Archimandrite Ioachim Parr
I don’t want to pray in the evening. How to prepare for the evening prayer?
You don’t want to pray in the evening because you only utter the prayers with your lips, but in fact you don’t pray from the heart. That’s why you see it as a burden.
You have no desire to be with the one you love, because the only one you love is you. That’s why you don’t want to pray. Because you are tired and you seek rest and comfort for yourself. So you don’t want to do it. It is your own time, the time when you take care of your own self. You did so many things for so many people during the day, so now you have no more time, you are too tired.
Do you remember how it was when you thought you were in love with someone? No matter what you had done during the day, you were so eager to see that person at the end of the day.
You didn’t care if you had slept or not, if you stayed in the snow to talk to that and you froze, you still didn’t want to leave. And even if you knew you had to wake up in the early morning, you didn’t care how long you stayed with that person, because you thought you loved him/her.
You would pray if you loved God! You would run home to be with Him…instead of saying Oh, I have to pray again…
If you had thought about Him all day, there wouldn’t have been any problem for you, but you thought only about yourself all day long. And you see God as if He were someone else you had to take care of before enjoying some time with yourself!
