Prayers by the Lake

Prayers by the Lake (Molitve na jezeru, 1922) is Nikolai’s poetic-mystical masterwork, a cycle of a hundred prose-poem prayers composed on the shore of Lake Ohrid. Modeled in form on the Psalter and on St. Simeon the New Theologian’s hymns, it is regarded as one of the classics of modern Orthodox devotional literature.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox (glorified 2003)

The Book and Its Setting

Molitve na jezeru — “Prayers by the Lake,” or “Prayers on the Lake” — was written during Nikolai’s episcopate at Ohrid and first published in 1922 (Nikolaj Velimirović, Prayers by the Lake / Molitve na jezeru, Ohrid, 1922; the work is available in English in the translation issued by the Serbian Orthodox Diocese of Western America). The lake itself is the book’s presiding image and occasion: Ohrid’s ancient waters, ringed by churches and mountains, become the mirror in which the bishop-poet contemplates God, the soul, creation, and death. The setting is not decorative but structural — the natural world of the lake, its light, its depths, its storms and its stillness, is drawn again and again into the prayers as a language for the movements of the soul before God.

The book belongs to the Ohrid years that were the creative summit of Nikolai’s life (see Bishop of Žiča and Ohrid), and it is widely regarded as his finest and most personal achievement — the work in which the eloquence that made him the “Serbian Chrysostom” turns inward, from public preaching to private prayer set down as literature.

Form: The Psalter and Symeon the New Theologian

Prayers by the Lake is a cycle of one hundred numbered prayers in rhythmic, unmetered prose — closer to the poetry of the Hebrew Psalter and of the Byzantine hymn than to Western verse. Two models stand behind it. The first is the Psalter itself, the Church’s own book of prayer-poems, whose direct address to God, whose sweep from lament to exultation, and whose fusion of the personal and the cosmic Nikolai takes up and continues. The second, more specifically, is the tradition of the personal mystical hymn represented above all by St. Simeon the New Theologian (†1022), whose Hymns of Divine Love likewise set the soul’s intimate experience of God into ecstatic first-person poetry (on the Symeon and Psalter affinities as the recognized literary background of the work, see the introductions to the English editions of Prayers by the Lake; cf. the treatment of Nikolai’s poetic corpus in studies of modern Serbian religious literature).

The result is a work that is at once deeply traditional and strikingly individual. It stands within the Orthodox tradition of prayer-as-theology — the conviction that the highest theology is doxology, prayer addressed to God rather than propositions asserted about him — and it makes of that tradition something recognizably modern in sensibility, in its psychological intimacy and its lyric address to the natural world.

Themes

The hundred prayers range across the whole of the Christian vision, but several themes recur with special force.

The presence of God in creation. The lake, the stars, the seasons, and the creatures are read throughout as signs and symbols pointing beyond themselves to their Creator — a sacramental reading of the natural world that is one of Nikolai’s most persistent instincts and that he developed elsewhere in prose (cf. his The Universe as Signs and Symbols). Nature is neither divinized nor dismissed; it is a book to be read, a veil through which God is glimpsed.

Repentance and the abasement of the self. The prayers are shot through with a profound sense of the poet’s own sin, littleness, and need — the classic Orthodox spirit of penthos, compunction, which keeps the mystical exaltation of the book anchored in humility. The soul that reaches toward God in these pages does so from the depths, as a sinner and a suppliant.

Longing and love for God. Above all the book is a sustained cry of longing — the soul’s desire for union with God rendered in the ardent, sometimes almost erotic idiom that Orthodox mystical poetry inherits from the Psalms and the Song of Songs and from Symeon. This is the note that gives Prayers by the Lake its intensity and that has made it beloved: it is not a book of instruction but of desire.

Death and eternity. The prayers dwell frequently on mortality — the poet’s own coming death, the passing of all earthly things, the reality of eternity — not morbidly but as the horizon that gives life its seriousness and its hope.

Place and Influence

Prayers by the Lake has come to be regarded as one of the classics of modern Orthodox spiritual writing, and as the work that best displays Nikolai’s gifts undivided by the controversies that attach to his more polemical and political texts. It has been translated into English and other languages and is widely read as private devotional literature well beyond Serbian and even Orthodox circles. Where the contested writings of Section 06 divide his readers, Prayers by the Lake tends to unite them: even critics who judge his interwar and wartime prose harshly generally recognize the poetic and spiritual quality of this book.

That said, the collection’s methodology requires a note of proportion even here. The high estimate of Prayers by the Lake as a spiritual classic is the judgment of its admirers and of much devotional reception; it is a literary and spiritual assessment, not a documentary fact, and it is offered as such. What is beyond dispute is the book’s authorship (unlike the contested 1944 text — see Words to the Serbian People), its date and place of composition, and its wide and enduring readership.

See Also

References

  • Velimirović, Nikolaj. Prayers by the Lake (Molitve na jezeru). Ohrid, 1922. English translation issued by the Serbian Orthodox Diocese of Western America (and other editions). (The text itself: the hundred prayers, the lake imagery, the themes of repentance, longing, creation, and death.)
  • Velimirović, Nikolaj. The Universe as Signs and Symbols. (The prose development of the sacramental reading of nature also present in Prayers by the Lake.)
  • Introductions to the English editions of Prayers by the Lake, and studies of modern Serbian Orthodox literature, for the recognized affinities with the Psalter and with the hymns of St. Simeon the New Theologian.