Dubitando: Studies in History and Culture in Honor of Donald Ostrowski

Prayer: A Golden Galaxy of Virtue

Dubitando: Studies in History and Culture in Honor of Donald Ostrowski. Brian J. Boeck, Russell E. Martin, and Daniel Rowland, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2012, 301–12.       Prayer: A Golden Galaxy of Virtue   Nickolas Lupinin   Prayer   rightly   combined   with   understanding   is   superior  to  every  virtue  and  commandment.   —St.   Symeon   Metaphrastis,   Paraphrase   of   the   Homilies  of  St.  Makarios  of  Egypt     Of  course,  every  good  deed  done  for  Christ’s  sake   gives   us   the   grace   of   the   Holy   Spirit,   but   prayer   gives  it  to  us  most  of  all  for  it  is  always  at  hand,  so   to  speak,  as  an  instrument  for  acquiring  the  grace   of  the  Spirit.   —St.  Seraphim  of  Sarov     Prayer   is   both   a   “holy   art”   and   “holy   work”—a   gift  and  a  task.   —Theodore  G.  Stylianopoulos   Father  Arseny,  an  art  historian  turned  priest  in  the  early  Soviet  period,  spent   some  27  years  in  the  Gulag.  In  the  inhumanity  of  those  conditions,  he  com-­‐‑ forted  hundreds  of  fellow  prisoners,  provided  spiritual  solace,  and  stood  wit-­‐‑ ness  to  human  charity  and  his  faith.  His  spiritual  children,  whose  number  is   legendary,   reflect   on   his   influence   in   a   book,   Father   Arseny:   A   Cloud   of   Wit-­‐‑ nesses,  which  has  been  characterized  as  “utterly  overwhelming.”1  Three  times   Father   Arseny   was   led   out   from   his   cell   to   be   shot,   and   three   times,   inex-­‐‑ plicably,  he  was  sent  back  alive.  Father  Arseny  knew  how  to  pray.   Early  in  The  Gulag  Archipelago,  Aleksandr  Solzhenitsyn  describes  the  in-­‐‑ creasingly  large  number  of  ordinary  believers  who  were  being  driven  into  the   concentration  camps  in  the  1920s.  His  depiction  of  women  as  being  the  most   stubborn  believers  of  all  has  been  echoed  by  other  memoirists  of  the  Gulag.   These   women   were   enormously   steadfast   in   their   prison   ordeals   and   gave   much  strength  and  succor  to  fellow  inmates  while,  at  the  same  time,  being  a                                                                                                                             For  the  title  of  this  article,  I  have  borrowed  the  term  “golden  galaxy  of  virtue”  from  St.   Symeon  Metaphrastis  (source  is  cited  in  n.  2  ).   1  By   Andrew   Louth   in   reflecting   on   Father   Arseny:   A   Cloud   of   Witnesses,   trans.   Vera   Bouteneff  (Crestwood,  NY:  St.  Vladimir’s  Seminary  Press,  2001).     302 NICKOLAS LUPININ consternation   to   the   guards.   Called   “nuns”   in   prison   parlance   for   their   un-­‐‑ bending  faith  and  strength,  these  “nuns”  knew  how  to  pray.   In   my   early   teens,   the   priest   of   our   Orthodox   parish,   Father   Alexander   Kolesnikoff,  was  a  bit  of  a  hulking  man,  somewhat  on  the  awkward  and  un-­‐‑ gainly  side  it  seemed  to  us  children.  An  attorney  by  training,  he  had  been  tor-­‐‑ tured  in  a  Soviet  prison  where  he  was  blinded  in  one  eye  and  had  multiple   bones  fractured.  At  his  first  opportunity  in  freedom,  he  trained  for  the  priest-­‐‑ hood,  thankful  for  his  life,  broken  as  it  was.  Father  Alexander  knew  how  to   pray.   In  1944,  my  refugee  family  was  in  Berlin  at  the  height  of  the  Allied  bomb-­‐‑ ings  of  that  city.  Periodically,  when  the  sirens  went  off,  people  ran  to  the  near-­‐‑ est   bomb   shelters.   Within   those   cold   and   dripping   concrete   walls,   huddled   and  hungry  people  lit  candles,  and  with  fear  palpable  and  etched  into  their   faces,  they  did  nothing  but  pray.  In  those  grievous  and  terrifying  moments,   these  refugee  families  knew  how  to  pray.   In  such  agonizingly  primal  and  tense  minutes,  the  obstacles  that  impede   prayer  fall  away.  There  is  no  license  given  to  “sleep,  listlessness,  physical  tor-­‐‑ por,  distraction  of  thought,  confusion  of  intellect,  debility  …  not  to  mention   afflictions.”2  St.  Teresa  of  Avila,  as  have  many  others,  also  pointed  to  the  in-­‐‑ tellect  as  a  potential  obstacle  to  prayer.3  And  over  the  centuries,  as  any  reader   of  even  the  most  rudimentary  texts  in  religious  history  recognizes,  the  obsta-­‐‑ cles  to  prayer  are  as  regularly  identified  as  those  which  obstruct  other  spiri-­‐‑ tual  pursuits.   In  reflecting  on  prayer  in  this  essay,  I  aspired  to  view  it  from  several  per-­‐‑ spectives.   It   strikes   me   that   there   are   levels   of   complexity   in   attempting   to   analyze  at  least  some  of  the  meanings  of  prayer  but  also  levels  of  simplicity— a  mental  and  spiritual  fund  for  all  seasons,  so  to  speak.  The  (implied)  trans-­‐‑ formation  of  the  mind  and  spirit  may  be  more  difficult  to  grasp  than  the  role   of  love  and  forgiveness.  The  latter  two  concepts  may  not  be  easy  to  effect  per   se,  but  I  suspect  the  average  person  knows  love  when  he  or  she  sees  it  or  feels   it,   and   understands   what   forgiveness   is   (though   this   will   not   automatically   lead   to   its   manifestation   in   one’s   own   actions).   Humility...