When a child learns how to pray, he learns what joy is
From the rhythm of our breathing we can guess the healthiness of our body. How big is the parents’ fear when their child is hardly breathing and in danger of suffocating. But we should fear more the lack of spiritual breathing, which is prayer.
One of the Saviour’s commandments is to pray unceasingly. Prayer is the breath of spiritual life. As the life of our body ceases when you stop breathing, so the spiritual life ceases without prayer.
From the rhythm of our breathing we can guess the healthiness of our body. How big is the parents’ fear when their child is hardly breathing and in danger of suffocating. But we should fear more the lack of spiritual breathing, which is prayer.
To avoid this we begin by accustoming our child with prayer since infancy, to maintain and deepen it over again.
(Translated from Nikolaj Evgrafovich Pestov, Cum să ne creștem copiii: calea spre desăvârșita bucurie, traducere din limba rusă de Lucia Ciornea, Editura Sophia, București, 2005, p. 45)
