Fr. Rafail Noica: "How should I pray?"

The culture of hesychasm centered on the Jesus Prayer is the union of the mind and heart; when a person’s mind and heart are one and live the same moment, and this is the moment of tears.

Fr. Rafail Noica

Excerpt from a Conference

Students’ House, Bucharest, 1993

“Please tell me how I should pray so that I weep every time?” Because true tears are not an emotional,  psychological moment, and Fr. Sophrony showed that sometimes–that is, talking about them from time to time–he said that they are the moment in which both the mind and heart in a person experience the same thing–the experience of the Name of God in both the mind and heart. Therefore, the culture of hesychasm centered on the Jesus Prayer is the union of the mind and heart; when a person’s mind and heart are one and live the same moment, and this is the moment of tears. We are speaking kind of technically about this moment: it is love. It does not always come through love, because love is no longer our nature, that is, it is but we fell from it, and it often comes through pain. And for this reason, a certain sense, maybe not of pain itself, but of returning to oneself through pain, is very much appreciated and cultivated, to put it this way. Pain is the moment in which both the mind and heart experience the same thing. And it is already the beginning of man’s unification.