The Prayer Rule of St Seraphim of Sarov:
A Rosary By Any Other Name . . .

Dr. Alexander Roman alex@unicorne.org

The Orthodox Church has decided to continue celebrating the life and spiritual patrimony of one of her greatest Fathers and spiritual teachers, St Seraphim of Sarov. This year marks the 250^th anniversary of his birth, in fact. And there is a particular practice that this tonsured monk of the Kyivan Caves Lavra followed that intimately links him with the West . . .

One of the most visible symbols of Western Catholic identity is the set of prayer beads known as the “rosary,” named for the “rosarium” or a rose-garden.

The great prayer of the Church, following the Divine Liturgy, is, of course, the Book of 150 Psalms.

So interwoven are these prayers in the great liturgical texts that St John Chrysostom did not hesitate to remark that St David, King and Prophet, was everywhere commemorated and present throughout the feasts and festivals of the Church. His psalms are “front and centre” in all the commemorations. And the Horologion or book of hourly prayers and Divine praises of the Church belongs to the spiritual life of clergy, monastics and laity alike!

The Psalter is sung liturgically once each week in our Church, and twice each week during Lent. It is the basis of personal prayer as well and it was not surprising to find individuals who knew the Psalter by heart. St John the Ukrainian Kozak and Confessor (“Aghios Ioannis o Rossos” as the Greeks call him) spent his days in Turkish captivity praying the psalms which he knew by heart.

The practice soon developed, however, to develop “substitutes” for the Psalter to allow people who could not read or who were otherwise very busy to pray according to the pattern of the Church’s liturgy. Priests and monastics who were traveling, for example, could fulfill their daily obligations of prayer, when necessary, by fulfilling a private rule of repeated prayers.

One of the earliest of these “psalter-substitutes” or “little psalters” involved the repetition of the Our Father and Hail Mary prayers 150 times each.

To keep count, people tied 50 or 150 knots on a cord that they carried about with them. St Basil the Great himself prescribed the making of prayer-ropes or “komvoschinia” with 100 knots divided every 25 with a divider bead or knot for the saying of prescribed numbers of the Jesus Prayer to replace the Divine Office and also the Psalter (one would have had to say the Jesus Prayer 6,000 times instead of the Psalter!).

In the West, prayer-chains with beads were soon developed with beads organized into groups of ten, divided with a larger bead (called the “gaudies”). And the very word “bead” or “bede” came from the old English word for “prayer” (and “beg” comes from the same root).

The group of ten beads recalled the ten-stringed musical instrument of the psalter itself on which King David played when he sang his psalms.

Meditations to these were later added that reflected on the lives of OLGS Jesus Christ and His Most Holy Mother.

Thus, came to be the “Rosary” of the West – said to have been personally communicated by the Blessed Virgin Mary to St Dominic.

This prayer was highly popularized by the French St. Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort who lived in the 18^th century through his “Total Consecration to Jesus, the Divine Wisdom, through Mary.” (There is a shrine to St Louis’ much venerated “Mary Queen of Hearts” in Montreal).

In fact, Pope John Paul II is a devotee of St Louis and his motto on his papal crest is taken directly from the writings of St Louis, especially the famous “True Devotion to Mary.”

In fact, this most visible identifying feature of Roman Catholicism is something that has existed in Eastern Orthodoxy, as has been mentioned, from the time of St Basil the Great himself – and it is still practiced widely by Orthodox monastics as well as laity. It was a defining feature of the spiritual life of St Seraphim of Sarov himself who required that his spiritual charges recite this prayer daily.

With all the interest in the life of St Seraphim last year and this, a number of his prayer rules have been published, his own very strict cell-rule for praying the psalms and his unique prayer rule for laity.

St Seraphim prescribed the recitation of three Our Father’s and Hail Mary’s (the Orthodox version begins “Rejoice, O Theotokos-Virgin . . .”) together with the Nicene Creed once, morning and night. He said that anyone, no matter how busy they are, can do this and, if they remain faithful to it, will be led into a greater prayer life by the Holy Spirit in time!

Among his other prayer rules is to be found the “Rule of the Mother of God” which consists in reciting 150 “Hail Mary’s” divided up into groups of ten. Each group is followed by the prayer “Open to us the doors of Thy Mercy . . .” (which he insisted was most important to include!) and with a special prayer for a particular intention. (I’ve translated the full text into English and it is on this site: http://www.montfortmissionaries.com/thoughts.phtml It is the letter under “Sept. 24,” the third down from the top.

St Seraphim also kept a book in which he listed all sorts of miraculous healings of people who prayed this rule faithfully every day.

At the great Diveyevo monastery, the nuns continue to recite this prayer rule as they walk in procession around the perimeter of their monastery three times. They actually sing it out loud during important feast-days associated with the Icon of the Mother of God “Joy of all Joys” that was St Seraphim’s cell-icon and on feasts of St Seraphim himself.

Another form of the prayer rope has been developed to accommodate the praying of this prayer rule – one involving 150 knots divided every ten with a divider bead or knot, much like the Roman Catholic beaded rosary.

The beautiful Russian “Lestovka” or, in Ukrainian, “Listvytsia” or “ladder” is a leather counter that used leather “steps” or knotches (St Seraphim used this rather than the Greek woolen prayer-rope). And Lestovkas with 150 knotches, called “Bohorodychny” or “of the Mother of God” are also made.

And St Seraphim taught that this prayer rule was revealed to an Eastern monk in the Thebaid in Africa in the 8^th century . .

On Mount Athos, novice monks especially are urged to practice reciting 150 Hail Mary’s with a prostration to the ground at the end of each prayer. The same is practiced with Our Father’s!

And St Louis de Montfort himself drank deeply of the teachings of the Eastern Fathers with respect to the veneration of the Most Holy Mother of God, as can be seen in the copious quotes from them in his own writings and in the recommended practices that he includes, such as the genuflecting at the end of each Hail Mary (genuflections were adopted by the Roman Catholic Church from the secular form of paying tribute to earthly sovereigns where one went down on one knee – but one goes down on the right knee before God and in Church, and on the left knee to people in authority).

One Orthodox spiritual elder, called by his contemporaries the “Elder of the Theotokos” used to say that the daily recitation of the “Prayer rope of the Mother of God” was more important in the lives of Christians than even her Akathist!

And there were Orthodox saints and holy monastic fathers who even used the “Hail Mary” or “Rejoice, O Theotokos-Virgin” as their form of the Jesus Prayer – they would constantly recite it, day and night. This prayer is a mystical hymn of the New Testament that sings of the Incarnation of OLGS Jesus Christ through His Most Holy Mother!

May we all pray this exquisite prayer rule with our Father among the Saints, the Venerable Seraphim of Sarov, especially during this great year that marks the 250^th anniversary of his birth!

Ukrainian Orthodoxy