The Forms of Prayer

The Lord taught authentic prayer in the Sermon on the Mount. The disciples asked him: “Teach us to pray,” and Christ gave the gift of the Our Father.

All prayer comes from three forms--request, offering, praise. We find all three in the Lord's Prayer: “Give us this day our daily bread”, “forgive us our trespasses”, “deliver us from evil”; then, “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”, “thy kingdom come”, which means “Accept the offering of our lives for this end; accept our pardon of others and make us thy servants and thy witnesses.” Finally, “Hallowed be thy name”; “for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory.”

St. Basil in his Monastic Constitutions advises: “Begin to say humbly: `I am a sinner; I give you thanks, Lord, for having patiently borne with me...' Then ask for the reign of God and then for respectable things, and do not cease until you have obtained them.”

We can recognize these three forms in the responses to liturgical litanies. In the story of a tanner who learned humility from St.

Anthony, in the description of his prayer, we see he followed them exactly and thus showed how these forms become a state of prayer sanctifying all moments, even for those who do not have any particular time for prayer at their disposal. In the morning this workman presented all the inhabitants of Alexandria to God, saying “Have pity on us sinners.” During the day, his soul did not cease to think of his work as an offering: “For thee, Lord.” In the evening, being very happy that he had been kept in life, he could say only: “Glory to thee.”

Among the faithful Jews, the law was graven on their hearts, always present before their eyes, written on their hands. Their entire being was thus structured by the law; their gaze recognized the law in the life of the world, the creation of divine wisdom; and finally the law was accomplished by their hands, by their everyday acts.

Prayer follows the same universalism; everything is sanctified and blessed by it; everything becomes one of its forms. This is the prayerful conception of life where the most humble labor of a workman and the creation of a genius are equally entitled to be an offering before the face of God, and are received as a task given by the Father.

For the spiritual life it is also a decisive passage from “Jesus before the eyes” to “Jesus in the heart” according to the hesychastic tradition of Jesus' prayer.