The lenten prayer par excellence in the Eastern Orthodox Church is the Prayer of St. Ephraim of Syria. This prayer is chanted at every lenten service, sometimes more than once. For many people, the very spirit of the Great Lenten season, the very breath of the Great Fast, is contained in this very brief and simple prayer.

The Prayer of St. Ephraim goes like this:

O Lord and Master of my life, do not give to me the spirit of sloth, despair, lust of power, and idle talk.
But grant rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience, and love to your servant.
Yea, Lord and King, grant me to see my own transgressions and not to judge my brother or sister.
For you are blessed unto ages of ages. Amen.

The prayer begins with an address to God as “Lord and Master.” “Lord,” we know, is the name for God in holy Scripture. It is the translation into Greek and into the English Bibles of the Hebrew Yahweh, which is the name that was given to Moses in the burning bush. Christ is the Lord. God is the Lord; the Lord is God. And the Lord in this prayer is also addressed as Master. Now here in English language, two different words are translated into English as “master.” One word, which is the one that’s usually translated “master,” is the word didaskolos, which means teacher or rabbi. It’s master in the sense of master’s degree. So that in the King James Version of holy Scripture when, for example, a person would come to Jesus and say, “Good Master,” that “master” meant teacher. That “master” meant teacher: magister, didaskolos. And in fact, almost all the times in the New Testament when Jesus is addressed in what is translated into English as “master” in the King James Version, translated as “teacher” in the Revised Versions: the word means teacher.

In fact, there is only one time that I know of in the New Testament where another term that is translated into English as “master” is used. And that is in the prayer of St. Simeon the Receiver of God who held in his arms the infant Jesus on the fortieth day after his birth when he was brought to the Temple. Simeon, when he held the child Jesus in his arms, he sang this hymn; he made this canticle which is part of the Orthodox Church service. It’s sung every single day at vespers. I believe in the Western Church it’s used in compline, but we’re familiar with that. It goes like this, in the normal English translation:

Lord, now let your servant depart in peace, according to your word. For mine eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared before the face of all people: a light of revelation to the Gentiles, and to be the glory of your people Israel.

Now it is very ironic that in English this canticle of Simeon begins, “Lord, now let your servant depart in peace,” because in Greek, the word there is not kyrios; it is not “lord.” The word there is despoti, despota. The word despot-, where you get the word “despot.” And that’s the word for “master,” which means master as a ruler, master as a kind of a royal person, master as one that you have to obey. It’s not master as master’s degree, like teacher, but it’s master almost like master of a servant, master of a slave, even. And that word is the word that is used in the Prayer of St. Ephraim at this point: “O Lord and Master…” In Greek, it’s Kyrie kai Despota tes zois mou: Despota. “O Lord and Master…” So we address Jesus in this prayer, and assuming that the prayer is to Jesus: it may just as easily as well be to God the Father, because God is the Lord, Christ is the Lord, God is the Master, Christ is the Master.

So it begins, “O Lord and Master of my life,” and that “of my life” is very important. “My life”: it means everything I am, everything I do, every breath I take, that God, Christ, is the Lord and the Master. And here we could remember that Jesus bought us on the cross. We belong to him like slaves, like bonded slaves. He receives as sons; he makes us heirs, joint heirs with him, of all of God’s splendor and majesty and virtue and power and beauty, but we come to him as bonded slaves. He owns us because he paid the price for our redemption, and therefore we literally belong to him.

And when we were baptized, at least in the Orthodox Church, and I believe in the West this is done in some churches at confirmation, a special oil was sealed on our forehead, and in the Orthodox Church not only our forehead, but our eyes, our nose, our lips, our ears, our mouth, our breast, our hands, our feet, our chest and our back. And it’s said, “The seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit.” That word, “seal,” means a brand, and when you’re branded you belong to the one who branded you. You’re no longer your own; someone else is your master.

So this is how the prayer begins: “O Lord and Master of my life.” Then in the normal translations, almost all of them used in English in the Orthodox Church, the next line would say, “Take from me the spirit of…” and then it says four things. So normally we would pray, “Take from me the spirit of…” and those four things are translated many different ways. The translation in front of me right now says, “Take from me the spirit of sloth, despair, lust of power, and idle talk.”

Now what we have to see now is that in the original prayer, probably written in Syriac but then translated literally into Greek and into other languages, certainly into Church Slavonic, it doesn’t say, “Take from me.” It says, “Don’t give to me; give me not,” Me me dos in Greek; Me daj mi in Slavonic. “Don’t give to me; don’t give to me those spirits.”

Now here that’s a very Semitic way of praying, because in the Semitic mentality—the Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac mentality, Egyptian mentality—God the Lord is the master of everything. He’s the master of demons as well as angels, of darkness as well as light. And if we have evil spirits in us, they are sent to us from God. We can’t even get the evil spirits by ourselves. God is the master of them. And we find that in the Bible all the time. God sent an evil spirit upon Saul. God gave them a spirit of delusion. God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. This does not mean that God tempts anybody or gives them evil for the sake of being evil, but it does mean that even the demons—the demons that we want, the demons that we ask for—are still given to us by God’s permission, by God’s mission, by God sending them to us. God does not tempt anybody.

But even in the Lord’s Prayer, we do not say in English, “Do not allow me to fall when I am tempted”; we say, “Do not lead us into temptation; lead us not into temptation.” It’s almost as if God were leading us, but that’s an idiom; that’s a Hebraic, Semitic idiom, which means if we are tempted, we are tempted by the evil spirits and our own passions and our own mind, but even God is behind that; even God has his hands in that, because God is the master of all. As the Protestant hymn says, “We hymn him God of all.”

And here we would not agree, as some modern writers actually write, that God is the God of the good side of life, but God is not the God of the bad side of life; that God is the God of light but not of darkness, of angels but not demons. That’s just not true. God is the God of all. So when we pray to our Master and Lord, we say, “Do not send to me, do not give to me these spirits. I don’t want them. Don’t give them to me.”

Now these four things that we ask not to be given in the prayer, is first the spirit of, in English, translated often “sloth.” And sometimes it’s translated “indolence,” “laziness” sometimes, “lethargy” sometimes. And that word means all these various things. The very word, argies, it means laziness, indolence, sloth, lethargy—so we don’t want that, and we pray God, “We don’t want that. Give us not the spirit: this spirit.”

Then the second, it says, “Give me not the spirit of—” and sometimes that’s translated “despair.” Even into Slavonic it’s translated for the word in Greek, akedia, which means lethargy, torpor, laziness, sloth, a sense of futility, a sense of the “blahs”: just what’s the use about anything? That’s certainly something that we don’t want. But the Greek word, the original word in Greek, anyway, periergias, it means something more than that, something a little bit different than that. What it means is the spirit of kind of wandering around, chatting, hanging out, gossiping, and just wasting our time in doing nothing. That’s what it means. It means just the kind of a spirit of—even in meddling in other people’s business, being curious about what’s going on, wasting our time, wasting our energy, doing nothing that amounts to anything. Well, we want to be delivered from that spirit; that’s what we’re praying here.

The third thing we ask to be delivered from, or not to be given, is a spirit of love or lust of power, vain ambition, wanting to be a power person and to have power and to love power and to rule over other people and to be someone of importance and so on. We pray to be delivered from that.

And then the fourth thing we pray is very simple and clearly translated “idle talk,” vain speaking, vain babbling, idle chatter, chit-chat. And here we remember when we make that prayer that the Lord Jesus said in the Gospel that we will be judged by our words. In fact, he said we will give an answer on the day of judgment for every empty vain, idle word that we have ever spoken. In the Gospel it says you will answer for every rhema argon, it says in Greek, and that word, rhema argon, argon, it’s the word for “barren.” It’s actually the same word for a woman who is not able to have a child, a barren woman, for a word that is empty, vain, idle, not-there.

So we are asking, “Lord, do not give me these spirits. Do not give me these spirits—but rather bestow upon me, rather give to me, your servant—” and then we ask for the spirit of four virtues, four other things, and these four other things that we ask for are, first, translated usually into English, almost always: chastity. But here the word is not “chastity” in the sense of purity in Greek, agneia; it’s not that word. It’s another word. The word in Greek there is sophrosene, in Slavonic tsyelomudrie, and it literally means “whole wisdom,” integrity, wholeness, not disintegration, purity in the sense of having everything together, holding our life together, not having any alien, polluted, corrupted elements in our being. And certainly it means in everyday language, just plain chastity; in other words, no porneia, no sexual immorality, no filthiness, nothing that pulls us apart in the integrity of our being. So that’s what we pray for first: a spirit of chastity, of wholeness, integrity, purity.

The second is a spirit of—it says in Greek tapeinophrosynes, and tapeinophrosyne, that is usually simply translated “humility,” and almost always in the prayer it’s translated “humility.” Sometimes it’s translated “meekness,” sometimes it’s translated “gentleness,” sometimes it’s translated “lowliness.” And it’s a Greek word that comes from a Hebrew word in the Bible, used very often in the Scripture. It’s a word for meaning having nothing, being totally lowly, being devoid of anything your own. It may even mean being completely poor. For example, this word is used by the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, in her Magnificat, in the canticle in St. Luke’s gospel, where she says, “My soul magnifies the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked up on the tapeinophrosyne; he has looked upon the lowliness, the tapeinosis, of his female slave, of the woman who’s a bonded slave and has nothing.”

So this word means we have nothing except what’s given to us by God, and it even means for a believer we’ve got nothing but God. We’ve only got what God gives, nothing else. And Jesus used this word in Matthew’s gospel when he said, “Come to me, all ye who labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me,” he said, “for I am prais” in Greek, which means meek or gentle, “and tapeinophrosyne, a tapeino ti kardia; I am lowly in heart; for I am humble of heart.” And Jesus says, “Learn from me, because that’s how I am. I am meek. I am gentle. I am humble. I am like a bonded slave. I am the slave of God, humanly speaking. I have taken the form of a slave. I have nothing my own by what is God’s. My word is God’s word. My work is God’s work. My will is God’s will.” So this is what that word means, usually translated simply as “humility.” So this is what we want.

Then we say, “And grant to me also a spirit of hypomone” in Greek, usually just simply translated “patience.” However, it means patience in a very particular sense. Probably it would be better translated in English as “patient endurance, enduring patience.” It exists in the New Testament very often in verb form, where Jesus says, “The one who perseveres.” Perseverance would be a word: “The one who perseveres to the end will be saved.” Or when he says in Luke’s gospel, “In hypomone, in patient, enduring perseverance you will save your soul; you will win your life; you will possess your life.” And this word is all through the letters of the Apostle Paul, this patient endurance, enduring patience, suffering all things, with a total and complete dependence and trust in God.

And the [fourth] thing is agape, love. In the Scriptures, the shortest definition of God: Ho Theos agape estin; God is love. It’s the greatest commandment: “Love God with all your mind, soul, heart, and strength; love your neighbor as yourself. Love your enemy. Bless those who curse you; pray for those who abuse you. Love everyone unconditionally and equally.” That’s what we pray for in agape.

So to repeat this middle part of the prayer, we would say, “Do not give me a spirit of laziness, sloth, lethargy, meddling, curiosity, gossping, chatting, hanging out, despondency, ambition, vain power, lust of power, idle talk, idle chatter; but rather give to me the spirit of chastity, purity, wholeness, integrity of person, meekness, gentleness, lowliness, humility, patience, perseverance, enduring patience, patient endurance, and love.”

And then the prayer continues: “Yea, O King and God, my Lord and King,” it says, “Kyrie and Vasilev, the reigning King, grant that I may know, may see, my own transgressions, my own sins. Let me see myself as I really am.” The saints tell us that when we come to see our self as we really are, we have done a miracle greater than raising the dead. And we can only see our self as we really are in the light of Christ. And when we see our self as we really are, then we can see God. And when we see God as God really is, especially shining in the face of Christ, then we see our self as we really are; we are really then illumined. So we say, “Yea, O Lord and King, grant that I may see my own sins, my own faults, my own transgressions, and not to judge my brother or my sister.” And that word in Greek, adelphos and adelphe—it’s in the plural—can mean either brother or sister; it’s “brethren” in the old English sense. It doesn’t just mean men; it means our brothers and sisters, our neighbors, the people around us. “Not to judge anyone for anything, for you, O Lord, are blessed forever, for blessed are you unto ages of ages. Amen.”

So this is the prayer that we repeat over and over again every day during the lenten season, many times during every service. It’s not used on the weekends, by the way. That’s why many people who go to church only on Saturday and Sunday never hear this prayer, because on Saturday and Sunday the services are not lenten in character. The Saturday service is the sabbath, and the Sunday is the Lord’s day. The penitential elements are not in the weekend services. But if you go to the weekday services and the lenten services and certainly the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts, then you hear this prayer read, although in some Orthodox churches of the Byzantine tradition, it’s not read at the Liturgy of the Presanctified, but in all the other services it certainly is.

So Orthodox Christian people use this prayer. If they don’t go to the church services, they use it at home. Some people that I know actually use this prayer every day throughout the entire year, because they’ve come to love it so much and learn it so much in the lenten season that they just apply it not just to the tithe of the year but they apply it to every day of the year.

“O Lord and Master of my life—” This is what we pray, and this is what we want, and this is the prayer that the Holy Spirit puts in our mouth and in our mind and in our heart during the Great Lenten season in the Eastern Orthodox Church.