At every weekday service during Lent, Orthodox Christians and Eastern Catholics recite the Prayer of Saint Ephraim:
O Lord and Master of my life, give me not a spirit of sloth, despair, lust of power, and idle talk.
But give rather a spirit of chastity, humility, patience, and love to thy servant.
Yea, O Lord and King, grant me to see my own transgressions, and not to judge my brother: for blessed art thou unto ages of ages. Amen.
Donald Sheehan, of blessed memory, once wrote a beautiful essay on this prayer called “The Syrian Penitential Spirit.” It begins with a discussion of the four vices named in the first line. At first glance, Ephraim seems to have chosen them almost at random. However, their relationship becomes clear when we look at the Greek meaning of each word.
According to Sheehan, the first vice, argia (sloth) “does not simply mean ‘not-working’.” Rather, “it means the total absence of any capacity to act.” The second vice, periergia (despair), means “running all around in a crazed busyness.” Next comes philarchia (lust of power): “the hunger to control things.” Finally, we have argologia (idle talk), which refers to “speech that has no capacity to achieve work.”
Notice, too, that Ephraim refers to these four vices as being four spirits. No: they are different parts of one spirit. As Sheehan explains, “Our sloth produces our crazed busyness, which in turn creates in us the hunger to dominate—and this hunger leads to speech that achieves nothing, and so we return to sloth: and the whole devastating cycle begins again.” Impotence begets mania; mania begets impotence.
I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I recognize this spirit all too well. Whenever I find myself picking fights about religion, I also inevitably find that I’m neglecting my prayer life. It’s like clockwork. And whenever I make a habit of luxury or sin I become more judgmental, more irritable—more anxious about Modernity, the Culture, etc. I try to compensate for my own failings by fixing everyone else’s. I would rather correct their bad thinking and break their bad habits than confront my own.
The cure for this evil spirit, Sheehan explains, is found in the second line of Ephraim’s prayer.
The first virtue is sophrosyne (chastity), which may also be translated as discretion, moderation, sanity, self-control, prudence, or temperance. Ultimately, it refers to “self-collection and becoming one before God.” Sophrosyne is “the state of self-integration in which each person achieves oneness in order to be in God’s presence.” Next is tapeinophrosyne (humility), which specifically means “humility of mind” or “the mind’s voluntary obedience to the way of humility.” Third is hypomone (patience): the ability to bear trials without resorting to self-indulgence, sin, or despair. Finally we have agape (love), the Beginning and the End of everything.
Really, the dichotomy is simple. Sin is bred of laziness and impatience; holiness comes from hard work and concentration. And in that way, it seems to me, the Prayer of Saint Ephraim also tracks with our progression through the spiritual life.
I. O Lord and Master of my life, give me not a spirit of sloth, despair, lust of power, and idle talk.
Most of us—perhaps all of us—are like the prodigal son. When we return to our Father’s house, we’re not motivated by a deep sense of piety or virtue. Our motives are purely selfish. We’ve ruined our lives, made ourselves thoroughly miserable, and so we go looking for someone to bail us out. Maybe you’re an alcoholic and you realize that, without a miracle, you’re never going to sober up. Maybe you’re a Wiccan and you’ve realized that the “gods” you worship are not free-loving tree-huggers like you, but demons. Or maybe you drove away your wife and kids through your serial philandering and you’ve realized that the only people you really care about want nothing to do with you.
The point is that, more often than not, our moral awakening begins with a deep awareness of evil. We know what we don’t want to be. As my friend Gary said to me yesterday, “I believed in Hell way before I believed in Heaven.”
II. But give rather a spirit of chastity, humility, patience, and love to thy servant.
Now that we can see our own failings, we go out in search of new ideals by which to order our lives. We try to obey Saint Paul’s command to put on the New Man. But what does that actually mean? Whereas we learn vice through experience, we generally learn about virtue through homilies and books and podcasts. The trouble is that virtue, like vice, can only be learned through practical experience… if only the experience of trial and error.
Because we’re human, we begin to practice our Christianity at the most superficial level: our appearance, our emotions, etc. We do this for three reasons.
First, we’re excited by this Shiny New Thing we’ve got and, naturally, we want to show it off. Second, we slip into something like the “Atomic Habits” method. You imagine that you’re the kind of person who is chaste, humble, patient, or charitable, and then yuo go from there. Thirdly, human beings are intensely tribal. We need to feel like our actions have consequences that are more than merely personal. If being vegan is good for me, it must be good for everyone. If cardio kickboxing helped me get in shape, I’m going to push it on all my friends. And if I become Christian, I need to get every other human on board with me right now, or else what’s the point?
But because our understanding is so face-value, at first we can only conceive of Christianity as a subulture orpersonality type. We think that, by dressing “humbly”—wearing sweatpants to church or walking with our head down—we will become humble. Or we might try to inspire feelings of charity in our heart: a sweet Franciscan benevolence towards all of God’s creatures. We smile a lot, especially when people complain to us about the day they’re having. And virtue, so far as we can tell, is a mood. We assume that chastity means not being tempted to get drunk or watch pornography or eat a whole large pizza by yourself.
This doesn’t work, of course. In fact, it can have the effect of making us worse people.
For instance, dressing in rags will not make you humble. Just the opposite. You’ll spend your days silently congratulating yourself on your humility and judging those who put a little effort into their appearance.
Likewise, by trying to stir up these kindly, “charitable” feelings inside yourself, your sensibilities will become overly delicate. You’ll become emotionally fragile You will not become less susceptible to anger and wrath. On the contrary, any provocation will make you doubly mad: once you realize that this person has stirred up feelings of hatred within you, you’ll realize that your pseudo-Franciscan bubble has been popped, which this will only make you hate that person more.
And if you’re waiting for God to put a “mood” of chastity in your heart—simply to remove your desire for booze or porn or whatever—you will quickly begin to excuse yourself for indulging these bad habits. “If God didn’t want me to do these things,” you’ll ask yourself, “why doesn’t he take away my desire?” This may thought may never cross your conscious mind, but it will be lurking in the background somewhere. Without fully realizing it, you’ll fantasize about some magical place in the not-too-distant future where, somehow, you simply don’t feel like sinning anymore.
III. Yea, O Lord and King, grant me to see my own transgressions, and not to judge my brother: for blessed art thou unto ages of ages. Amen.
Eventually we get burned out. We’re tired of judging others. We’re tired of pretending to be holy when, if anything, we’re more wretched than ever. We’re done trying to strike a Christian pose. We want to actually become imitators of Christ.
Slowly, we realize that the work of Christianity is just that: work. It’s hard, it’s plodding, and it’s deeply unsexy. Father Seraphim Rose put it nicely: “There are would-be desert-dwellers who can’t pass through a week of obedience in an ordinary monastic community. There are those who dream of the most exalted states of prayer, and who can’t help saying a sharp word at the slightest provocation. There are those who dream of converting whole cities or states when they are barely able to get along with those around them.”
I am as guilty of this as anyone. And that’s partially because God has been so good to me. He has taken away my most burdensome crosses and replaced them with the sweetest consolations, all without my ever asking. Yet I’ll admit that, all the more, I catch myself thinking: “I can skip prayers tonight. I’ll feel like it more tomorrow.” Why do I think that? Because sometimes it’s true!
Especially when we’re new to the spiritual life, God will indeed make us crave prayer and fasting, to the point where it would take more effort not to pray and fast. But the truest love is found, not at the marriage bed, but at the deathbed. Likewise, the purest prayer—the prayers that are most pleasing to God—are usually those we offer when we’re exhausted and heartbroken and anxious and confused and frankly the last thing we want to do is pray.
Also, as Father Seraphim suggests, our duty as a Christian is to be more attentive to those around us: our spouses, our children, our parents, our siblings, our friends, our fellow parishioners, our coworkers. To have a conversation with your wife, or play catch with your son, or visit your mother when you’d rather watch television: that will do you more good than any spiritual reading. Why? Because that’s what all good spiritual reading is pushing us to do: to love others, actively and intentionally.
Part and parcel of this work is learning not to judge our neighbors, both individually and collectively—neitrher elites nor folks we know in real life. We have to silence the little voice in our minds that criticizes and condemns other people. This is a slight exaggeration, but only a very slight one. As Father Seraphim wrote in a letter to one of his spiritual sons: “The first and important thing is not ‘rightness’ at all, but Christian love and harmony. Most ‘crazy converts’ have been ‘right’ in the criticisms that led to their downfall; but they were lacking in Christian love and charity and so went off the deep end, needlessly alienating people around them and finally finding themselves all alone in their rightness and self-righteousness. Don’t you follow them!”
Again, this spiritual labor is not at all sexy. It’s usually quite tiresome and repetitive. Prayer is less likely to bring sweetness, though the withdrawal of consolation will be a gift. It will help you to become aware of your shortcomings and also to see more clearly how God is transforming your heart.
Still, if we do it right, this is all totally thankless, because it goes entirely unnoticed. But at this point we’re not doing it for attention. We’re not always loving our neighbor for our neighbor’s sake, much less our own. We’re doing it for God. “Blessed art thou unto ages of ages,” we mutter (or something like that), and then we get back to work.
So I feel impotent which leads to frantic busy-ness because I want to be ‘in control’ and then I boast about all the useless stuff that I did? … Sounds about right. And my mutterings are nowhere near that polite, but maybe that’s just me. I do appreciate the translations though. We seem to lose so much meaning when we use modern languages instead. Learning to swim requires deep water and typical Biblical / homily exposure doesn’t provide that. Much appreciated, sir.
A great reflection. I appreciate that correlation with the prayer and our progress through the spiritual life. I've said (and believe) that God gave me my wife and Children for my salvation. I used to imagine I'd like a single and solitary life, focusing only on God. But now, being married and having 4 children, I realize I would have just ended up deluded and imaging myself a good person. I'm reminded daily now, thanks to my family, just how selfish, impatient and unloving I can be. But, thanks be to God, that revelation is a continuous opportunity for repentance that I might have missed otherwise.
It's easy to read the lives of the Saints and imagine achieving those great heights or prayer and spirituality, but also easy to gloss over the hardship, suffering and struggle they went through to get there. I think often of the quote, "I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy." There seems to be a parallel there with our life of Faith.