The Body When Praying
The Body When Praying

Summary/Abstract: The spiritual life in Orthodoxy it is the consequence of the work and of the presence of the grace within man. But, in the same time, and in the same measure, it is also the answer of the man to the grace`s work, answer manifested as a searching for, and as a running after, grace. When the “dispositions of the soul in time of praying”, which create an “icon” that fits them to the manifestations of the body, are repeated to exhaustion, in time, there takes place the forming and the fixing of bodily habits (gestures) of the prayer (for instance: praying by standing, raising up the hands, kneeling, making the sign of the cross, etc.). They become traditional bodily ways of praying, through which are preserved and transmitted, from generation to generation, the rule of the faith and the state of prayer. Imposed as rule of the tradition, they can no longer be modified in time, without considering this modification as renouncement, or at least deformation, of the rule of faith. Consequently, in the Orthodox spirituality, there are two bodily gestures through which, the ethos of the Early Church and the rule of the Apostolic faith, have been transmitted over centuries. Their present practicing roots the contemporary Orthodoxy in the biblical Apostolic tradition. From the standing point of view of these affirmations, we will approach few bodily forms of praying.

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