What is prayer?
Food
and rest are essential to sustain human life; knowledge, art, and culture in
general enrich the mental capabilities of men, but only prayer reveals and
expands our spiritual faculties.
God
loves all His creations, and in particular He loves each of us since He is our
Heavenly Father. As it is natural for children to want to see and converse with
their parents, so it should also be natural and pleasant for us to converse
with our Heavenly Father and to want to be in spiritual communion with Him.
This conversation with God is called prayer. The soul, while uniting with God
in prayer, simultaneously is united with the whole spiritual world — with the
angels and saints. According to Saint John of Kronstadt, “Prayer is a golden
bond of the Christian — a stranger and wanderer on earth — with the spiritual
world of which he is a part, and even more so with God, the source of life.”
Prayer
is frequently accompanied by devout words and other outward signs of piety: the
sign of the Cross, kneeling, prostration, etc. But prayer can also be offered
without words, and without other external manifestations. This is the inner or
hidden prayer of a pious soul, which is familiar through experience to many
earnest Christians.
Orthodox Church Pakistan
www.ocpak.com
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