0:00 In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. If you're anything like me, you probably started at a point in your life where you had no idea even really how to pray or how to pray. That was me at 18, 19 years old. >> [laughter] >> You know, I had very little experience of prayer, very little understanding, and it really wasn't until I became Orthodox at 25 that I really began to understand prayer in a systematic fashion. So, I want to distill down two decades of experience with prayer into easy to digest and understand very simple recipe for fixing your prayer life. Number one, you need to think about your prayer life as sets and reps. What do I mean by that? All the principles of the universe that are baked into the physical life are also
0:45 baked into the spiritual life because all principles undergirding the universe are built on the character of God. So, when you think about prayer, people often think about a time and a mood and an energy and what they're going to say. We need to get rid of all that and start from the very basics. It's like going to the gym. What are your sets and reps? Now, anybody who lifts weights knows this. If you go to the gym one day for 60 minutes and then don't go for 4 days, you're never going to make any progress. But even a person who goes every single day for 15 minutes over those 4 days will see exponential progress versus the person who goes 1 day and takes 3 days off afterwards, okay? So, when you think about prayer, think about it in terms of sets and reps. The number one thing that
1:31 my spiritual mother taught me when I first started to pray is she said, "How long can you pray for?" Then I'm like, "Well, how long am I supposed to pray?" And she said, "Realistically, what can you do every day?" And so, I told her, "I can do this." And it was probably like super pathetic, 5 minutes or 10 minutes or something like very, very, very beginner level, no praying in my life blah blah blah. >> [clears throat] >> She said, "Great. What I want you to do is set a timer and not to look at the timer, but when you pray, just follow that timer. When the timer goes off, you've completed your time of prayer. If you want to go a little bit past that, it's fine, but you're only expected to hit the timer. So, it's quantifiable." I'm like, "Okay, how often do I need to pray?" She's
2:17 like, "Every single day. Every single day." She gave me a prayer rule. Every single day. And so, we agreed on a time. And then, from that point on, you have a baseline of what you can work on. Now, this really should be done with your spiritual father or your parish priest, whoever's available to you to talk to, but it needs to be something practical and tangible. My spiritual mother told me the number like one of the number one problems is quantity over quality. She's like, "God doesn't need a lot of prayers. He just wants quality prayers. So, what you can do and stay focused on is more important than just running through your prayers at 90 mph trying to complete some arbitrary goal." She said,
3:04 "Focus on the time that you're going to spend in prayer." In my experience, that is absolutely the best way to do it. Because it reminds me a lot of the life of St. Sophrony of Essex. And they had this prayer rule that they were supposed to complete every day. And it was an hour and a half in the monastery. And he said that he would basically get through three lines of prayer in that hour and a half. They were supposed to read all of these prayers, but he would be so immersed in like whatever it was, the first 1 minute worth of prayers, that it would take him the full hour and a half. And he went and talked to the abbot of the monastery. And the abbot of the monastery said, "Well, you probably need to finish all the prayers." And And the thing was is that he was so immersed
3:49 in those short lines that he It was like he lost all track of time and was so deeply in the prayer that he didn't need to go any further because it just took him so long to think about those introductory lines of the prayer. So, he went to his spiritual father, Saint Sophrony, and Saint Sophrony said, "Just keep doing what you're doing." Just keep doing. If you only make it through those first 10 lines of prayer, just stick with that if it takes an hour and a half. Because the quantity is not important. The amount of words that you say are not important. But, the quality of what you say for that amount of time that you're able to keep to on an every single day basis is absolutely important. And the number one thing that I learned about
4:35 praying when I first started to really pray was that every day that I prayed, my day would be exponentially better. So, it didn't matter that I was only praying for 5 minutes cuz that was the hardest 5 minutes of my day. But, the thing was I was doing it every day. And every day that I skipped it, I woke up late, I got busy, I got distracted, I did whatever, I didn't pray, it was like my heart became kind of hard and the whole day was just off. And I realized the only way to keep your heart soft, it's like silly putty. You know, when you grab silly putty, it's hard, but when you massage it, it becomes soft. And it becomes gooey and malleable. And I realized my heart is like silly putty.
5:21 When [snorts] I sleep and I go to bed and I wake up in the morning, it starts to get hard and I need to warm it up. I need to massage it. I need it to get like soft towards God again. And so, that's why those morning prayers are so integral. To wake up and to just pray whatever amount of time that you can pray. That's number one. Sets and reps. How much time are you doing? >> Let's go! Halfway there, baby. Come on! >> Number two, you need to have focus when
6:07 you pray. It doesn't matter how long you're praying for, what matters is that you are focusing on the words of prayer. And primarily the Orthodox Church kind of falls into two recipes for this. Number one, we have the prayer book by uh Jordanville Press that has morning and evening prayers in it. That's the go-to prayer book. It has all the prayers laid out for you. Number two is to do the prayer rope and to pray the Jesus prayer. Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me. Either one of those are going to be very beneficial. And the reality is is that you're going to need times where you become overly familiar with some of the prayers, and you may need to start praying an akathist for a short period of time. Those are the nuances that you talk to with your
6:53 spiritual father. But whatever you're praying, when it's time to pray, you got to be focused. You got to be dialed in. You have to put all of your best mental energy. This is why the saints always uh committed to praying in the middle of the night. And what they would do uh well, I shouldn't say all, but many of the saints were committed to keeping an all-night vigil. It wasn't that they stayed awake all night. It was typically that they slept 3 or 4 hours. Then they would wake up, and what did they often say? They drank coffee. They drank caffeine. They had pre-workout. They did whatever they needed to do to get themselves in the right mindset where they felt energized. In fact, sometimes it says they would eat a little bread
7:39 and drink a a of coffee. Like we read about this in the life of Saint Joseph the Hesychast, the whole brotherhood. Like, everybody would drink coffee. They'd wake up in the middle of night at 1:00 a.m. They would drink coffee. They would get energized, and then they would hit their prayers. That is so key to understand that there is a physical component to prayer. And the thing is, why did they pray so much as the first thing that they did in the day? Because that's when our mind is the most focused and acute. It's the It's the best time when our mind is ready to go, when it doesn't feel exhausted from a whole day of activities. Evening prayers are very good at That's a separate conversation, but the thing that they focused on the most was waking up, getting caffeinated, getting
8:24 focused, and then saying their prayers. I can't say this enough because it piggybacks on the first point, which is what you're doing has to be the only thing that you're doing. If you're praying and walking, if you're praying and driving, if you're praying and cooking, those are all good activities, but you need to pray when you're praying. That's the key. Whatever it takes to get you into that state where you are ready and mentally focused and able to give your best mental energy to God, that's the most fruitful experience of prayer that I've ever had in my life. When everybody was asleep, I wake up before them. I I get into my
9:09 little prayer corner, and I do my prayers, and there's no distraction. There's no thought for the day. There's nothing else that needs to go on. Now, one of the tips that I'll give everybody is >> [clears throat] >> you're going to have thoughts, like things that you need to do that day, uh bills that need to get paid, or something random that will come to mind that your brain says, "Hey, aren't you supposed to do this?" Sometimes it's helpful to have a little notepad and a pen, and you just write those things down. Like, you have the thought in the middle of your prayers. I was supposed to call somebody back yesterday and I forgot. And then your brain is nagging you and saying like you got to remember this. Well, it's easy to write it down on the notepad, call so-and-so, and then put it down, and your brain will feel like a burden lifted off of it. Then it says, "Okay, now we don't have to worry about that. We already wrote it down."
9:55 Otherwise, it will start nagging you, and you'll start thinking about it. And you don't want that. You want the best, most focused time of prayer. Next, you have to understand that when you pray, you are devoting and giving your time to God in the best possible way that you know how. It does not mean that you are a master of prayer. In fact, there's a beautiful saying from Saint Porphyrios, where he basically says, "Nobody can teach you to pray. The only one who can teach you is the Holy Spirit." So, how do you get better at writing a bike? You ride a bike. You may read something or watch a video on how to get better at bike riding, but ultimately, you got to put your feet in the pedals, and you got to cycle. And
10:42 it's the same thing with prayer. Books are there to encourage us to pray, and they're a fundamental aspect of understanding the life of prayer. But the most important way to get better at prayer is prayer. So, it's time under tension. It's the amount of time that you dedicate to prayer that adds up over the years that begins to show you how to focus your mind into your heart. How to become very resolute in that time of being only focused on Christ himself and nothing else. That is so fundamental, but we have to have the humility to understand we are giving God the best that we have.
11:28 But the best that we have is like a child with a crayon drawing, okay? So, when your child gives you a crayon drawing, you don't think it's a Picasso. But, you love it cuz it's what they gave you. It's the best of their ability. And likewise, God, when he sees us struggling to give our best prayers to him, he knows that we're not titans of the faith. You know, he knows that we're like children. But, he's so overjoyed that we are spending the time with him, that we are dedicating that time to him, that we are making an effort. And the thing with that is, we should understand when we are new at prayer, we should not be expecting anything.
12:14 We shouldn't expect grandiose spiritual experiences. In fact, the holy fathers tell us, those people, like St. Paisios says, the people who look for grandiose spiritual experiences are sometimes given them even by the devil because it puffs them up and makes them prideful. The goal in prayer is to connect with God in whatever way that God sees fit. And grandiose spiritual experiences for basically all of us are not really beneficial to our souls. The reason for that is because so many people get puffed up and prideful and deluded and begin to think that they're spiritual. And the minute that they think that they're spiritual because they're praying, guess what? You've just undone all of the work of prayer, which
13:01 leads to the next point. The purpose of prayer is to humble ourselves. It's to humble ourselves before God. When we say the words, "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me," both his name scrubs the inside of our soul because that name, Jesus Christ, is the most powerful name in the entire universe. It is the name at at which is spoken every knee shall bow and every tongue will confess that Christ is Lord. That name is powerful to scrub the inside of our souls. But when we say have mercy on me, we're not saying, "Have mercy on me. Don't shoot me with lightning bolts." We're saying, "Have mercy on me like I'm drowning in my own sins, my own self-love, my own pride, my own egotism in the pool of life that I can't manage on my own. Pull
13:48 me out of the water." That disposition of humility is what we are trying to cultivate in our prayers. That is so different than people who are looking for experiences. We are looking to cultivate a state of the soul that is humble and focused on Christ and has the right disposition in prayer. And last but not least, it's something we all have to keep in mind, which is that there's like two types of prayer. There's the prayer that we offer God, and then there's the type of prayer that the saints experienced, where God prayed with them, and they experienced intensely the presence of God. And
14:33 there's a lot that could be said about that. Most of us will experience little moments of this throughout our life, maybe during the liturgy, maybe during our prayers. But that's when prayer is really prayer. It's really alive. But you know what's so interesting the saints tell us? They say that prayer is genuine prayer. But the thing that's best for us is when prayer is kind of hard work. Because even the saints who experienced tremendous moments of the experience in the presence of God often described that they experienced times afterwards that were devoid of that. You know, Saint Silouan the Athonite says that he felt like Adam rejected from the Garden of Eden when he lost
15:20 that grace of the Holy Spirit, and he struggled to recapture that. He said his his soul was in turmoil. In fact, it's one of the reasons the saints say that most people don't have very illustrious spiritual experiences because they could not handle the heartbreak, the pain, and the agony, and the disappointment of not being that close with God afterwards. And so, God measures out what they're able to experience of him in order to keep them in a healthy spiritual framework without falling into despair. So, we have our prayers and sometimes God prays with us. And we thank God for those moments. They're they're they're they're they're the highlight of our life, but they are fleeting.
16:05 They're not all the time and they're not what we're looking for. We're just looking to humble ourselves and be connected with Christ. And there's such a faith that goes into praying even when we know it's just like simple prayer. That takes real faith. It takes real faith to cultivate that daily. It takes real work and real energy. And this is why we often describe the saints as athletes because they're fighting against their disposition of wanting everything to be good and and and happy and joyous and and spiritually illustrious. They're fighting against that, you know, kind of spiritual Xanax that people are looking for where they want all their problems
16:51 to go away because they said some prayers like as if it's magical incantations. They're fighting against that and all they're looking for is to be united to Christ in simple prayer every single day to walk with Christ. And in this way, if we mitigate our expectations, if we have a right view of what we should expect from prayer, we let prayer be whatever it is going to be because we are on the path of cultivating our souls into spiritual health by being focused on Christ daily. God bless. Hello friends of the inner webs. If you're looking to grow your relationship with Christ and you want more direct access to my content and to me personally, check out school.com/fathermoses.
17:37 I do two live Q&A's every week where you can ask me anything directly. We have a message [music] board on the main page. We have courses on marriage, dating, fitness, masculinity and all of this is offered for $10 a month. I hope to see you there. God bless.
