The ancient Christians, when compiling the order of church readings, most likely assigned today's passage from the Gospel of Mark to this Sunday of Great Lent because of Christ's words: "This kind is driven out only by prayer and fasting". From these words of the Savior the conclusion suggests itself that prayer and fasting are not merely important, but at times irreplaceable means of a person's spiritual life. At the same time, of course, it must be kept in mind that the word "fasting" (as in the analogous phrase in the Gospel of Matthew) is a comparatively late Byzantine insertion here, and in the original the evangelist Mark most probably wrote, "this kind cannot come out by anything except prayer."

Nevertheless, the question of why one cannot make do in spiritual life with something more convenient seems quite natural at first glance. Yet Christ's words set every accent precisely, for without prayer you can engage in moral self-improvement or charity, but that will hardly be spiritual life.

But in the evangelist Mark's account there are words that may be no less important for us in our relationship with God. These are the words of the father of the possessed boy: "I believe, Lord; help my unbelief." None of us would dare say that he believes "wholly and completely." The constant movement from trust toward confidence and hope by accumulating the experience of faith is a natural and, I dare say, necessary part of spiritual life. And in this it is very important for us to know that we can choose not to hide unbelief, shamefully pretending to be some hypothetical confident person. This man's example says that we can bring our weakness in faith to Christ and find help and strengthening in Him Himself.

In the story of the healing of the epileptic boy, the word "unbelief" is heard twice, so that it becomes a troubling refrain, simply the dominant note of the story. Jesus seems to address these words to everyone, not specifically to the boy's father, but still he is the main person on whom the whole weight of these words falls. And the father humbly acknowledges unbelief in himself, though just think how hard that must have been for him. For us, words about unbelief sound like something ordinary. We have already lived through the postmodern era with Hermann Hesse's words that faith and doubt condition one another like inhaling and exhaling, but then "unbelief" sounded frightening.

The risen Christ "rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart" (Mark 16:14). The Lord Himself equates unbelief with hardness of heart. And it is even worse than hardness of heart, because the apostle Paul asks: "What agreement has Christ with Belial? Or what does a believer share with an unbeliever?" (2 Cor 6:15), that is, the faithful and the unfaithful differ as much as Christ and the devil. We must understand this and feel it in order to understand what the boy's father experienced, and what the disciples experienced, since these words were addressed to them too. For we have become used to an educated tolerance of belief, and in recent years in our country people have even begun to respect atheists in a special way, as those who have not joined the majority, the crowd, the mass.

But "if we are faithless, He remains faithful" (2 Tim 2:13). Therefore the healing takes place. These words draw attention to themselves: "And He said to them: this kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer." It is unclear what else they could have tried to use to drive it out. After all, Christ did not teach them medicine or magic, and everyone who heard these words understood that they had tried to drive it out by prayer. But He very simply, and in a way that allowed no objection, made them understand that not every prayer can be called prayer.

Once again we read that the Son of Man must suffer and be humiliated, and rise on the third day. The cycle of church readings is scarcely offering us precisely these passages now "by chance." The Lord Himself speaks of His Passion: "For this hour I came." The meaning and purpose of the Savior's birth in Bethlehem is not to make our life a little easier and more pleasant. He comes in order to share with us and destroy our death.

That is why the celebration of the Nativity has, since ancient times, had a number of features in the Eastern Church that bring it close to Pascha. In a certain sense, the whole life of Christ from the very beginning was the way of the Cross and Resurrection. And as we are moved and rejoice in Christ the Infant, we must not forget this.