Love gives birth to prayer

Myself, I have little to say right now, but to pass on to others the words of the saints I am privileged to know. I cannot stay away from Sergei Fudel, and once again I turn to him by reading his short book Light in the Darkness. Sergei is "one in a million," a man in whose eyes I see the light of Jesus. Just to be near him is a healing, because he never leaves Jesus' side. Here's what Sergei says about prayer…

Prayer is born of love.
Is it not the same as to say, "Prayer is born of tears?" I realized this quite recently when I heard a young girl answer a question addressed to her. "How can I learn to pray?" The question did not puzzle her, and she said unhesitatingly, "Go and learn to weep and you'll learn to pray." She completed the words of the Fathers.

Bishop Theophan the Recluse used to say that praying only with words written by another is like trying to talk in a foreign language using only textbook dialogues. Like many other Church Fathers, he said that we must look for our own words in order to pray. I suppose that this is truly possible for us only in moments of desperate need, real anguish, either for ourselves or for others. In such moments we do not "recite" prayers, we simply cry out to God, "Lord, please come to him and comfort him!" The audacity of prayer is born only in the audacity of love. Saint Macarius [Abba Makarios] said, "Love gives birth to prayer."

"Love gives birth to prayer," therein lies the mystery and the meaning of prayer. We can recite endless litanies, we can endlessly finger our prayer beads, but unless we have love, unless we have learned to grieve for others, we have not even begun to pray. We can thus go through all our life without having begun to pray.

Unless we are truly sympathetic to human suffering, we are merely carrying out a "prayer rule," not really praying.

"Pray constantly!" is a direct admonition of the Apostle.
There is a logic, a spiritual kind of logic, to constant prayer.
Constant prayer serves to establish in us an absolutely sincere humility. I cannot not pray constantly, because I constantly need divine help. Why should I be proud of constantly calling for help?
We do not feel pride because we breathe without interruption, we do not even notice it! We should not evaluate the process, we must just pray. Our prayer must acquire the unwitting simplicity of constant breathing.

Yearning to pray is what a simple heart needs more than anything else.

I sleep, but my heart is awake.
I hear my Beloved knocking.
"Open to me, my sister, my love,
my dove, my perfect one,
for my head is covered with dew,
my locks with the drops of night."

—The Song of Songs 5:2 Jerusalem Bible