Publisher's Synopsis
The work of prayer is the first thing in Christian life.The ancient holy fathers, greeting each other when they met, usually asked not about health and not about anything else, but about prayer: how, they say, goes or how does prayer work. Action prayers were they a sign of spiritual life, and they called it the breath of the spirit. There is breath in the body - and the body lives; breathing stops - life stops. So it is in the spirit: there is prayer - the spirit lives; no prayer - no life in the spirit.We are able to pray according to prayer books, that is, according to prepared prayers given to us by the Lord and the holy fathers who have succeeded in prayer, but we should not stop at this alone. It is necessary to extend further and, having used the mind and heart to turn to God with outside help, to make experiments and one's own ascension to Him, to reach the point that the soul itself, through her speech entered into a prayer conversation with God, that it herself ascended to Him, that it revealed herself to Him and confessed what was in her and what she desired. It is necessary to accustom the soul to this
