Reverend Father and Priest, we shall attempt, in the care of your paternal exhortation and with your blessings, to provide certain indications, regarding the multi-faceted topic that you asked of our unworthiness. The topic is "The Elder (Geronda) and his teaching regarding the Prayer."

In his Second Homily on Prayer Saint John Chrysostom writes, "Prayer is the beginning of every good thing and the mediator of salvation and eternal life...The greatest thing we have to say about prayer is that every praying person converses with God, and this to the extent that, being human, one can speak with God...One cannot adequately express in words this honor. For this honor exceeds even the magnificence of the Angels themselves...At the time of prayer, we are forgetful of our human nature, considering ourselves to be in the midst of Angels and carrying out the same worship as they. For all the other things are very different and separated - I mean between us and the Angels - but the work of prayer is common to both Angels and humans."

1. GLUTTONY

Overeating, drunkenness, nor keeping the fasts, eating in secret, over-indulgence, extreme love of one's body and bodily comforts, which leads to egoism and indifference to God, the Church and virtue.

We find a clear reference to the Dormition (Koimisis) fast in a conversation of Saint Leo the Great from around the year 450 A.D. "The Church fasts are situated in the year in such a way that a special abstinence is prescribed for each time. Thus, for spring there is the spring fast--the Forty Days [Great Lent]; for summer there is the summer fast...[the Apostle's fast]; for autumn there is the autumn fast, in the seventh month [Dormition fast]; for winter there is the winter fast [Nativity fast]."

Having promised us a technological utopia, our ubiquitous and intrusive cyber-culture has instead precipitated a spiritual crisis in which human experience has been systematically fragmented and the coherence of the self increasingly threatened. Living in a culture of organized distractions, our thoughts are isolated and disconnected, preventing us from seeing and experiencing the wholeness of life. Distraction and fragmentation have negative consequences for the organization of knowledge; they prevent us from engaging our spiritual depth, and render us incapable of engaging the spiritual depth of others, for having lost touch with our own personhood, we can receive neither the personhood of our neighbor nor of God.

What does Saint John Chrysostom say about true fasting? "Fasting" he writes, "is a medicine." But medicine, as beneficial as it is, becomes useless because of the inexperience of the user. He has to know the appropriate time that the medicine should be taken and the right amount of medicine and the conditions of the body which is take it, the weather conditions and the seasons of the year and the appropriate diet of the sick and many other things. If any of these things are overlooked, the medicine will do more harm than good. So, if one who is going to heal the body needs so much accuracy, when we care of the soul and are concerned about healing it from bad thoughts, it is necessary to examine and observe everything with every possible detail.