HOLY SILENCE

This is a vocal prayer, which is added in after the reading of the Second Kneeling Prayer on Pentecost. It, too, gives us much to...

"In order to awaken a sinner from his sleep, the divine saving-grace directs all its power towards the destruction of the main support...

"When a grace-given awakening takes place in the consciousness of a man... there is an instantaneous destruction of the whole order of...

We pray, Most Holy Trinity, that you help us to die to our old self. Help us to escape from desperation, desolation, dysfunction, sin,...

"If one looks at a sinner's inward disposition and outward state then it will be found that sometimes he knows much, but is blind with...

"Being actively united with this entire world, every sinner falls into its broad nets, wraps himself in them, and is so deeply buried...

"...this whirling is intensified and complicated a thousand times because the sinner is not alone. There is a whole world full of other...

"So, a sinner persists incessantly in his troubles and anxieties, and in his search for excessive knowledge, many possessions, and...

"He has fallen away from God, who is the fullness of everything. He is empty in himself. The only thing that remains is to spread himself...

"A man becomes a bottomless abyss; he tries hard to fill this abyss, but he cannot. That is why for his whole life he is in sweat, toil,...