AMA 002

Question 1: Please share some ways that parishioners can support their priest and his family. Many of us are converts and would love guidance in this area. Please share ways we can help them financially along with services we could do for them. Thank you.

This is a very important question, but unfortunately, it is difficult to answer, since each priest’s family, like any other family, is living through a unique set of circumstances. However, there are some general problems that may be common to most.

Money: Let’s get this one out of the way first. Many people are understandably shy about the topic of money in the context of such lofty things as liturgical services or pastoral care. However, it should be self-evident that a priest must use money to provide for his family, buy food, educate his children, buy petrol for his car, etc. Some priests may be independently-wealthy or have high-paying jobs outside the Church, but many do not. And even if they do, it is still important that the community offers financial support to the priest without relying on the priest’s secular employer to do that. In the United States, one of the major problems is healthcare. Even if a priest and his family can eat the antidoron for food and wear thrift finds for clothes, there are no good thrift options for medical care. It is important that parishioners think of their priest and his family not as just another icon they see in church on Sundays, but as real human beings who still have normal human needs on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

Time: Some priests are very good at setting boundaries, but others are not - everyone has some strong qualities and some weak ones. Especially if the priest has a full-time job outside of church, it is important to pay attention to the use of his time. Sadly, it is not altogether uncommon that a priest’s marriage suffers precisely because between his job, church services, parish functions, and pastoral care, he has no time left for his wife and children. You cannot imagine how many telephone calls a priest receives on Great and Holy Saturday asking about the schedule for Pascha - and that is after he spends hours posting the schedule of services on every conceivable web resource and sending it out to every conceivable email list. Lay people usually do not come for every single service and every single event, but a priest feels that he must be at every single one of them. If a priest is having a difficult time setting proper boundaries, parishioners should try to be well-differentiated and work to safe-guard his time - trust me, the parish will greatly benefit if the priest and his family are psychologically healthy.

Friendship and fellowship: This problem is somewhat complicated or it can be. Due to the peculiar position of a priest and his family in the parish, it is often very difficult for them to form friendships. In some cases, close friends can be misunderstood as favorites. In other cases, close friendships may interfere with some aspects of pastoral care or even confession. And yet in other cases, a priest, his wife, and their children may feel that they cannot relax and show normal human vulnerability, because they must always act as an example of virtue. There is a tradition in some communities, for example, that when a priest comes to a reception of some sort, such as at a wedding, he stays only for a short while. The hosts and guests act all prim and proper while the priest is present, and the real party begins only when the priest has left. This is very prudent, of course, but good friendships are formed and maintained in precisely such relaxed and unscripted moments from which the priest is absent. (Naturally, we are not talking about the kinds of “unscripted moments” when, as the Russian custom goes, icons are carried out of the room lest they witness the debauchery about to take place.) One solution to this understandable isolation of the priest’s family is to support and fund their trips to visit other priests and their families, clergy conferences - and it is important that the priest’s wife also attends these events, Orthodox camps for their children, etc. Priests, especially those who are not independently wealthy, cannot afford the travel; and even those who can, often hesitate on account of their having to be at church on the week-ends. It would be a very good practice, if the parish developed a robust custom of scheduling laity-led services to allow the priest to form and maintain relationships with other clergy and their families.

These are some general remarks, and any particulars will depend on the unique circumstances of every parish.

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Question 2: How in the time of Jesus Christ and after in the early centuries Christians pray in the morning and in the evening. Or did they even pray regularly? Maybe it was the singing of psalms as it was in the Old Testament times?

I am trying to imagine Maria Magdalena for example and how was her praying practice? Did St. Mary pray every morning?

Great question! There are two main difficulties with exploring this issue. First, in the early centuries, Christians were not unified by custom, since Christian customs did not yet exist, and each group varied in what they did based on their own cultural background and creative talents. Jewish Christians in the first-century Jerusalem, for example, did something quite different from what converts from Paganism did in Rome in the second century or Syriac Christians in the fourth. I will plan to cover some of this information in detail in a future post.

As for Mary from Magdala, almost nothing is known about her with any certainty, but she was most probably a Jew, as is evidenced by her name - Miryam - which is of Hebrew origin. Magdala was a fishing village on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Thus, like many of the apostles, Mary was a Galilean. In early-first-century Magdala, there were two synagogues, one of which Mary likely attended.

According to Christ’s teaching, the God whom the Jews worshipped was God the Father; therefore, there is no evidence that Christ taught against any of the prayers or synagogal worship of the Jews. He regularly visited synagogues and the Temple and apparently, participated in worship like any other Jew. After Christ’s ascension, His disciples “were continually in the temple, praising and blessing God” (Lk 24:53) - that is, the Jewish Temple. From that point, they apparently participated in Temple worship daily (Acts 2:46 et passim) with the addition of breaking bread in their homes once a week. In other words, Jewish Christians continued to observe Jewish religious customs, until they were eventually expelled from the synagogues sometime between 60 and 90 AD. Most probably, the story was quite a bit more complicated and varied from town to town, but in the first approximation, this seems to have been the case.

There is no documentary evidence for how the earliest Christians and Mary Magdalene conducted their daily prayers, but most scholars assume that they simply continued to follow the Jewish practice of their day. At the time of Christ’s earthly ministry, Jews prayed three times a day - morning, mid-day, and evening. The prayers consisted of a small office which included the Creed or Shema and the 18 Blessings or Amidah, among other prayers. (There are now 19 Blessings; a blessing condemning heretics - i.e., Christians - was added during the time when Christians were being expelled from the synagogues.) In fact, it may very well be the case, as some scholars suggest, that when Jesus gave to His disciples the Lord’s Prayer (“Our Father…”), He meant for it to be incorporated into the normal Jewish daily prayers. A similar argument is made concerning the prayer rule in the Didache 8:2, 3. This is conjecture, however, and there is no direct evidence for either claim.

The Didache, a second-century Christian document gives the following rule:

2. And do not pray as the hypocrites, but as the Lord commanded in his Gospel, pray thus: "Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy Name, thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, as in Heaven so also upon earth; give us today our daily bread, and forgive us our debt as we forgive our debtors, and lead us not into trial, but deliver us from the Evil One, for thine is the power and the glory for ever." 3. Pray thus three times a day.

As I mentioned, while the document itself does not elaborate, most scholars assume that the Lord’s Prayer was to be included in the normal Jewish practice of prayer. Because this practice was normal and well-known, the rule treats it as self-evident. Whether this is actually so, we may never know.

To summarize, we have no way of knowing how Mary Magdalene prayed every day, but there is good reason to suppose that she said the normative Jewish prayers - the Shema, the Amidah - and quite possibly the Lord’s Prayer three times each day. This may have been done either individually or as a form of group prayer with other Christians. She also broke bread with fellow Christians on the Day of the Lord - that is to say, on Sunday (technically, on Saturday evenings rather than Sunday mornings in the earliest traditions).

One thing is certain: Christians in the first century did not have a Prayer Book - at least, none has been found from that time period, and there are no mentions of the existence of one in any of the sources with which I am familiar. This likely means that prayer rules were transmitted orally and consisted of a small set of shorter prayers which could be easily memorized - the Shema, the Amidah, and the Lord’s Prayer may have been just such a set.

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Question 3: How can we avoid the trap where we only recite prayers audibly without paying attention? As we know, this isn’t really prayer at all.

I think that I will mark this one for a longer post sometime soon - this question is relevant for most of us. For now - a few brief remarks.

Saint Ignatii (Brianchaninov) was a 19th-century Russian bishop who not only wrote a great deal about asceticism, including prayer - many have written about such topics, including here on Substack - but he wrote from personal experience. He practiced asceticism in the way that the great ascetics of the Church teach it (his knowledge of the Fathers was superb), and then wrote about the experience.

According to Saint Ignatii, there are four levels of prayer. What we are discussing here is the first level or the first step - the oral or audible prayer. Self-evidently, this is the type of prayer that most of us tend to practice: standing before icons and chanting prayers with our mouth. (Perhaps, chanting “in our heads” - that is to say, without making audible sound, is also a form of oral prayer, for the mechanisms involved in the brain are the same.) Saint Ignatii recognizes the fact that our mind tends to wander during such prayer and refers to Saint John Climacus in recommending that we return our mind back to the words of the prayer every time that it wanders off. Naturally, this requires a degree of vigilance and self-awareness.

The passage to which Saint Ignatii refers is found in The Ladder of Divine Ascent, chapter 28:

Try always to bring back to yourself your wandering thought, or, better to say, enclose it in the words of prayer. If, due to your infancy, it [your thought] becomes tired and falls into distraction, then again bring it into the words of prayer, for inconstancy is characteristic of our mind. But He Who is strong to establish everything can also give constancy to our mind.

The important part, I think, is this: “inconstancy is characteristic of our mind.” In other words, thoughts naturally wander and must be trained - through effort and over time. In chapter 4, Saint John says the following:

Constantly struggle against the flight of your thoughts, and when your mind is scattered, gather it to yourself, for God does not seek prayer without fleeing [thoughts] from novices. Therefore, do not grieve, being plundered by thoughts, but be of good spirits and constantly call your mind to attention, for never being plundered by thoughts is characteristic of only an Angel.

Again, from us, God does not seek prayer without fleeing thoughts, but only that we keep bringing our thoughts back to the words of prayer. Asceticism, of which prayer is a part, is exercise - quite literally, from the Greek askeo. As with any exercise, we may find ourselves not particularly successful at first, but with time and effort, we get better.

A long time ago, I had the privilege of spending some time with Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) of blessed memory. He gave one useful piece of advice (which he also offered in some of his talks and writings): it is better to pray for shorter times more often. In other words, it is counterproductive to speed through a set of prayers in order to check off some imaginary box in our daily routine. It may be far better to slow down, bring the mind back to the words of prayer, and not to worry about whether all of the boxes will be checked. In order not to be tempted to simply forego the prayer rule on account of the wandering of the mind, the Metropolitan suggested setting a certain time - for example, 5 or 10 minutes - and then just focusing on proper prayer. If you manage to say ten prayers properly in that time - that is good; if you say only one prayer - that is good too, because you spent time in attentive prayer. At least, this is my recollection of that conversation a long time ago.

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Question 4: I've noticed the occasional scattering of Latin phrases in your posts and wanted to ask if you believe Latin is an important component of a good education? Many Orthodox Christians are drawn to classical education which heavily emphasizes the study of Latin, and sometimes Greek to a lesser extent.

Hmmm… English is not my native tongue, so it’s all Greek to me…

Jokes aside, Christianity first appeared and became established in the Greco-Roman world. Many of the Fathers wrote in Latin, and many others - in Greek (yet others - in Syriac). The Gospels were written in Greek. It helps to be familiar with Greek and Latin, if one wishes to study the texts in depth or to explore linguistic nuances. That said, it is not necessary to know Greek and Latin in order to be a Christian.

However, the issue of Classical education is a bit different; it is not identical to Christian education - Plato and Cicero are not required reading for Christians. “Classical” stands for the study of the Classics, which are defined by culture. In the West, there is one set of the Classics. In Russia, this set is a bit different (because, despite what some may say, Russian culture is adjacent to but not fully a Western culture). And I imagine that in China, the Classics are something completely different still from what we call by that word in the West.

So, to answer your question, I do think that a familiarity with Latin is helpful to those who wish to be immersed in the Western culture on a level a bit deeper than that of Hollywood and McDonald’s. It is also helpful in studying some of the very important works by the Church Fathers (although, good translations suffice for most studies). This is why Latin, Greek, and Hebrew were required courses in my theological education, as they are in many seminaries and schools of theology.

Cicero in the Senate Accuses Catiline of Conspiracy, October 21, 63 BC by Hans W. Schmidt

There were a few other questions submitted for the “Ask me anything” project. I will try to include them in the next episode.

As always, last but not least, please help Phroneo by sharing it with everyone you know - reading Phroneo may very well be an important part of a good education. And perhaps you might consider becoming a paying subscriber - Cicero would, certus sum.