Remembering

O Lord and Master of my life,
take away from me the will to be lazy and to be sad,
the desire to get ahead of other people and to boast and brag.
Give me instead a pure and humble spirit,
the will to be patient with other people, and to love them.
Let me realize my own mistakes,
and keep me from judging the things other people do,
for You are blessed now and forevermore.
Amen.

— ‘The Prayer of Saint Ephraim’

This prayer is more usually associated with the time of Great Lent, the forty-plus days of fasting before the feast of the Resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the Pascha, the ‘Passover of God’, the Lamb without spot, slain before the foundation of the world.
Yet here we are in the ‘lesser lent’ of forty days before Christmas, the feast of the Lord's Nativity, and we are in no less need of praying these words to our Savior. ‘Lesser lent’ is right; who is it among us that keeps this fast faithfully? Yet, the fast is not a program of ascetic discipline designed for our pride. As the fathers teach,
‘Eat what you please, anything, but not the flesh of your brothers.’ To remember this prayer and say it faithfully and with all our heart, even if only once in this fast, with prostrations or without, it doesn't matter. God knows our hearts. He knows our lives. All we have to do is bring our burdens to Him, and lay them down before His Cross, and receive from Him what we do not deserve but what He longs to grant us, great mercy.

Prayer. Speaking to God. He speaks to us, we speak to Him. In our own words, or in words that we make our own, partaking of the mind of the Church, when we read aloud or inwardly what we find in our prayer books. Do you think it is really any different, whether we speak to Him out of our private treasury, or out of the treasury that the saints have bequeathed us? Maybe to some of us, but not to Him. Again, He is listening to our hearts, and our hearts are listening to Him. ‘Remembering our most-holy, most blessed…’ and praying with her and all the saints, as we join them in the heavenlies, ‘a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb… wearing white robes… holding palm branches in their hands,’ there we are, together, one in faith, one in hope, one in charity: there is the Church, and there is no other. Prayer is the language of welcome between heaven and earth.

I offer you again, brethren, all of the treasure that has been given to me, but piece by piece, it is too heavy to be handed over all at once, and we have crossed the threshold of time, we have been dead but now, with Him, we are alive forever, and so we have more than mere time to share these things. I offer this book of prayers that are the saints' but are also ours, as we are one household with them, the bride of one Husband, the Lord. Praying these words mingled with our own, we feel the cool droplets of sweet myrrh falling upon us as from the feast-day hyssop rod, and we are surrounded by the great cloud of witnesses, having found our true Home with them, and forever. Let us stand, brethren, let us sit, let us lie down, falling on our faces, facing East whence the Lord shall come with a mighty shout and the voice of the archangel, and the trumpet, as lightning flashing thence to the uttermost West, to gather us all into His Kingdom. He is waiting for us as much as we are waiting for Him. Remembering this, let us pray with one heart, one mind, one voice as He does before the Father, before whom He stands, our great High-Priest, interceding for us sinners. Remembering...

This prayer book is very short. It's a PDF file formatted to be printed as a 5½" x 8½" booklet, but you can print it out on any size paper. This is the prayer book of my family, which I want to share with you. It starts out by remembering what the Lord tells us about prayer, and it's good to read these passages as we go into our place of prayer, to prepare our faith and reset our minds into the right perspective, to ‘cast away all earthly care, that we may receive the King of all.’ just click on the link to download and print. Daily Prayer — A simple pamphlet of basic Orthodox prayers for morning and evening, with emphasis on praying the Psalms.

Christ is born! Glorify Him!