Reflections on prayer in the writings of St. Cyprian of Carthage
In this video, Fr. Adrian Podaru emphasizes that “In prayer, we cannot be multi-tasking. Prayer must absorb us completely, entirely, body, soul, mind, heart, senses.”
Fr. Dr. Adrian Podaru is Lecturer in Patristics at the Faculty of Orthodox Theology in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
Fr. Adrian:
In prayer, we cannot be multi-tasking. It is a title of glory and many young people like to boast with it.
To be multi-tasking means to do several things at the same time and to be efficient in this ability of yours to do several things at the same time.
In prayer, says St. Cyprian [of Carthage, +258 AD], we cannot be multitasking, and I quote: “What sluggishness it is to be led astray and captivated by unbecoming and profane thoughts when you supplicate the Lord, as if there were anything else that it behoved you to think about except that you are speaking with God! How can you ask to be heard by God when you do not even hear yourself? … Wherefore the apostle anxiously and carefully warns us, saying, Continue in prayer, and watch in the same.” [Colossians 4:2]
Prayer, therefore, must absorb us completely, entirely, body, soul, mind, heart, senses.
Finally, one last idea, quoting from Tobit 12:8, where it says “Prayer is good with fasting and alms” and alluding to Isaiah 58 where the prophet talks about true fasting (and I urge everyone to read chapter 58),
St. Cyprian says that prayer accompanied by fasting and almsgiving will always be heard by God.
But, be careful, fasting and almsgiving must precede prayer, moreover, they must be a constant in one’s life.
In other words: God always listens to the fasting and merciful man in his prayers.
Consequently, the greedy and the stingy pray to the wind.
Concluding as we began, with a text from the epistle to Donatus, St. Cyprian warns: “In courts of justice, in the public assembly, in political debate, a copious eloquence may be the glory of a voluble ambition; but in speaking of the Lord God, a chaste simplicity of expression strives for the conviction of faith rather with the substance, than with the powers, of eloquence.”
It is not the power of eloquence, not the crafted speech, but the power of deeds, the exemplarity of the Christian life that convinces and converts. The life of St. Cyprian, crowned by martyrdom, as in the case of St. Ignatius, made and still makes his words to receive weight and penetrate deep into hearts, transforming and ennobling them.
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