Asking the Saints to Pray

The single most important distinction here is between asking and adoring. Orthodox Christians worship God alone; the saints they honor and ask for prayers. When a believer says "Holy Father Nicholas, pray to God for us," he is doing exactly what he does when he asks a friend, "please pray for me" — only he is asking someone whose prayers, the Church trusts, are especially close to God. The saints are not a second set of gods and not rivals to Christ; they are His friends, and they pray in Him. On the crucial line between veneration and worship, see veneration-vs-worship-proskynesis-vs-latreia.

This rests on a fact about death: in Christ, the saints are not dead. "God is not the God of the dead, but of the living," and the saints are more alive now than we are. Scripture pictures the prayers of the saints rising before God's throne like incense, and describes us as "compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses." Asking their prayers is simply taking that cloud of witnesses seriously. The full teaching is set out in the-communion-of-saints.

In daily life this is unremarkable and concrete. A believer keeps an icon of a beloved saint in the icon corner and greets it in prayer. Prayer books supply short hymns — a troparion and kontakion — to a saint, and longer services of praise called akathists. The recurring phrase is always a request: "pray to God for us." Above all the Orthodox turn to the Theotokos, the Mother of God, whose intercession the Church holds especially powerful.

Most Orthodox have a particular bond with one or two saints. Many are named after a saint at baptism and keep that saint's feast as a name day, honoring their heavenly namesake and asking his or her prayers; converts and others often choose a patron saint whose life speaks to them (patron-saints-as-a-practice). Learning a saint's story is part of the relationship — you ask the prayers of someone you have come to know.

Newcomers reasonably ask: if I can pray to God directly, why involve the saints? The Orthodox answer is that it is not either-or. We pray directly to God constantly — and we also ask others to pray with us and for us, because that is how the Body of Christ prays. "The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much," writes St. James; if it is good to ask a righteous friend on earth to pray for us, it is good to ask a righteous friend in heaven, whose prayer is not weakened by distance or sin.

This takes nothing from Christ. There is indeed "one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus," and the saints do not compete with Him; their prayers have force only because they are in Him. Asking a saint to pray is not a detour around Christ but a sharing in His one life, in which the whole Church — on earth and in heaven — prays together. St. John of Damascus put the honor plainly, asking whether those "who make intercession to God for us" are not worthy of our love.