๐ About Prayer (Part 5)
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The prophet David, a man of God, said, "In the morning, O Lord, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and wait expectantly." He stood before God in the morning, giving thanks to the Creator and asking for His goodness. (Psalm 5:3)
1.3. When we pray, we should face east. The east is always the manifestation of the Lord, and all good things emerge from the east like the rising sun. Therefore, any priest or layman should stand to the east when praying. The east is a symbol of the Lord and the Holy Virgin Mary, as it is written, "Look to the east." With spiritual justice, it has been decided that we should turn our faces to the east. The Holy Book tells us that God will come from the east in the last days to gather this world and call us in the resurrection, so we should turn to the east and pray.
1.4. When we begin to pray, we should make the sign of the cross on our whole body using our fingers. Before we begin to pray, we cover our faces and our whole bodies with the sign of the cross. This is to put the evil spirit that opposes us in our thoughts and challenges us not to connect with our Creator in prayer, with the power of the cross, to throw it under our feet or to keep it away from us altogether. When we make the sign of the cross, we should start from top to bottom, then from left to right. This is so that the thoughts of darkness can be pushed away from us, and we can walk in the light. We stretch out our index finger and make a cross by folding our middle finger and others and touch our face and our whole body from top to bottom and from left to right. When we pray, we say "Father" on the forehead, "Son" on the chest (heart), "Holy Spirit" on the left shoulder, "One God" on the right shoulder, and invoke the name of the Trinity.
"But if I cast out demons with the finger of God, then the kingdom of God has come to you" (Luke 11:20), because the finger is a manifestation of God's power. Clergy fathers pray with the cross they hold, while lay people should pray by joining the fingers next to the thumb in the shape of a cross as described above. The spiritual secret behind this is as follows:
"In the name of the Father" means that God the Son, Jesus Christ, is the perfect God who was sanctified in heaven together with the Holy Spirit before the world.
Touching the heart with the word "Son" means that "Son" came down from heaven in a different body and took flesh from the body of the Holy Virgin Mary and soul from her soul and was conceived in a perfect union.
Writing from left to right, "The Holy Spirit, the One God" means that the Son of God, Jesus Christ, nailed His hands and feet with nails for us on Friday, and in His resurrection, from left to right, from hell to heaven, from suffering to peace, from death to life, from darkness to light, from sorrow to joy, to testify.
From top to bottom, from left to right, we mean a cross because it is the shape of a cross. Christ saved the world by hanging on the cross. The right is like heaven, and the left is an example of hell. (Article 14 of Justice King)
The times when we make the sign of the cross are as follows:
- When we want to pray,
- When we come to a word stated about the cross in the prayer
โ on the foods we eat and drink,
โ On the clothes we wear,
โ When we sleep; & when we wake up,
- Before we start any spiritual and physical work, we should make a sign using our finger of the cross in a way discribed above.
1.5. We should pray with our eyes fixed on heaven. Because we do not live in despair like heathens or heretics, but we have hope that we will rise above the grave in the resurrection and inherit the heavenly inheritance prepared for us, and to confirm that it is religion and conduct that will enable us to walk uprightly before the Creator, we should open our eyes and pray with a humble mind and an open mind.
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