If the monk can associate the prayer with his life in the common-life monastery, the married Christian can join the prayer in the same way to his or her life at its very hearth. The capricious husband, the ill-tempered wife, the lazy child... he or she will put all this aside before being overwhelmed by it, and then lift up his or her thoughts toward God. No obstacle, nor any trial, can interrupt our progress toward God. If the prayer is everything we have truly to say, what then is our life worth without it? It seems to me that without the prayer, our life is like a car travelling along a road. When the car finally stops somewhere, what then? Don't we then perceive how ephemeral we are? The whole world itself, without the prayer, is like such a moving car. The earth spins on its axis, but one day it will stop forever. Heaven and earth will vanish away, will disappear, like all the cars that we take first to the repairman and then finally to the junkyard. A heart that lacks the prayer also seems to me like a plastic bag, the sort that one uses for a moment to carry something in, but then throws into the garbage can the minute it tears. It is the prayer that give meaning to our existence, and that is because it is the prayer which gives us God.
+Elder Aimilianos of Simonopetra, from Mount Athos: Sacred Vessel of the Prayer of Jesus, in The Living Witness of the Holy Mountain, by Archbishop Alexander (Golitzin).