not despise.Psalm 50, in the liturgical English Psalter; Psalm 51 in the Masoretic numbering

No text in Orthodox use is repeated more often. Psalm 50 is read at the Third Hour, at Matins, at Compline, in the morning prayers, in the preparation for confession, in the mystery of Holy Unction, at the funeral, and in the priest's private prayers at the Liturgy. Its superscription in both traditions sets it in a specific and disgraceful episode: David after Nathan came to him, which is to say after the adultery with Bathsheba and the arranged death of Uriah. The Church did not choose an abstract penitential text; she chose the prayer of a murderer and adulterer who was also the anointed king and the ancestor of Christ, and she gave it to everybody to say every day.

Two verses in it are theologically loaded and it would be evasive to pass over them. Verse 7 in the Septuagint numbering — "in iniquities was I conceived, and in sins did my mother bear me" — is one of the main proof texts of Augustinian original guilt in the Western tradition, and the Orthodox reading is genuinely different, taking it as a statement about the condition of mortality and corruption into which everyone is born rather than about inherited guilt for Adam's personal act. That argument belongs to the chapter on salvation and is not settled in a sentence. The other is the ending, which looks like an anticlimax and is not: after the greatest interior prayer in the Psalter the psalmist asks that the walls of Jerusalem be built and that whole burnt offerings be laid on the altar. The Church has always read this as the correction of a possible misunderstanding. Repentance is not a private transaction between a soul and God; it ends in the restoration of the city and the offering of the public sacrifice, which is to say in the Church and at the altar.

The Prayer of the Publican

God, be merciful to me a sinner.Luke 18:13, NKJV

In the Russian prayer books this stands at the very head of the morning prayers, before the sign of the cross and the beginning prayers, as the first thing said on waking. The placement is an argument. In the parable the Pharisee's prayer is not a lie — he really did fast and tithe, and Christ does not dispute a word of it — and it is rejected, while the publican's eight words are accepted and he goes down to his house justified. Putting his sentence first in the book means that everything after it is said by a man who has already taken that position. There is also a philological point worth having. The Greek is hilastheti moi to hamartolo, and the verb is from the sacrificial vocabulary: be propitiated toward me, the same root as hilasterion, the mercy seat, which Paul applies to Christ in Romans 3:25 and which Hebrews 9:5 uses of the ark. The publican is standing in the temple where the atoning sacrifice is offered, and what he asks is not a general pardon but to be covered by it.

It is truly meet (Axion Estin)

It is truly meet to bless thee, O Theotokos, ever-blessed and most pure, and the Mother of our God. More honorable than the cherubim, and beyond compare more glorious than the seraphim, who without corruption gavest birth to God the Word: true Theotokos, we magnify thee.Axion Estin; sung at the Liturgy after the consecration and said at the end of most private rules

This is two hymns joined, and the second is the older. "More honorable than the cherubim" is the irmos of the ninth ode of the canon of Holy Friday, attributed to St. Cosmas of Maiuma, the eighth-century hymnographer and foster-brother of John of Damascus. The opening section, "It is truly meet," was added later, and Athonite tradition tells the story of how: that in the tenth century an angel appeared to a monk at a cell near Karyes on the Holy Mountain, taught him to sing the new opening before the old irmos, and wrote it on a stone with his finger. The cell is called Axion Estin and the icon associated with it is kept in the Protaton church at Karyes to this day. It is a story the Mountain tells about itself and it should be received as tradition and not as a record; what can be documented is only that the composite hymn is in Byzantine use from a certain point onward.

A Protestant should notice exactly what the hymn does and does not do, because it is often cited as the type of Orthodox Marian excess. It blesses her and it magnifies her. It asks her for nothing. There is no petition in it at all. Luke 1:48 has Mary say that all generations will call her blessed, and Luke 1:46 has her magnify the Lord; the hymn does the first and uses the verb of the second. The theologically weighty word is Theotokos, God-bearer, which the Council of Ephesus in 431 affirmed against Nestorius, who preferred Christotokos. That argument was not about Mary's dignity; it was about whether the one born of her was a single divine person, and if the answer is yes then the woman who bore Him bore God. The title is a statement about Christ, made by way of a statement about His mother, and the Church sings it in the Liturgy immediately after the consecration, at the point where the claim about what has just happened on the altar is at its most concentrated.

Beneath thy compassion

Beneath thy compassion we take refuge, O Theotokos. Do not despise our petitions in time of trouble, but rescue us from dangers, O only pure and only blessed one.Sub tuum praesidium; the text of John Rylands Greek Papyrus 470 in a standard English rendering

This is the oldest known prayer addressed to the Theotokos, and it survives on a torn scrap of papyrus about the size of a hand, catalogued as John Rylands Greek Papyrus 470 in the John Rylands Library in Manchester. C. H. Roberts published it in 1938, and the paleographer Edgar Lobel judged the handwriting to be third-century, which is where the familiar date comes from. It has to be said clearly that the date is contested. Hans Förster has argued at length for a much later date, others have proposed the sixth or seventh century, and the question is a live one among papyrologists working from a small and damaged sample of a difficult hand. A reader should not be told "third century" flatly and should not be told that the dispute settles anything either, because the hymn is independently attested early: it appears in the Georgian Iadgari, a hymnal that reflects the liturgical practice of Jerusalem and points to use of the text by the fifth century.

The claim this papyrus supports has to be stated conditionally, and it is still remarkable in its conditional form. If the third-century date holds, then Christians in Egypt were addressing the mother of Jesus as Theotokos, asking her not to disregard their petitions, and taking shelter under her compassion, more than a century before the Council of Ephesus defined the title and before Constantine legalized the faith. That would mean the practice is not a Byzantine development imposed on the Church by imperial piety, but something the Church was already doing while she was still being killed for existing. If the later dates hold, the papyrus proves much less and the Georgian evidence carries the weight instead, which still puts the prayer in the fifth century at the latest. What is not in dispute, on any dating, is the wording: a scrap of a private or liturgical text in Greek that calls her Theotokos and asks her to act.

The prayer went west as well as east. In Latin it is Sub tuum praesidium, and it has been in continuous Western use for many centuries, which makes it one of a small number of texts that Christians in both halves of the Church have prayed without interruption since antiquity. Byzantine practice sings it at Great Compline and in the Lenten services. It is short enough to memorize in an afternoon, and a catechumen who wants to know whether he can pray to the Theotokos in good conscience could do worse than begin with the words that survived on the oldest surviving scrap.

The Angelic Salutation

Rejoice, O Virgin Theotokos, Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, for thou hast borne Christ the Saviour, the Deliverer of our souls.The Angelic Salutation; the troparion sung at Sunday Vespers and said in most private rules

The bones of it are two verses of Luke, the same two that make up the first half of the Western Hail Mary: Gabriel's greeting in Luke 1:28 and Elizabeth's in Luke 1:42. Two differences from the Western form are worth knowing. The first is small: the Greek chaire is the ordinary word for rejoice, and the Latin ave and English hail are defensible renderings of a greeting but lose the joy in it, which matters because the Akathist will go on to say chaire a hundred and forty-four times. The second is substantive. The Orthodox form ends with a statement of fact — for thou hast borne the Saviour of our souls — where the Western form ends with a petition: Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. That petition is a Western development. It was circulating by the fifteenth century and was fixed in the form Catholics now say by the Roman Breviary of Pius V in 1568.

The honest gloss on that difference is not the one a Protestant might hope for. It is not that the Orthodox decline to ask the Theotokos's prayers; they ask constantly, in the Paraklesis, in the litanies, in the dismissal of every service, and in prayers printed on the same page as this one. The point is narrower and more interesting: the single most frequently said Marian prayer in the Eastern Church contains no request, and consists entirely of the words two people say to her in the Gospel plus a clause identifying who her son is. It is prayed with a bow or a prostration, three times in some rules, and it is sung at Sunday Vespers in the resurrectional cycle. A Protestant who finds intercession difficult and wants to begin somewhere can say this one without saying anything he does not already believe, and the chapter on the saints takes up the harder argument.

To one's Guardian Angel

O Angel of Christ, my holy guardian and protector of my soul and body, forgive me all wherein I have offended thee every day of my life, and protect me from all influence and temptation of the evil one. May I no longer anger God by any sin. Pray for me to the Lord, that He may make me worthy of the grace of the All-holy Trinity, and of the most blessed Theotokos, and of all the saints. Amen.The prayer to the guardian angel, from the prayers before sleep

The scriptural basis is thinner than for most things in the prayer book and is worth laying out exactly. Christ says of children that "their angels always see the face of My Father who is in heaven." Psalm 90 [91]:11 says that God will give His angels charge over the one who trusts Him. When Peter is released from prison and knocks at the door, the household in Acts 12:15 concludes not that it is Peter but that "it is his angel," which is reported as an ordinary assumption rather than an odd one. Hebrews 1:14 calls the angels ministering spirits sent forth to serve those who will inherit salvation. That is the material, and the doctrine of a guardian angel for each Christian is built on it together with a continuous tradition of belief; it is not a defined dogma in the way the two natures of Christ are defined.

The line a Protestant will stop on is "forgive me all wherein I have offended thee." You are asking an angel's forgiveness. What the tradition means by it is not absolution, which belongs to God alone, but the ordinary forgiveness owed between persons who have wronged one another: the angel appointed to a man is grieved by that man's sins, in the way a friend who has worked for you is grieved when you throw the work away, and the prayer acknowledges the offense as an offense against him too. There is a longer morning version of this prayer in the Russian books, addressed to the angel who stands by "my wretched soul and my passionate life," which asks him not to depart because of the sinner's intemperance. The combination of tenderness and severity in that phrasing is very characteristic of the whole prayer book.

For the departed

With the saints give rest, O Christ, to the soul of Thy servant, where there is neither sickness, nor sorrow, nor sighing, but life everlasting. Memory eternal. May his memory be eternal.The kontakion of the departed, from the funeral and memorial services; and the final acclamation

The short service for the dead is called the Litia in Slavonic use and the Trisagion in Greek use — in English usually the Trisagion prayers for the departed — and it takes five or six minutes. A priest serves it at a graveside, in a home, at the end of a Liturgy, or over the phone-length silence after bad news. Its central prayer asks God, who has trampled down death and given life to the world, to give rest to the soul of the departed in a place of light, a place of green pasture, a place of refreshment, from which sickness, sorrow and sighing have fled away; the phrase is Isaiah 35:10, and Revelation 21:4 says the same thing of the world to come. A layman can read the prayers in the shortened form printed in most prayer books, and in Slavic households the practice of commemorating the dead by name at the morning prayers is completely ordinary — the list grows and is not pruned.

The words "memory eternal" are commonly misheard. They are not a wish that the living continue to remember the dead, which would be a sentiment rather than a prayer. They are a petition that God remember him, and the Orthodox understanding of what it is to be remembered by God is not mental recall but being held in existence and in His love. This is what the thief asked for: "Lord, remember me when You come into Your kingdom." Praying for the dead is the point at which a Protestant reader is most likely to close the book, and the argument deserves its own treatment rather than a paragraph here; the texts usually brought forward are 2 Maccabees 12:44–45, which Protestants do not receive as canonical, and Paul's prayer for the household of Onesiphorus in 2 Timothy 1:16–18, which most commentators read as a prayer for a man already dead. What can be said here is only what the words ask, and the words ask that God hold him.

A morning prayer and an evening prayer

O Lord, I know not what I ought to ask of Thee. Thou alone knowest what are my true needs. Thou lovest me more than I myself know how to love. Help me to see my real needs which are concealed from me. I dare not ask either a cross or a consolation: I can only wait on Thee. My heart is open to Thee. Visit and help me, for Thy great mercy's sake. Strike me and heal me, cast me down and raise me up. I worship in silence Thy holy will and Thine inscrutable ways. I offer myself as a sacrifice to Thee. I put all my trust in Thee. I have no other desire than to fulfil Thy will. Teach me how to pray. Pray Thou Thyself in me. Amen.A morning prayer, attributed to St. Philaret (Drozdov), Metropolitan of Moscow, 1782–1867

Philaret of Moscow was the most formidable churchman in nineteenth-century Russia: the author of the Longer Catechism of 1839, the driving force behind the Russian Synodal translation of the Bible, and the man who drafted the manifesto emancipating the serfs. This prayer circulates under his name, is printed in prayer books as his, and is not in every edition; the attribution is traditional and widely accepted rather than documented from a manuscript, and it is worth saying so. Its remarkable feature is that it asks for nothing specific and then refuses, in so many words, to ask for either suffering or comfort. And it ends where the third section of this chapter began: "Teach me how to pray. Pray Thou Thyself in me" is Romans 8:26 turned into a petition, by a man who had spent fifty years praying.

O Master, Lover of mankind, is this bed to be my coffin, or wilt Thou yet enlighten my wretched soul with another day? Behold, the coffin lieth before me; behold, death confronteth me. I fear, O Lord, Thy judgment and the endless torments, yet I cease not to do evil. My Lord God, I continually anger Thee, and Thy most pure Mother, and all the heavenly hosts, and my holy Guardian Angel. I know, O Lord, that I am unworthy of Thy love, but deserve condemnation and every torment. But, whether I will it or not, save me, O Lord. For to save a good man is no great thing, and to have mercy on the pure is nothing wonderful, for they are worthy of Thy mercy. But show the wonder of Thy mercy toward me, a sinner.An evening prayer, attributed to St. John of Damascus; the rubric in the Russian books directs that it be said while pointing at one's bed

The rubric is the most striking thing about it. The prayer book does not merely supply a text about death; it tells you to point at the furniture. This is the same instinct that puts a washed skull on a shelf in an Athonite ossuary, and it is not morbidity, because the sentence it produces is not despair but a demand: whether I will it or not, save me. That line gives Protestants pause and gives readers of Calvin a moment of recognition, and it is worth being precise about what it is and is not. It is not a statement about irresistible grace and the writer is not making a systematic claim; it is a man observing that his own will is unreliable and asking to be saved past it, which is a different and older kind of sentence. The attribution to St. John of Damascus, who died around 749, is traditional; the Greek corpus under his name is large and not all of it is his.

The Prayer of the Optina Elders

Grant unto me, O Lord, that with peace of mind I may face all that this new day is to bring. Grant unto me to dedicate myself completely to Thy holy will. For every hour of this day, instruct and support me in all things. Whatsoever tidings I may receive during the day, do Thou teach me to accept tranquilly, in the firm conviction that all eventualities fulfil Thy holy will. Govern Thou my thoughts and feelings in all I do and say. When things unforeseen occur, let me not forget that all cometh down from Thee. Teach me to behave sincerely and rationally toward every member of my family, that I may bring confusion and sorrow to none. Bestow upon me, my Lord, strength to endure the fatigue of the day and to bear my part in all its passing events. Guide Thou my will and teach me to pray, to believe, to hope, to suffer, to forgive and to love. Amen.The Prayer of the Optina Elders, in the English version most widely circulated; renderings differ

Optina Pustyn, a hermitage in Kaluga province, was the greatest center of eldership in imperial Russia, and the line of elders there — Leonid, Macarius, Ambrose, Anatoly, Barsanuphius, Nektary and the rest — drew Gogol, Dostoevsky, Soloviev and Tolstoy, along with thousands of peasants. About the prayer itself an honest account has to be given. It is called the prayer of the Optina elders, and in some printings the prayer of the last Optina elders, but it cannot be traced to the writings of the nineteenth-century elders and its actual origin is not established; it appears to have spread in the twentieth century and is now printed in Russian prayer books and translated everywhere. That does not make it a bad prayer. It makes it a prayer of uncertain pedigree with a very good name attached, and anyone who tells you it was composed by St. Ambrose of Optina is telling you more than is known.

What it does is unusual enough to be worth noticing. Nearly every other prayer in the book asks God to do or give something; this one asks almost exclusively for a disposition. And its central petition is the hardest sentence in the whole prayer book to mean: that whatever news the day brings be received tranquilly, in the firm conviction that all of it fulfils God's will. A man who says that in the morning and then opens his email has made a claim he will be tested on by eleven o'clock. It also contains one of the very few petitions in the entire Orthodox corpus about behaving sensibly toward one's own family, which may be why converts with children find it the most immediately usable prayer they are given.

Before communion

I believe, O Lord, and I confess that Thou art truly the Christ, the Son of the living God, Who camest into the world to save sinners, of whom I am first. I believe also that this is truly Thine own immaculate Body, and that this is truly Thine own precious Blood. Therefore I pray Thee: have mercy upon me and forgive my transgressions, both voluntary and involuntary, of word and of deed, committed in knowledge or in ignorance; and make me worthy to partake without condemnation of Thine immaculate Mysteries, unto the remission of my sins and unto life everlasting. Amen. Of Thy Mystical Supper, O Son of God, accept me today as a communicant; for I will not speak of Thy Mystery to Thine enemies, neither like Judas will I give Thee a kiss; but like the thief will I confess Thee: Remember me, O Lord, in Thy Kingdom. Let not the communion of Thy Holy Mysteries be unto me for judgment or condemnation, O Lord, but for the healing of soul and body.The prayers said immediately before communion; the first traditionally attributed to St. John Chrysostom

"Of whom I am first" is 1 Timothy 1:15, and the Greek there is present tense — Paul says he is the chief of sinners, not that he was — which is why the Church keeps it in the present when she puts it in the mouth of a communicant. The second prayer works by naming three groups of people who were present at or near the Supper and choosing one: not the enemies, to whom the Mystery is not explained; not Judas, whose approach was a kiss; but the thief, who confessed on a cross beside Him and asked to be remembered. It is a deliberately humiliating piece of self-location, and it is the standard prayer of every Orthodox Christian on the way to the chalice. The third is the pastoral one, and the verse behind it is 1 Corinthians 11:29, on eating and drinking judgment to oneself; the Orthodox tradition takes that verse with complete seriousness, which is why the preparation is as heavy as it is.

Two honest qualifications. The attribution of the first prayer to St. John Chrysostom is what the service books say; the set of pre-communion prayers and the canon that accompanies them was assembled over a long period from many hands, and the names attached to individual prayers in the prayer book are liturgical convention as much as demonstrable authorship. And the discipline around communion varies more than almost anything else in Orthodox practice. A catechumen does not yet commune at all. Among the baptized, the requirements — confession beforehand and how recently, the length and strictness of the eucharistic fast, whether the full canon and all the prayers are read — differ substantially between Greek, Antiochian, Russian and Serbian practice, and have shifted within living memory: the movement toward frequent communion in the twentieth century, associated in the English-speaking world with Alexander Schmemann and in Greece with the Zoe movement and later writers, changed the norms in many places and did not change them everywhere. This is a question for a priest and not for a book.

At table

Before eating, after the Lord's Prayer: O Christ God, bless the food and drink of Thy servants, for Thou art holy, always, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen. After eating: We thank Thee, O Christ our God, that Thou hast satisfied us with Thine earthly gifts. Deprive us not of Thy heavenly Kingdom, but as Thou camest among Thy disciples, O Saviour, and gavest them peace, come also to us and save us.The prayers before and after meals

The prayer after the meal is the interesting one, because it does not stop at thanks. It thanks God for the earthly gifts and then immediately asks not to be left with only those, which is a startling thing to say over a cleared plate and is the whole theology of Orthodox fasting in one clause. The second half is doing something specific with Scripture: the Saviour coming among His disciples and giving them peace is John 20:19, the evening of the Resurrection, and the Church asks Him to come to this table as He came to that room. She could hardly have chosen otherwise, since the risen Christ is twice recognized at a meal — at Emmaus in the breaking of the bread in Luke 24:30–31, and by the sea of Tiberias in John 21. In many households the verses of Psalm 144 [145]:15–16 are said first, that the eyes of all hope in God and that He gives them their food in due season, and "It is truly meet" is often added at the end.

O Lord, save Thy people

O Lord, save Thy people and bless Thine inheritance. Grant victory to the Orthodox Christians over their adversaries, and by the power of Thy Cross preserve Thy habitation.Troparion of the Cross; sung at the Exaltation of the Cross and said at the Third Hour and in the morning prayers

The first line is Psalm 27 [28]:9 almost verbatim, and the rest is a prayer to be defended by the Cross rather than by arms. It is the troparion of the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross on the fourteenth of September and is used constantly outside it. And it has a history that ought not to be hidden, because a chapter that printed it without the history would be presenting a revised text as an ancient one. In Russian imperial use the middle line was a prayer for victory for the Emperor over his enemies, and in some older Greek usage it named the pious sovereigns; after 1917 it was revised, and the versions now in print vary — some read "grant victory to the Orthodox Christians over their adversaries," some soften adversaries to enemies of the faith, and some jurisdictions have reworded it further. This is a real, documented case of a liturgical text changing with the politics around it, and it is a useful corrective to the impression that nothing in Orthodox worship has ever moved.

For enemies

Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.St. Nikolai Velimirovich, Prayers by the Lake, the opening of the prayer for enemies

The command is Matthew 5:44 and Luke 6:28, and it is one of the few things Christ tells His followers to do that has no parallel anywhere in the religious literature of the ancient world. The Church's ordinary provision for it is not a feeling but a list: in the commemorations of the morning prayers, after the living and before the dead, the one praying is directed to remember "those who hate and offend us," which puts his enemies into his rule by name every day whether he is in the mood or not. That is the mechanism, and it is more effective than resolve. Beyond it stands the most famous modern Orthodox prayer on the subject, written by St. Nikolai Velimirovich, Bishop of Ohrid and Žiča, in his Prayers by the Lake; it goes on to argue, at length and with a kind of dark cheerfulness, that his enemies have driven him closer to God than his friends ever did, and to ask blessing on them for that reason. The biographical fact is load-bearing and should be stated: Velimirovich was arrested by the Germans and was held at Dachau in 1944 and 1945. The prayer is easy to admire and hard to say, and the tradition does not pretend otherwise.

For the sick and for travelling

For the sick, the Church's principal act is not a prayer but a sacrament: the mystery of Holy Unction, the Euchelaion, served on the authority of James 5:14–15, in which the sick person is anointed with blessed oil, with seven epistles, seven Gospels and seven prayers in the full form. Short of that there is the Paraklesis, the supplicatory canon that any priest will serve for a named sick person, and the prayers for the sick in the Book of Needs, which ask God, the physician of souls and bodies, who puts down and raises up and who chastises and heals, to visit His servant, stretch out His healing hand, raise him from the bed of sickness, and forgive whatever sins are bound up with the illness. Wordings differ between translations and are best read from the book rather than reproduced from memory. What a layman does at home is simpler and is what priests actually recommend: put the name into the Jesus Prayer — "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on Thy servant N." — and keep it there, and ask the priest to commemorate the name at the Liturgy, where it will be cut into the bread at the Proskomedia.

O Lord Jesus Christ our God, the true and living Way...The opening of the prayer for travellers, Book of Needs

The travel prayer is built out of journeys in Scripture. It addresses Christ as the true and living Way, from John 14:6, and recalls that He journeyed with Joseph and His mother into Egypt as an infant and with Cleopas and his companion on the road to Emmaus after the Resurrection; it asks that He accompany the traveller in the same way, and that an angel of peace be sent as one was sent to guide Tobias. The details of the rendering vary, which is why only the opening is quoted here. In practice most Orthodox Christians travelling say the beginning prayers, this prayer or the troparion of St. Nicholas, and then the Jesus Prayer, and a great many of them cross themselves before the car moves, which is the most visible piece of Orthodox piety in any Greek or Russian neighborhood.

All of the occasional prayers — for the sick, for travellers, for a new house, for the blessing of water, for a woman in childbirth, for seed and for the fields — live in a single book, called the Euchologion in Greek and the Trebnik in Slavonic, and in English usually the Book of Needs. It is worth borrowing a copy once, because its range is startling to a newcomer: there are prayers for a well that has gone bad, for bees, for a car, for a fishing net, for a man troubled by his own thoughts, and for the dedication of a house in which a suicide has occurred. Any priest will read any of them on request, and most are surprised and pleased to be asked.

Behind the prayer book stands a much larger structure, and a layman does not have to do all of it but should know what it is, because the phrases he hears at his parish come out of it. The liturgical day in the Orthodox Church begins at sunset, on the reckoning of Genesis 1:5 — "and there was evening and there was morning, one day" — so Saturday evening already belongs to Sunday, which is why Vespers on Saturday night is the beginning of the Sunday services and not an appendix to Saturday.

Ninth Hour: Three in the afternoon. The hour of Christ's death on the Cross, Matthew 27:46. Served immediately before Vespers, and so belongs to the day that is ending.
Vespers: Sunset, and the opening of the new liturgical day. Psalm 103 [104] on creation, Lord I have cried (Psalm 140 [141]), the entrance with the lamp, the ancient hymn O Gladsome Light, and the Song of Symeon.
Compline: Before sleep. Small Compline is short and includes the Creed and prayers of repentance; Great Compline, used in Lent, is long, dark and among the most powerful services in the year.
Midnight Office: Kept in monasteries in the small hours, on the parable of the bridegroom coming at midnight, Matthew 25:6. Rarely served in parishes.
Matins: The long morning service; in Greek use Orthros. The Six Psalms, the canon of the day, the Gospel on Sundays, the praises and the Great Doxology. In Slavic practice usually joined to Vespers the night before as the All-Night Vigil.
First Hour: Dawn. Commemorates Christ standing before Pilate. Read immediately after Matins.
Third Hour: Nine in the morning. The descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, which Peter dates to the third hour in Acts 2:15. Includes Psalm 50.
Sixth Hour: Noon. The nailing to the Cross and the darkness, Mark 15:25 and 33. Read before the Liturgy.
Typika: Read in place of the Liturgy on days when there is no Liturgy, or by a community without a priest. This is the service a deprived parish can keep without clergy, and in the Soviet period a great many did.

The hours are not a monastic invention. Roman civil time divided the daylight into four watches of three hours, and Jewish practice already had appointed times of prayer; Acts shows the apostles keeping them, Peter and John going up to the temple at the ninth hour and Peter praying on a roof at the sixth. What the Church did was to fill the existing hours with the events of the Passion and Pentecost, so that the clock became a commentary. By the fourth century the structure is visible in the pilgrim Egeria's account of the services in Jerusalem, written in the early 380s, which describes daily prayer at dawn, at the sixth and ninth hours, at lighting of the lamps, and at greater length on Sundays — the first eyewitness description we have of the daily cycle in operation.

The Psalter is the backbone of all of it. The Orthodox Psalter follows the Septuagint numbering, which is why the great penitential psalm is 50 and not 51, and it contains a Psalm 151 that Protestant Bibles do not. For liturgical use it is divided into twenty sections called kathismata, each subdivided into three staseis; the word means "sitting," because the reading of a kathisma is one of the few points in Byzantine worship at which one sits. Distributed across Vespers and Matins, the twenty kathismata carry the entire Psalter through in a week, and during Great Lent the distribution doubles so that all hundred and fifty psalms are read twice in each week. A monk in a strict house will hear the whole Psalter every seven days and may read a kathisma privately as his rule on top of that, and in the Russian tradition the Psalter is read continuously over the body of a dead monk until burial.

A layman is not going to do this, and being told otherwise is discouraging rather than inspiring. What is within reach is a psalm a day, or the kathisma of the day read once a week, or the Six Psalms of Matins — 3, 37 [38], 62 [63], 87 [88], 102 [103] and 142 [143] — read in the morning, which takes about eight minutes and constitutes a complete and ancient prayer in itself. The most practical counsel is to memorize four: Psalm 50 for repentance, Psalm 90 [91] for fear, Psalm 22 [23] for grief, and Psalm 102 [103] for thanksgiving. A psalm that is in you is available at two in the morning in a hospital corridor, where the book is not.

Two devotional forms stand between the prayer book and the services, and a convert will be handed both. The Akathist is the more famous. The word means "not sitting," and it names the one thing everybody is told about it: you stand for the whole of it. The Akathist to the Theotokos is a poem of twenty-four stanzas, alternating short kontakia and long oikoi, arranged as an acrostic on the Greek alphabet, with every oikos ending in the refrain "Rejoice, O Bride unwedded." Its authorship is genuinely unknown and has been assigned at various times to Romanos the Melodist, to George of Pisidia, to the Patriarch Sergius and to the Patriarch Germanus; specialists do not agree, and the proemion "To thee, the Champion Leader" is a later addition traditionally connected with the deliverance of Constantinople from the siege of 626. In Greek practice it is sung in four parts on the first four Fridays of Great Lent, as the Salutations, and entire on the fifth Saturday, the Saturday of the Akathist. The Akathist to the Sweetest Lord Jesus is a later medieval composition on the same pattern, and dozens more have been written since to particular saints and icons, of uneven quality; the original is in a different class from most of its imitations, and it is fair to say so.

The other form is the canon. A canon is a set of nine odes attached to the nine biblical canticles — the song of Moses at the Red Sea, the song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32, the song of Hannah, the prayer of Habakkuk, Isaiah 26, the prayer of Jonah, the two songs of the three young men in the furnace, and the Magnificat — with the second ode, which is the most severe of them, omitted outside Lent. The Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete, read in Lent, runs to some two hundred and fifty stanzas. The one a layman will meet most is the Paraklesis, the Small Supplicatory Canon to the Theotokos, attributed to Theosteriktos the Monk in the ninth century, with a Great Paraklesis attributed to the Emperor Theodore II Doukas Laskaris in the thirteenth; in Greek parishes the two alternate every evening through the first fourteen days of August during the Dormition fast. It is also the standard thing to read, at church or at home, when somebody is in danger or seriously ill, and its refrain is simply: Most Holy Theotokos, save us.

The service books a newcomer keeps hearing named: the Horologion, the book of the hours; the Psalter; the Octoechos, the eight-week cycle of resurrectional hymns in the eight tones; the Menaion, twelve volumes for the fixed calendar, one per month; the Triodion, for the ten weeks of Lent and pre-Lent; the Pentecostarion, for Pascha to Pentecost; the Euchologion or Trebnik for the sacraments and occasional prayers; and the Typikon, the rulebook that says how the others are combined on any given day. The Typikon is the reason there are arguments.

The first thing to expect is that it will not feel like much. A convert who has come from a tradition where prayer is measured by warmth, liberty or a sense of the Lord's nearness will find the Orthodox rule strangely flat: a fixed text, in old English, said standing in front of pictures, producing very little. This is not a malfunction. The tradition has a name for the condition and a large literature about it, and the counsel in that literature is consistent from the Egyptian desert to nineteenth-century Russia: the withdrawal of consolation is normal, is frequently deliberate on God's part, and is one of the principal instruments by which a beginner is taught to pray for God rather than for the feeling of God. St. Isaac the Syrian, writing in the seventh century, treats the alternation of consolation and abandonment as the ordinary rhythm of the Christian life rather than a sign of anything wrong. The one response that is ruled out is stopping.

The second thing is distraction, and it is worse than a beginner expects. You will get four words into the Trisagion and discover that you have been thinking about a work email for a minute and a half. Everybody does this; the Fathers who wrote about it did it. The counsel is technical and useful. Do not argue with the thought and do not examine it, because both are ways of continuing to attend to it — simply return to the words, as many times as necessary, without commentary on yourself. Say the prayers aloud, quietly, because the voice gives the wandering mind something external to follow and it is much harder to drift while speaking than while reading. And when you notice that you have said a whole prayer without attending to any of it, St. Theophan's advice is to go back and say it again rather than to press on and finish on schedule, because the rule exists for the attention and not the reverse.

The third thing is the failure mode that actually ends most beginners' prayer lives, and it is not doubt. It is zeal. The pattern is so regular that priests can predict its timing: a catechumen prays the short rule he was given, finds after a month that it is working, concludes that more would work better, adds an akathist and five hundred knots on the rope and the full evening prayers without asking anybody, keeps the enlarged rule for two or three weeks on the strength of enthusiasm, misses a night, misses a week, and then does not pray at all for months, with a private conviction that he is not suited to Orthodoxy. What has happened is not a spiritual failure but an arithmetical one. The remedy is the oldest piece of advice in this chapter: do not increase the rule without asking, and when you are given permission to increase it, increase it by less than you want to.

The fourth thing is subtler and more dangerous, and it arrives about the time the rule becomes habitual. A man who prays every morning begins to notice who does not. He starts to measure other people, including his own family, by a standard he was given three months ago, and to take a quiet satisfaction in his own consistency. This is precisely the condition the prayer of St. Ephrem is aimed at, and it is why the hinge of that prayer asks for sight of one's own sins and not for the strength to keep going. The traditional instruction is to say nothing to anyone about one's rule — not the length of it, not how it is going — and there is nothing pious about the reticence; it is a practical measure, because a rule described to others immediately starts being kept for them.

Some practical matters that decide more than they should. Pray the morning prayers before the telephone, because after the telephone the mind has already been given its subject for the day and will not release it. Pray the evening prayers before you are too tired to stand, not in bed at twenty to twelve, which is not the rule but a gesture at it. If you travel, take the small book. If you miss a day, do not make it up with a double portion the next day, and do not treat it as a debt; simply do the next one. If you are ill, sit, and if you are very ill, say the Jesus Prayer lying down and let that be the whole of it — there is a strand in the tradition, from Optina in particular, that treats the prayer of a sick person as worth more than the standing rule of a healthy one.

And the rule is reported. Confession in the Orthodox Church is not principally a review of misdeeds; it is where a man tells his priest the truth about the state of his life, and the state of his prayer is part of that. The useful sentence is not "I kept my rule" but "I stopped praying on the fourteenth and here is what happened that day," because the second is information a confessor can act on and the first is not. A convert who conceals the collapse of his rule out of embarrassment has removed the one mechanism the tradition supplies for repairing it.

Finally, the honest limit of what is promised. None of this is advertised as producing experiences, and a chapter that implied otherwise would be selling something. What the tradition claims the rule produces, over years and not months, is a man who is slightly harder to provoke, slightly less certain that he has understood his own motives, and considerably more able to pray when something terrible happens, because the words are already in him and do not have to be invented at the worst possible moment. That is a modest claim and it is testable. The larger promise is not modest, and it is not the tradition's promise but Christ's, made at the end of the parable this whole chapter keeps returning to: the publican went down to his house justified. He said nine words, from a fixed form, without lifting his eyes.

A last practical thing. The hardest moments are the ones in which nobody opens a book, so it is worth knowing in advance what the Church reaches for. Everything below is in this chapter, and everything below can be memorized; the total is perhaps twenty minutes of learning for a use that lasts the rest of a life.

On waking: The Prayer of the Publican, then the usual beginning. Before the telephone.
When there is no time at all: The sign of the cross and the Jesus Prayer, once, meant.
When you cannot pray and do not want to: The usual beginning, read aloud, slowly, to the end. The point is that it does not depend on you.
When you have sinned badly: Psalm 50 and the prayer of St. Ephrem, with the prostrations. Then arrange to go to confession.
When you are afraid: Psalm 90 [91], and Beneath thy compassion.
When you are angry with someone: His name in the Jesus Prayer, fifty knots. Then the commemoration of those who hate and offend us.
Before a meal: The Lord's Prayer and the blessing of the food; after it, the thanksgiving, which asks not to be left with earthly gifts alone.
Before a journey: The prayer for travellers or the troparion of St. Nicholas, and the sign of the cross before the vehicle moves.
For someone sick: The name in the Jesus Prayer, the Small Paraklesis if you can read it, and the name given to the priest for the Proskomedia.
When someone has died: The kontakion, With the saints give rest, and Memory eternal. Then ask a priest for the Trisagion prayers for the departed.
Before communion: I believe, O Lord, and I confess, with Of Thy Mystical Supper and the prayer against condemnation — in addition to whatever your priest has told you to read.
At the end of any rule: It is truly meet to bless thee, and Rejoice, O Virgin Theotokos, with a bow.
Last thing at night: The evening prayer of St. John Damascene, said while pointing at the bed, and then the Jesus Prayer until sleep.

Two closing cautions, both already made and both worth repeating because they are the two mistakes this chapter is most likely to cause. First, translations differ, and the texts printed here are widely used traditional renderings rather than an authorized version; the book your parish uses is the book to pray from, and where its wording differs from what is above, its wording wins. Second, none of this is a substitute for being given a rule. Everything here can be read tonight, and a reader who wants to begin tonight should — the usual beginning, one prayer, the Lord's Prayer and a bow will do — but the next step is to tell a priest what you have started and let him tell you what to keep.

On beginning as a catechumen. A catechumen is not yet communing and in some parishes is not yet expected to keep a full rule, and there is a real difference of practice about which prayers are appropriate before baptism or reception. Some priests give the whole morning and evening rule at once; others give the beginning prayers, the Jesus Prayer and the Creed and add the rest at reception; a few withhold the pre-communion prayers entirely until they can be used. All of these are defensible. None of them is something to work out alone from a chapter on a website.