Faith is needed here: thy faith shall save thee, said the Lord to the blind man after he had been healed. Faith is needed for constancy in prayer; constancy, patience and long-suffering are needed; a rejection of false shame and perseverance are needed in order for the podvig to bring forth its wondrous fruit.

They forbade the blind man to cry out, and he cried out all the more; they commanded the blind man to be silent, and he cried out all the louder. This is what we should do: we must overcome and trample down all obstacles to prayer; we must ignore all obstacles and pray all the more zealously and fervently. If at your morning rule your prayer was plundered by thoughts and dreams, and you did not belong to yourself, because of the violence of the passions that overwhelmed you, then do not weaken, do not fall into despondency. With renewed zeal, stand up at the evening rule, earning to listen to your prayers and gathering up your scattered thoughts, like the leader of Israel, who said to his soldiers: Let us be of good courage and be strong for our people and for the cities of our God, and the Lord will do good in His [His] eyes" (1101). In prayerful podvig, it is necessary to renounce oneself, to leave our success to the will of our God, Who at a time known to Him gives grace-filled prayer to the one who, by his own podvig, actively proves his will to have it [1102]. I do not have my soul honest to myself [1103], says the Apostle;  those who consider themselves worthy of grace are deceived by pride and self-conceit. If during the year our progress in prayer, despite constant exercise in it, turned out to be meagre and insignificant, next year let us make the efforts in our power to make the progress fruitful. If ten years have passed, if dozens of years have passed, and we have not yet seen the desired fruit, let us try to remain faithful to the podvig in the remaining days of our lives. The treasure brought by podvig is eternal; it is of immeasurable value: it is not at all strange that God's Providence allows us to work which, even if only slightly, would correspond to the crowning acquisition of it.

The main condition for success in prayer is that prayer should always be performed with the greatest reverence and attention. For this, it is necessary not only to abandon a sinful life, but also to withdraw from the city, which mainly depicts the rejection of all cares and cares during prayer. We achieve this when we entrust everything that concerns us to the Lord. The Holy Church invites us to such devotion to God; she often recalls this devotion, saying: "Let us commit ourselves, one another, and all our life to Christ our God" [1104]. Attentive prayer is aided by the remembrance of the omnipresence and omniscience of God. If God is present in every place, then He is also present in the place of our prayer. If He sees everything, then He also sees the disposition of our hearts, the mood of our minds. Standing at prayer, we stand before the face of God, at the judgment of God; we have the opportunity to propitiate God with our prayerful cry and lamentation. Remembering the uncertainty of the hour of death also incites to fervent, warmest prayers. We will not sin at all if every time we pray, we pray as if in the last hour of our life, as if in the hour of our coming end. When the mind pays attention to prayer, the heart also listens to it, expressing and proving its attention with a feeling of repentance. For the most convenient attainment to the state of attention, the Holy Fathers advise to pray slowly, as if enclosing the mind in the words of the prayer, so that not a single word escapes attention. An elusive word is a lost word! A prayer that escaped attention is a lost prayer!

A mind that has not acquired the habit of attention has difficulty in accustoming itself to it. This should not lead to despondency and confusion for the ascetic of prayer. "Inconstancy," says St. John of the Ladder, "is characteristic of the mind" [1105] of fallen man, a mind corrupted by sin. "When your mind," the great John continues to instruct the ascetic of prayer, "is carried away from attention because of its infancy, you again introduce it into the words of prayer. If you do this, then He Who appoints the boundaries of the sea will come to you and command your mind: Come to this in your prayer, and do not pass away, but in you your waves will be broken" [1106]: let your thoughts be concentrated in you. Constant labor in acquiring attention is an active testimony before God of our sincere desire to have attention. But it is impossible for a man to bind his spirit by his own efforts: for this he needs the command of the All-Supreme Spirit, the Spirit Who is the Lord and Creator of our spirit [1107]. And the Spirit does this work. This is the Messenger Who is sent by the Son of God to the blind man sitting and crying out, Who calls the blind man to Jesus [1108]. The Spirit of God announces the Son of God [1109]. The Spirit, having overshadowed the servant of Christ, instructs him in all truth,[1110] and instructs him also in attentive prayer. The attention of the mind during prayer is its complete striving towards the Truth, it is its correct state and action; Absent-mindedness, on the contrary, is a state of self-deception, is a sign that the mind is carried away by the teaching of falsehood, by thoughts and dreams that are brought to it by demons, and arise from a nature that is sick with sin. The state of deep, constant attention during prayer comes from the contact of Divine grace with our spirit. The bestowal of grace-filled attention on the one who prays is the original spiritual gift of God [1111].

The blind man, hearing the invitation, revived, delighted by this invitation, gets up, throws off his outer garment, and goes to appear before the Lord. "When the mind, through grace-filled attention," say the Fathers, "is united with the soul, then it is filled with ineffable sweetness and joy" [1112]. Then begins the spiritual progress of the ascetic of prayer; then, by the power and purity of prayer, he aspires with all his being to God; then all extraneous thoughts and dreams depart, disappear, as St. David said: Depart from me, all you who work iniquity, for the Lord has heard the voice of my weeping, the Lord has heard my prayer, the Lord has accepted my prayer. Let all my enemies, the outcast spirits, be ashamed and troubled, let them return and be ashamed. The overthrow of outer garments means the abandonment of many and different external forms of prayer; they are replaced by prayer in the spiritual cell, which embraces and unites in itself all the particular deeds. Being a vast work, it absorbs and combines in itself the entire life of the ascetic. "There are many kinds of virtue," said the Monk Nil of Sorsky, "but they are particular; but prayer of the heart is the source of all blessings: the soul is watered with it, like a garden with abundant waters" [1114]. Pure prayer is standing before the face of God. He who stands before God asks for enlightenment and receives grace-filled enlightenment of the mind and heart. He enters into true knowledge of God and divine services: he no longer returns to his former state of immobility, to the gates of the city; but, joining the rest of the disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, he will follow Him. He has all the possibility and the necessary ability for such a sequence. "Whoever prays with his lips," says St. Symeon the New Theologian, "but has not yet acquired spiritual reason and cannot pray with his mind, is like a blind man who cried out: Son of David! have mercy on me. But he who has acquired spiritual reason and prays with his mind, whose spiritual eyes have been opened, is like the same blind man when the Lord healed him, when his sight was restored, and when he saw the Lord, he no longer called Him the Son of David, but confessed Him to be the Son of God and gave Him the worship befitting God" [1115].

Faith is the foundation of prayer. Whoever believes in God, as one should believe, will certainly turn to God through prayer, and will not depart from prayer until he receives God's promises, until he is assimilated to God, until he is united with God. "Faith," said St. John of the Ladder, "is a standing of the soul devoid of doubt, unshaken by any oppositions. A believer is one who not only confesses God as almighty, but also believes that he will receive everything from Him. Faith is the mother of silence" [1116], both in the cell and in the heart. Whoever believes that God is vigilantly caring for him, places all his hope in Him, calms his heart with hope, with the help of hope removes all cares from himself and devotes himself wholeheartedly to the study of the will of God, revealed to mankind in the Holy Scriptures, revealed even more abundantly by the feat of prayer. By faith in God, the ascetic endures and overcomes all the obstacles arising from the fallen nature and erected by the spirits of malice, obstacles that increase to confuse his prayer, to deprive him of the means of communion with God. Thou hast been with me in multiplicity from my youth; On my back she made sinners, continuing her iniquity[1117]. But I, strengthened and guided by faith, have constantly lifted up my eyes, my mind and my heart, to Thee, O my Lord. Behold, as the eyes of a servant are in the hand of his master, as the eyes of a handmaid are in the hand of his mistress: so are our eyes to the Lord our God, until He will be generous to us. Amen.

Homily

in the thirty-second Week

About Zacchaeus

For the Son of Man has come to seek and save the lost [1119].

Beloved brethren! These merciful words, which we have heard today in the Gospel, were spoken by the incarnate God about the sinner whom the righteous Judgment called lost, who was exacted by the power and grace of redemption, included and inscribed by it among the saved.

The sinner, Zacchaeus, was a publican and an elder of tax collectors. He had considerable wealth, as the Gospel mentions, hinting at the means by which wealth was acquired. Tax collectors were called tax collectors. Money is tempting! the glitter of gold and silver enchants the eyes of Adam's descendant, infected with sinfulness, and where money turns, abuse rarely, rarely does not creep in. For the most part, the tax collectors went into covetousness. When covetousness turns into passion, then it allows itself all the violence, all the oppression of its neighbor. To help the passion of covetousness comes the passion of deceit and hypocrisy. From their copulation comes a disposition to captiousness, which attaches itself to all trifles under the pretext of unfailing observance of the laws, invents guilt for the innocent, and strengthens by such behavior to give the appearance of justice to inhuman oppression and cruelty committed against neighbors. By virtue of their character, the publicans served as an object of terror for the people, an object of contempt for moral people. Zacchaeus was the elder of the publicans: his abuses were greater than those of his subordinates. It is not without reason that it is mentioned that he was rich! He was enriched by iniquities; his sin was covetousness; His spiritual affliction was greed and the lack of mercy and compassion for mankind arising from greed. Because of his grave sins, because of the criminal mood of his soul, Zacchaeus is called lost. It was not the frivolous, often erroneous human judgment that recognized him as lost: God spoke the decree about him. Zacchaeus became an inveterate sinner: in order to accumulate wealth through abuse, it takes a long time and constancy in the way of acting.