Battle With Prayer

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According to St. Isaac the Syrian, What are the Main Requirements for “True Prayer? 

First, one should pray with attention and without distraction: external activity should not draw one's attention from prayer. 

Secondly, one should pray with humility. The prayer of a humble person goes directly from his mouth to God's ear. When you fall down before God in prayer, become in your thought like an ant, like a creeping thing of the earth, like a leech, and like a tiny lisping child. Do not say anything before him with knowledge, but with a child's manner of thought, draw near God and walk before him, that you may be counted worthy of that paternal providence that fathers have for their small children. 

Thirdly, one should pray with deep affection and tears. The sense of the heart's affliction, accompanied by bodily labor that is prostrations-should become an integral part of prayer: 'Reckon every prayer wherein the body does not toil and the heart is not afflicted to be a miscarriage, for this prayer has no soul'. At the same time, as St. Isaac quotes Evagrius, 'prayer is joy that sends up thanksgiving'. The paradoxical combination of affliction of the heart and the spiritual joy of thanksgiving becomes a source of tears, which accompany prayer, especially at its highest stages. 'The fullness of prayer is the gift of tears', Isaac says. Tears during prayer is a sign that the soul has been deemed worthy of God's mercy in her repentance, and that her repentance has been accepted, and through her tears the soul has begun to enter into the plain of limpid purity. 

Fourthly, one should pray with a patience and an ardor that are connected with the love of God: Love is a fruit of prayer that, by prayer's contemplation, draws the intellect insatiably toward that for which it longs when the intellect patiently perseveres in prayer without wearying, whether it prays in a visible way, employing the body, or with the mind's silent reflections, diligently and with ardor. Prayer is the mortification of the will's motions pertaining to the life of the flesh. For a man who prays correctly is the equal of the man who is dead to the world. And the meaning of 'to deny oneself' is this: courageously to persevere in prayer. 

Fifthly, every word of prayer should come from the depths of the heart. Even if the words of prayer are borrowed from the psalms, they should be uttered as if they were one's own: In the verses of your psalmody do not be like a man who borrows words from another, lest ... you be left utterly devoid of the compunction and joy to be found in psalmody. Rather, recite the words of psalmody as your very own, that you may utter the words of your supplication with insight and with discriminating compunction.