A Pentecost Prayer from Symeon the New Theologian

The following prayer was included at the end of the preface of The Giver of Life: The Holy Spirit in the Orthodox Tradition (reviewed on this blog previously here).  It comes from Symeon the New Theologian’s Hymns of Divine Love  and is a wonderful prayer invoking the Spirit’s presence and voicing praise for all the Spirit does Symeon lived from 949-1022 and is one of the great mystics of the Christian east and an Apophatic tradition. This prayer/hymn emphasizes the radical transcendence of the Spirit of God. In our day and age, we tend to emphasize the immediacy of the Spirit, but we need to be challenged by the ways the Spirit of God defies definition and control and whose ways are most certainly not our ways.  May you experience the infilling of the Spirit this Pentecost Sunday!

 

Come, true light.

Come, eternal life.

Come,  hidden mystery.

Come, nameless treasure.

Come,  ineffable reality.

Come, inconceivable person.

Come, endless bliss.

Come, non-setting sun.

Come, infallible expectation of all those who must be saved.

Come, O Powerful One, who always creates and recreates and transforms by Your will alone.

Come, O invisible and totally intangible and impalpable.

Come, You who always remain motionless at each moment move completely and come to us, asleep in hades, O You above the heavens.

Come,  O beloved Name and repeated everywhere, but of whom it is absolutely forbidden for us to express the existence or to know the Nature.

Come, eternal joy.

Come, non-tarnishing crown.

Come, crystalline cincture, studded with precious stones.

Come, royal purple.

Come, truly sovereign right hand.

Come, You whom my miserable soul has desired and desires.

Come, You the Lonely, to the lonely, since You see I am lonely.

Come, You who have seperated me from everything and made me solitary in this world.

Come, You who have become Yourself desire in me, who have made me desire You, You, the absolutely inaccessible one.

Come, my breath and my life.

Come, consolation of my poor soul.

Come, my joy, my glory, my endless delight.