INTRODUCTION
St John Chrysostom on Prayer
Jesus Christ, the Merciful One
here is nothing more worthwhile than to
T pray to God and converse with Him, for
prayer unites us with God as His compan-
ions. What light is to the eyes, this is what prayer
is to the soul; and if being unable to see the light is
considered a great loss, then how great is the loss
we suffer when we fail to pray and prevent the light
of Christ from entering our souls? And just as one
who wishes to stand in the light must avoid the
darkness, so too those who wish to converse with
God must abandon the darkness within them-
selves; for impiety and a lawless life are the death
of the soul, while prayer and the worship of God are
its life. Whoever lacks these things has only to ask
for them, for if one seeks to live virtuously, whether
in virginity or in marriage, he will learn that the
virtues are acquired only through prayer, for there
is no one who asks God for holiness, righteousness,
gentleness, kindness, peace, patience, or any other
ix
 the light of the world
virtue, and does not receive it as Scripture says: “Ask,
and it shall be given to you; seek and you will find; knock
and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks
receives, and he who seeks, finds” (Mt 7:7-8). And else-
where it says: “What father among you, if his son asks
for bread, will give him a stone instead? Or if he asks for
a fish, will give him a snake? So if you who are evil know
how to give good gifts to your children, how much more
will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those
who ask him!” (Lk. 11:10-13). With these words, and
with such great promises, the Lord calls us all to
prayer. Prayer is the light and life of the soul. It is an
everlasting bond uniting us to God. Whoever does
not pray or has no desire to enjoy communion with
God, is already lifeless and dead. For what the soul
is to the body, this is what prayer is to the soul, and
just as a body without a soul is dead, corrupt, and
foul smelling, so too a soul without prayer is dead,
wretched, and foul. Abandoning prayer is thus the
sign of the greatest foolishness, not to say madness,
for what else should we call the unwillingness to
acknowledge the greatness of the honor that has
been bestowed on us, namely, to speak with God,
knowing that turning away from God leads only
to death? 3is is why the great Apostle Paul says:
“Persevere in prayer, being watchful and thankful” (Col.
4:2), and, “Pray without ceasing, give thanks in every cir-
x xi
introduction
cumstance, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus”
(1 3ess. 5:17-18), and elsewhere, “Pray in the Spirit
at all times, with every kind of prayer and petition, being
watchful to this end with all perseverance and supplica-
tion” (Eph. 6:18). 3ese and many other divine words
in Scripture call us to pray without ceasing, for all
human beings need prayer no less than plants and
trees need water. And just as they cannot grow and
bear fruit if they are not receiving water and nour-
ishment through their roots, neither can we bring
forth the fruit of piety, godliness, and a life pleas-
ing to God if we are not watered by the grace of the
Holy Spirit in prayer, for “the Spirit Himself intercedes
for us with sighs too deep for words’”(Rom. 8:26).1
Elder Aimilianos of Simonopetra on Prayer
Prayer is the journey of the soul toward God. If a
car or a ship is going the wrong way, it will never
reach its destination—and if our prayer is not go-
ing the right way, we will never reach God. If we
do not know how to pray, or if our prayer is lifeless
and weak, we will be unsuccessful and unhappy in
everything else we do. 3e harm that befalls us if
we do not pray is incalculable! But when our prayer
is right, it will bring our whole life into order, over-
come all our difficulties, solve all our problems, re-
1 St John Chrysostom, Homily on Prayer (PG 50:775-76, 778-79).
 the light of the world
move all our worries, and arrange all things prop-
erly.
3ere are some things that go together—they
cannot be separated—like “faith” and “works,” since
one has no meaning apart from the other (James
2:14-16). 3e same is true of prayer, which is linked
to something else, namely, liturgy and especially
Holy Communion. If there is no worship and no
Holy Communion, then there can be no prayer,
and any prayer uttered apart from them is false.
At the same time, if our worship is divorced from
intense, inward personal prayer, which cries out to
God from our depths, then you can be certain that
our worship and our Holy Communion is in vain: it
is an attempt to deceive God and ourselves by pre-
tending we love Him, when in fa6 we have no rela-
tionship with Him whatsoever. One day he will say
to us: “I do not know you” (Mt. 25:12).
I cannot say, “I will go to church,” if I do not pray.
It is pointless for me to receive Holy Communion if
I am not constantly praying. And it is pointless for
me to pray if I have no part in the Divine Liturgy
and the worship of the Church. It should be clear
that the spiritual life and the sacramental life go
together, each presupposes the other, and to have
one without the other is to have neither. But when
prayer and liturgy are inseparably united, God be-
xii
introduction
comes present to me; and as I address myself to
Him, He rushes toward me, He stretches out to-
ward me, and, through prayer, I stretch out toward
Him, until we are completely united.
3e quality and intensity of our prayer to Christ
refle6 our desire for Him. “Ask, and it shall be given to
you; knock and the door will be opened to you” (Mt. 7:7). If
you call upon Christ, He will answer you. 3e Holy
Spirit will come to you. No one can be our teacher
except Christ, to whom His disciples said: “Teach us
how to pray” (Lk. 11:1). Every other teacher offers us
nothing more than a weak and impoverished voice.
For you to stand before God and say, “Lord Jesus
Christ, you are great and sublime, you are holy
and mighty,” and so on, is easy. But to say, with full
knowledge, “God, have mercy on me the sinner,”
well, how many times can I do that—if I do it at all?
For this to happen, I must be crushed and broken;
my heart must be broken open so that all the gar-
bage it contains can be thrown out; so that I can see
what I have inside of myself, what I am, and what
unworthy things I have loved, what unlovely loves
I have desired, which St Paul calls “dung” (Phil.
3:8), and which I must reje6 and cast aside. I have
to understand that all those things are the lowest
forms of waste and let go of them, so I can be filled
with God. In the beginning, I thought God’s king-
xiii
 the light of the world
dom was being revealed to me; I thought His light
was being poured out on me; but now I see my own
darkness, and my great distance from God, and this
requires me to make a decision: Will I move toward
God or stay where I am? Will I accept Him, or reje6
Him?2
***
Anyone seeking to understand the Orthodox
Church must at some point consider how the
Church prays. In prayer we encounter the deepest
expressions of Orthodox faith, and through prayer
we enter the mysterious place of intimacy between
God and the human heart, reconne6ing with the
hidden source of our being and life. A person of
prayer, therefore, is not simply someone who reads
prayers from books, but someone who allows the
Holy Spirit to enter his life and work within him,
for “in Him we live and move and have our being”
(A6s 17:28).
3is book, which contains thirty-five prayers to
Jesus Christ, along with a final prayer to God the
Father,3 is intended as a companion volume to
2 Adapted from Elder Aimilianos of Simonopetra, “On Prayer,” from
his book, !e Church at Prayer: !e Mystical Liturgy of the Heart (Athens:
Indiktos, 2005), 9-44.
3 For information on the authors and sources of these prayers, see
the “Notes on the Translation” at the end of this volume.
xiv
introduction
Mother of the Light: Prayers to the !eotokos. Like the
prayers in Mother of the Light, the prayers to Christ
are remarkable for the intensity of the religious
feelings they express, including the abje6 sorrow
and self-abasement of the writers, who grieve and
lament over their sins, and engage in uncompro-
mising self-criticism. As was noted in the Intro-
du6ion to Mother of the Light, these intense spiri-
tual states are not the overwrought ruminations
of unhealthy minds, but are rather the expressions
of a godly and transformative sorrow, which Christ
Himself encouraged and blessed, saying: “Blessed
are those who mourn, for they will be comforted”
(Matt. 5:4).
As strange as it may sound, these are the prayers
of saints. Having been purified and cleansed of sins
in their souls and bodies, the saints exist in union
with God, who fills them with His divine, uncreat-
ed energies. 3ey have been transformed by grace
and possess the fruits of the Spirit—love, joy, peace,
patience, kindness, and goodness (cf. Gal. 5:22-23)—
but their consciousness, which has been expanded
to embrace God Himself, has also become acutely
conscious of the corruption of human nature. 3e
words of the apostle Peter, when he first encoun-
tered Jesus and said, “Lord, depart from me, for I
am a sinful man” (Lk. 5:8), are the genuine acknowl-
xv
 the light of the world
edgment of one’s unholiness in the face of the holy.
3us, the intense language and imagery of these
prayers are the expressions of a truly healthy soul,
paradoxically poised between sorrow for sin and joy
for salvation.
Prayer as Confession
We can say then, that the prayers in this volume
take the form of confessional meditations, in which
readers are invited to speak dire6ly to Christ, and
at the same time refle6 on the nature of their life
in relation to him. 3e Greek texts of these prayers
generally describe them as “A Prayer to Christ in the
form of a Confession,” or a “Compun6ive Prayer of
Confession and Repentance,” indicating that—like
the response of St Peter noted above—they bring
significant focus to a person’s self-understanding
as it emerges in light of the greater reality of God.
As spiritual meditations, these prayers place the
reader in the context of a particular world, in such
a way that he or she cannot avoid a genuine and
transformative encounter with that world, similar
to the way an icon implicates the viewer in a rela-
tionship with the sacred person who appears before
him. 3e world in question is a fully ecclesial world,
it is the world of Christ’s economy of salvation
xvi
introduction
made available in the Church, which encompasses
all creation and all human history, from the griev-
ous wound of the fall to joy and wonder in the face
of gratuitous salvation.
3ese prayers consequently invite and require the
reader to ask: “Who am I in this world? Where is
my place within it? How am I oriented to it, and
what is the nature of my relationship to it? What is
my response to this world—the nature and degree
of my ’responsiveness‘ to it?” From this point of
view, the prayers fun6ion as a mirror in which the
self is refle6ed in the text, externalized and made
available to the reader for self-refle6ion, examina-
tion of conscience, and heightened self-knowledge.
To read these prayers with devotion is to surrender
oneself to the world of the prayer; it means to con-
sent to lose oneself, to allow oneself to be reconfig-
ured within that world and restored on a higher
level. 3ese dynamics of reading and refle6ion—a
movement of self-loss and self-discovery—provide
the conditions for the possibility of a spiritual ex-
ercise which, in the framework of these prayers,
is a process that encourages heartfelt confession
through a genuine dialogue with Christ.4
4 While it is beyond the scope of this Introdu6ion, it should be not-
ed that the process initiated by these prayers aims to assimilate the
human person, as image, to its divine archetype in Christ, indicating
xvii
 the light of the world
As a point of comparison, it will be helpful to
note that modern social media platforms perform
similar fun6ions, and have emerged as powerful
“confessional” technologies, prompting users with
the question: “What’s on your mind?” 3rough
these technologies, users are encouraged to define
and proje6 a sense (or an image) of themselves,
while having little choice but to self-categorize
into predetermined, standardized classifications.
In this digital space, the person is no longer ori-
ented to God or even to the real world, but to other
user “profiles” which are then sold as information
to advertisers, who are deeply invested in the mar-
ket-driven process of configuring and conforming
entire populations to superficial external images.
In formal terms, modern technologies of “confes-
sion” and subje6-formation do not differ greatly
from older confessional pra6ices, but their aim is
no longer to liberate human beings for life in the
Spirit but rather to imprison them within econom-
ic and social cages. 3e goal is not to assimilate us to
our divine archetype, but to categorize us on the ba-
sis of algorithms, imposing on our minds a narrow
cognitive template while at the same time with-
holding or denying competing options. As modern
that Christology provides the stru6ure for anthropology, and that the
paradigm for authentic human existence is Christ.
xviii
introduction
commentators have pointed out, the community of
faith has been replaced by the autonomous individ-
ual, spirituality has been reduced to the fulfillment
of psychological needs, and salvation becomes a
quest for self-realization, so that spiritual needs
are confused with consumerist needs, while the
consuming self contains nothing but a terrible ab-
sence, a hungry ghost without substance, purpose,
or dire6ion.
Prayer as !eology
“You are a theologian when you truly pray; and
when you truly pray, you are a theologian.”5 3is
pithy observation was authored by Evagrios of Pon-
tus who summarizes the teaching of his brilliant
spiritual mentor, St Gregory the 3eologian, for
whom the term “theologian” meant someone who,
through ascetic struggle and purification, had at-
tained knowledge of God in prayer and contempla-
tion. Evagrios thus encapsulates St Gregory’s syn-
thesis of mind and heart, knowledge and love, and
the corresponding notion that theology and spiri-
tuality are not separate, self-contained a6ivities,
5 Evagrius of Pontus, Chapters on Prayer 60, translated by Robert
Sinkewicz, Evagrius of Pontus: !e Greek Ascetic Corpus (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003), 199.
xix
but reciprocal and correlative components forming
an integral unity.
3is also the teaching of the Orthodox Church,
for which true theology is the fruit of prayer, and
not an exercise that is independent of or second-
ary to it. 3e way of prayer leads to true theology,
and a theologian is someone who has learned how
to pray, and to pray truly. Authentic theology is the
speech of the blessed—as well as their silence. 3e
logos concerning God (!eos) is a word of truth that
emerges only after the turmoil of the passions has
been stilled. In the same way, “whoever speaks con-
cerning the passions descends into Hades togeth-
er with the word of his teaching, bringing to life
through his word every virtue deadened by evil and
leading it to resurre6ion.”6
It follows that theology can never be reduced to
mere “academic” knowledge of God, obtained sole-
ly from books and divorced from a life of ascetic
prayer, confession, and ongoing repentance. Know-
ing the chemical formula of water cannot satisfy
one’s thirst, just as concepts and theories about
God are, by themselves, equally fruitless for salva-
6 St Maximos the Confessor, Ambigua 59.3, translated by Fr Maximos
Constas, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: Maximos the Confessor, !e
Ambigua, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2014), 261.
xx
tion. True theology is knowledge of God based on
experience, rooted in a life of virtue, and imbued
with the grace of the Holy Spirit. 3eology is par-
ticipation in the life of God, made available to us
through Christ, who can be known only through
love, because the love of God engenders knowledge
of God, and such knowledge engenders love. Love
and knowledge have a true interdependence, for
the believer knows Christ whom he loves, and loves
Him whom he knows.
It is a blessing to make these prayers available to
the faithful, for whom my own prayer is that the
light of Christ will be a lamp unto their feet leading
them unhindered to the light of the Father.
V. Rev. Archimandrite Maximos Constas
Fast of the Holy Apostles, June 2020
xxi