But this is all creation, and how much more joy will the contemplation of the Creator Himself bring us! How beautiful He is, how perfect He is, how all-blessed He is, and this is given to us freely. This gift is given to us in baptism, but we still need to know how to take it, we need to work for it. And it depends on how much we grow it whether we enter the Kingdom of God, whether we come to know God through the Son of God, or whether we remain outside.

It's all up to us. Therefore, by the mercy of God, let us try not to waste time, but to remain in constant spiritual labor, so that neither the day, nor the hour, nor the month are wasted with us. Amen.

Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross,

June 15, 1986

All-Night Vigil under the Smolensk Icon of the Mother of God

Today's Sunday coincided with the celebration of the Smolensk Icon of the Mother of God. This icon blessed the daughter of the Byzantine emperor, who was married to the prince of Kiev, on the road, so it is also called "Hodegetria" (in Greek "Guide"). And so she became our Guide to salvation.

The Mother of God is assigned a mysterious role in the matter of our salvation. Back in Cana of Galilee, when there was not enough wine, She turned to Jesus and said: "They have no wine." And the Lord, although He grieved that He would now have to perform the first miracle – and this would be the first step to Golgotha – nevertheless turned water into wine in order to make people happy. Although you think, there was not enough wine, it's okay, you can buy more, or you can just drink tea. But the Lord did it, and since then it has been known that the prayers of the Mother of God have such a miraculous and helping power. The Church knows this from spiritual experience.

In fact, all spiritual experience is based on prayer. Take away prayer – and there will be no spiritual life, because we are sinful people and do not see God directly, as Adam saw Him. We do not hear God, because our senses have become coarse. We can communicate with Him only through faith and through prayer. But many, going to church for forty or fifty years in a row, do not even know what prayer is. Therefore, very often you can hear how a person asks to be allowed to copy some powerful prayer. Some even carry a written prayer on themselves, in their pocket or on their belt, thinking that their very words will protect and preserve them from something. This suggests that a person does not understand the essence of prayer, does not understand that its power does not depend on words.

Prayer is the living conversion of a living person to the living God, for it faith is necessary. A non-believer cannot pray, he can only read the text. A necessary condition for prayer is to place oneself before God or the saint to whom one is turning. But this can only be done by someone who unquestionably believes in the presence of God in the world. And this does not require any external conditions: riding a train or riding a horse, sitting at home, washing dishes, working with children, doing work in the garden, a person can always mentally put himself before God in one second, that is, remember Him. To remember that wherever he is, whatever he does, whatever he thinks, the Lord knows where he is, knows who he is and what he is thinking at that moment, and wants to save him. When such a thought comes to a person's mind, he feels a trembling of the soul. And by placing himself before God, a person can turn to Him. Knowing that God is omnipresent, knowing that God is omnipotent, knowing that God, even before we say or think something, already knows what we will say or think, we can address Him in any language: Greek, Latin, English, Japanese, Chinese, any of the dozens of African languages. And everyone who runs to God always knows from his own experience that God hears him.

By virtue of our sinfulness, we turn to God first of all with a request, with a supplication, which is why this appeal is called prayer. A person has turmoil in his soul, he is hard, scared, and he cries out to God. Half a day passes, and he sees that this horror has disappeared, it is no longer in his soul. This is the result of prayer – a person asked for help, and the Lord, by His mercy, very imperceptibly, very slowly, helped and healed the person at his request. Usually people turn to God in some kind of trouble (often this is how religious life begins). The man prayed – everything was settled, thank God, and he again forgot about God until the next trouble. But this experience remained in his memory, so in case of trouble he usually knows where to run, and always ends up in church. And even if he has no words, he can light a candle – this is also an expression of his prayer; or simply to fall on one's knees – to prostrate oneself in the dust before God, to imitate prayer with one's body; or make the sign of the cross. For example, someone who is even very far from God comes to church and suddenly begins to be baptized. He himself is not aware of what kind of action he is performing, but he has a desire – by this he expresses his agreement with God, expresses his reverence to Him, expresses his commitment to God, so far only by gesture.

And so he will turn to God once – the Lord helps; the second, third, hundredth time, the two hundredth, the thousandth – the Lord helps and helps. Then he becomes ashamed: what is it, God gives me everything at the first request, and what am I? And his conscience begins to stir somehow, he begins to feel that something is wrong in his life. This moment of moral revolution is the beginning of repentance: a person realizes that God is good, God is merciful, God is ready to forgive him, to accept him, but he is not worthy of this, he lives dirty, disgusting and vile. And he becomes ashamed that God saves him, pulls him out of all sorts of garbage pits, and he continues to bathe in this swamp.

This is the beginning of rebirth – a person enters the path of repentance, the path of correction; the work of freeing his soul from sin begins. And this is where difficulties arise in prayer. Many people are surprised: how is that? when I was still almost a non-believer and did not go to church, the Lord immediately helped me, but now, when I go to church and ask, the Lord often does not seem to hear me, and I have a kind of dryness in prayer and absent-mindedness, and I do not feel anything. The fact is that in the past a person prayed in all sorts of desperate situations – a desperate situation penetrated him to the marrow of his bones and he cried out to God from the depths of his being. His prayer was always sincere and came from the heart. And the Lord cannot but hear such a prayer and cannot help but pity a person, because it is said: "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved." And now the powder on which he worked disappears and the work begins – a Christian prayerful feat, in which the Mother of God Hodegetria, the Guide of our salvation, helps.

Unfortunately, we pray absent-mindedly. When we open the prayer book and begin to read the prayers, then, having finished reading, we understand that out of hundreds of words that we have pronounced mentally or aloud, at most two or a dozen and a half have reached our minds. This, of course, is not prayer. Any prayer without exception is always fulfilled, and if it is not fulfilled, then it is not a prayer. If we ask God, and the Lord does not give it to us, it means that we did not actually pray, it was only an attempt at prayer.