Sometimes it is so difficult to remain awake and alert

[Mary Naeem]

—Sometimes it is so difficult to remain awake and alert during our morning or evening prayers. Is it because we are tired from work or school or is there another dimension to the problem? St Cassian may have an interesting insight to our common problem. Abba Cassian (360-435), better known in the West as St. John Cassian who wrote “Institutes” and “Conferences,” two of the best-known classics of monastic writing, joined a monastery in Bethlehem as a young man and later left it with a fellow monk, Germanos, to travel abroad to Egypt and Syria to study monasticism. The books which resulted from these travels have made Abba Cassian one of the best known writers on monastic spirituality in both the eastern and western traditions of Christianity. The Church commemorates St John Cassian on 29 February.