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PRAYER
Prayer
is doxology, thanksgiving and a petition towards God.
We, the Orthodox, believe in a personal God, the Father, the
Son and the Holy Spirit. This Triune God reveals Himself to
us through His second person, our Lord Jesus Christ.
Jesus
Christ is incarnated, preaches the Gospel, performs miracles,
He is crucified. He is resurrected, ascended into the heavens
and sends the Comforter to unite us with God the Father, in
order to restore the disturbed relationship with Him; in order
to bring us into a personal encounter, communion and union
with God.
Since
God is personal, we cannot know Him apart from His loving
relationship that prayer creates. If He was an idea, we could
have known Him with logical attestation.
‘Pray
and love God in order to know Him’, we could say to
someone that is searching for God. With prayer the unapproachable
God, becomes approachable. The unknown God becomes known.
The alien God becomes kin and friend. This is the way that
the God-man, our Lord, himself showed us. Lord Jesus Christ
prayed often.
However,
how are we supposed to be praying, because we do not know
by ourselves how to do it. St. Paul says, that we feel the
need to pray the same way we feel the need to breath. Prayer
is the breath of the spiritual life. We want to glorify, we
feel the desire to give thanks, we are driven to beseech,
but we do not know how to utter the shout of our hearts.
The
Holy Scriptures teach us that prayer has to be a sincere disposition
of our soul and not some hypocritical stance of our body.
It has to be done with faith, to be continuous and persevering;
to be done with humility and love and not as the prayer of
the Pharisee but as the prayer of the Publican.
There
is the private and the public prayer. In the private one,
we pray in our home, away from the human eyes. The public
one occurs mainly in Church.
The
true, honest prayer, the uplifting of the soul, the conversation
with God diverts the mind from the worldly care.
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Preparetion for the Holy Communion
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Salutations of Theotokos
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The canon of the Salutations of Theotokos
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Small Paraklisis to Theotokos
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Prayer of Optima Fathers
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