Yesterday, I introduced this year’s Lenten series, which will be daily reflections on famous or important liturgical prayers. As a general principle, I’ll be treating the season of Lent like a liturgical day, starting with the evening offices then going through the daytime services. But today I’m going to start with the quintessential Lenten prayer of the Christian East, known as the Lenten Prayer of St. Ephrem the Syrian. I’ve actually already written about it twice before in the early days of the blog (on the practice of praying it, and on its theology), but it’s worth bringing forward again at the start of our Lenten call to prayer this year.
The prayer goes like this:
O Lord and Master of my life:
Take from me a spirit of laziness, distraction,* love of power, and idle talk.
But give your servant a spirit of wisdom,^ humility, patience, and love.
Indeed, O Lord and King, grant me to see my own sins and not to judge my brothers and sisters.
For You are blessed for ever and ever. Amen.
This prayer uses the ‘two ways’ rhetorical trope, which we see often in both Scripture and prayers. (We see it, for example, in Psalm 1, which begins: “Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked … but whose delight is in the law of the LORD.”) It outlines two paths, one positive and one negative, and exhorts or prays to go down the correct one. It’s always interesting in these prayers to see what contrasts the author has in mind. In St. Ephrem’s prayer, in the Greek, three of the four characteristics prayed against come from a shared lexical root, erg- ‘work’:
- laziness (argia, ‘not-working’)
- distraction (periergia, ‘around-working’)
- idle talk (argologia ‘not-working-words’)
All three terms speak to ways our life can easily go awry and not be the kind of life we want it to be: either not doing what we need to do, doing everything but what we need to do, or blabbing away about nothing. The fourth term is not related in the same way, but contains similar sounds and so works in the poetics of the prayer: the love of power (philarkhia, ‘love of authority’). It likewise reflects a disjointed relationship with responsibility, in this case not focusing on the work before us but on our ambition to do and be ‘more’.
This leads us to what really could be the guiding theme of this whole blog for the past eight years: the search for a faith that works, that creates the actual change in our lives that our Scriptures and tradition tell us genuine faith produces (by God’s grace, through Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit). It’s not about being productive (in that capitalistic sense that defines our worth by how much we do), as much as it is about being intentional about how we’re spending our time and energy (there’s that erg- root again!).
With this in mind, what does the path the prayer wants us to take, the one that is as effective as the other is ineffective, look like? It asks for four qualities: wisdom (a practical wisdom marked by sound judgement), humility, patience, and love. And really, if we had to pick four qualities to focus on for a more fruitful and faithful life, it would be hard to come up with a better list than these:
- wisdom: exercising good judgment in how one interprets information and organizes one’s life
- humility: understanding one’s role and letting one’s work speak for itself
- patience: being comfortable waiting and sitting in uncertainty, and persevering in one’s circumstances
- love: extending grace, compassion, warmth to others
Looking around at our world today, it looks a lot like those characteristics St. Ephrem prayed against. Our lives are built around putting in as little effort as possible so that it’s often easier to be lazy now than not. There are entire economies (to say nothing of political strategies) build upon distraction. The love of power by a small number of people is making our whole system seem more and more like an oligarchy of the super-wealthy. And so little of what is said in traditional media, social media, or in our conversations is meaningful in any way.
What a difference we could all make if we just had ten percent less of this, and ten percent more wisdom, humility, patience, and love!
And so as we start off this Lenten season, I’d encourage us all to keep St. Ephrem’s prayer in our hearts as much as possible.
O Lord and Master of my life:
Take from me a spirit of laziness, distraction,* love of power, and idle talk.
But give your servant a spirit of wisdom,^ humility, patience, and love.
Indeed, O Lord and King, grant me to see my own sins and not to judge my brothers and sisters.
For You are blessed for ever and ever. Amen.
—
Notes:
* ‘distraction’, traditionally translated as ‘despair’ or ‘despondency’, but these do not capture the sense of the Greek at all; it’s about misplaced energy and attention, not feeling sad.
^ ‘wisdom’, traditionally translated as ‘chastity’, but this has too much of a sexual connotation in today’s English to be accurate. The Greek sophrosyne is a practical form of wisdom focusing on good judgment in the proper management of a household or one’s life, like ‘prudence’ but without the negative, ‘prudish’ connotation that word carries.
Matthew Root 