Part 1 of a talk presented at Sts. Cyril & Athanasius of Alexandria Institute for Orthodox Studies Symposium “Prayer in the Church Fathers” on 17 February 2013, San Francisco, California.
Yesterday, in his introduction, Father Irenei (Steenberg) said that he wished to spare me the utmost difficulty of trying to follow the most excellent talk by His Eminence Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) on prayer; and so, he graciously took that spot himself and afforded me the distinct agony of trying to follow an entire day of enlightening and inspirational talks by two illustrious and distinguished professors. One of the questions inspired by yesterday’s lectures was whether or not prayer was a conversation with God. Father Irenei alluded to the fact, and Metropolitan Kallistos talked about prayer being so much more than words and so much more complex than an exchange of information between man and God. In this talk, I hope to address some aspects of this very issue.
“Thou conversest with them oftimes, as with Thy true friends”
- Saint Symeon the New Theologian
As a pastor of a parish comprised mostly of recent immigrants to the United States whose Christian formation sometimes began through one of the many American and Western European Evangelical denominations actively proselytizing in the former Soviet Union, I often speak with people who already have some form of a prayer life about the tradition of prayer in the Orthodox Church. As is the case with many liturgical traditions, the Orthodox tradition of prayer - public and private - begins with set forms and texts which are compiled in books. And when giving advice to a person new to the Orthodox Church, I usually mention the concept of a prayer rule and give him or her an abbreviated Prayer Book containing shortened versions of morning and evening prayer rules and the rule before Holy Communion. In some ways, this gesture is often taken as an implicit suggestion that the way that the inquirer has been practicing prayer up to that point - that is to say, without a Prayer Book, praying simply with his or her own words - is somehow inferior to the use of a Prayer Book. In fact, the tradition of a set prayer rule found in a Prayer Book is so strong in the Russian Orthodox Church that many people confess deviating from that rule (usually, by shortening it) as a sin, but in more than eleven years of pastoral work I am yet to hear anyone confess the sin of making prayers in one’s own words too short or not saying enough of them. And herein arises a question: is it not better to talk to God in one’s own words - the same way we talk to any other person - rather than reading someone else’s words from a book? Should we not be like Moses with whom the Lord spoke “face to face, as one speaks to a friend”?[1]
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