Prayer–“standing in the present, in the ‘now'”

“We can pray to God only if we are established in a state of stability and inner peace face to face with God, and these things release us from the sense of time… Usually we think or we behave as though the present was an imaginary line, very very thin indeed, between the past and the future, and we roll from the past into the future, continually passing this line in the same way as you can roll an egg on a cloth. If you do this, it runs continuously, it is nowhere at any moment, there is no present, because it is always in the future…What you have got to do is to be so completely in the present that all your energies and all your being are summed up in the word ‘now.’ You discover with great interest that you are in the now. … I think we must do exercises in stopping time and in standing in the present, in this ‘now’ which is my present and which is also the intersection of eternity with time.” (Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, Eastern Orthodox archbishop, “Beginning to Pray,” 82-85)