"Lord and Master of My Life": The Prayer That Seals Our Lenten Journey

By Protopresbyter George Dorbarakis

Lord and Master of my life,
give me not a spirit of idleness,
curiosity, lust for power, and idle talking.
 
Bestow on Your servant instead
a spirit of temperance,
humility, patience, and love.
 
Yes, Lord King, grant me to see my own offenses,
and not to condemn my brethren,
for You are blessed unto the ages of ages. Amen.

This short prayer of the great Father and ascetic Teacher, Saint Ephraim the Syrian, is the most well-known prayer of Great Lent and seals its entire course. For it very succinctly places the faithful Christian before the Lord Jesus Christ in order to beg Him, on the one hand, not to allow his heart to take the direction and inclination towards the sinful mindset expressed in the passions of idleness, curiosity, lust for power and idle talk, but on the contrary to turn towards Him, something that will be manifested charismatically with the concrete fruits of temperance, humility, patience and love. The basis of this positive path towards the Lord is, the Saint’s prayer emphasizes, the gift from Him again of self-knowledge as the fixation of the eyes of the soul on the reality of ourselves: the sin and the faults we commit daily, a fact that frees us from the impassioned fixation on the sins of our neighbor and therefore their condemnation.

It is not possible to comment on all the individual points of the prayer – this would take too much time. However, two points of it can be emphasized in particular. First, the Saint’s indication as to where the soul “leans”, that is, what spirit dominates within it, since its direction reveals its orientation, and consequently the true content of its faith. The Lord himself revealed the meaning of this truth: “Where your treasure is”, He said, “there your heart will be also.” What does this mean? To understand what is the central value of our life, our treasure, our God, we must examine the very content of our heart. I may confess Jesus Christ as the ruler of my life, but this is ultimately a theory and an ideology for me. Because other things occupy the first place in my life: my career, the pleasures of life, my friends, even my family. The Lord was absolutely clear to us: Your priority, He said, must always be God, therefore Himself as the incarnate God. “He who loves father or mother or wife or children or lands, yes, even his own life, more than Me, is not worthy of Me.” “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness.” Therefore, if the scale of my love tilts in priority towards anything other than the Lord and His holy commandments, I prove that He is not my God, even if I claim again and again that this is not true.

This is what the Saint tells us that we should beg for in our prayer: Make us love You above all things, that our spirit may be turned to Your Spirit, and this will be manifested by the fruitfulness of virtues and certainly not of false passions. The original commandment “You shall love the Lord your God with all your soul, with all your heart, with all your mind, and with all your strength” finds its exact fulfillment here.

The second point is the struggle for self-knowledge, for attachment to what I have right in front of me: my own self. And it is indeed strange, how everything that is in front of us escapes us, while we easily see what is happening to our fellow man. This is a reality that the ancient Greeks had also established, when they said that every man has two bags on him: one in front and one behind. The back bag is his own mistakes and failures. The front one is that of his fellow man. That is why he presents himself with open eyes to the errors and actions of his fellow man, while he presents himself blind to what is his own mistake. The reason for this “paradox” is obviously, according to our faith, the fall of man into sin. From the moment man sinned, he refused to submit to the will of his Creator by choosing his own will, therefore things were distorted, with the result that instead of love as acceptance and openness towards our fellow man, we have the critcism and condemnation of the other.

Thus, Saint Ephraim tells us, in order to be on the path towards God, that is, following the Lord, His grace is required. His grace opens our eyes to see our own errors, to repent of them and to throw ourselves at His mercy – the path of repentance that we see in the return of the prodigal son. The prodigal son is each of us and Saint Ephraim essentially presents his repentance with the great prayer that he taught us.

Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.