My Most Holy Lady Theotokos, through Your saints and all-powerful prayers, take away from me, Your humble and accursed servant, despondency, oblivion, foolishness, negligence, and all the nasty, evil and blasphemous thoughts from my accursed heart and from my darkened mind; and extinguish the flame of my passions, for I am poor and damned. And deliver me from many and cruel memories and enterprises, and free me from all evil actions. For Thou art blessed from all generations, and glorified is Thy most honorable name forever and ever. Amen.
Drive away - drive away. Humble - pathetic, low. Enterprises - here: plans (enterprise - that which precedes the adoption of a thought or action, a preliminary intention).
+ “Why do people sin?” - St. Ambrose of Optina sometimes asked a question and solved it himself: “Or because they don’t know what to do and what to avoid; or, if they know, then they forget, then they become lazy, despondent... These are three giants: despondency or laziness, oblivion and ignorance - from which the entire human race is bound by insoluble bonds. And then comes negligence with all its host of evil passions. That is why we pray to the Queen of Heaven: My Most Holy Lady Theotokos, with Your holy and all-powerful prayers, drive away from me, Your humble and accursed servant, despondency, oblivion, foolishness, negligence, and all the nasty, evil and blasphemous thoughts.”
It is also worth comparing these words of prayer with one of the petitions of John Chrysostom’s prayer (according to the number of hours of the day and night, from prayers for sleep): Lord, deliver me from all ignorance and oblivion, and cowardice, and petrified insensibility.
Your humble and accursed servant... The words humble and accursed are often found in prayers, so it is worth delving deeper into their basic meanings. Humble means not only “endowed with humility” - one of the most important Christian virtues (saying about yourself to God: “I am humble” is even more absurd than telling people: “I am humble,” and in prayer we should not allow even a shadow of exaltation with our imaginary “humility”!) - but in general, humiliated, low, pitiful (in the explanation of prayer 5, the constant opposition in the Holy Scriptures was pointed out the highest - the upper and the humble - the lower). Damned - unhappy, rejected, filled with torment.
Deliver me from many and cruel memories and enterprises, and free me from all evil actions. With these words of prayer, we ask the Most Holy Theotokos to free us from numerous evil (many fierce) thoughts, both about the past (memories) and about the future (enterprises), as well as from evil actions associated with these thoughts. The focus of this petition on guarding the mind and heart is very important. Standing attentively in prayer, we inevitably notice the invasion of those very memories and enterprises from which we pray to the Most Holy Theotokos for deliverance; The struggle for prayer (and for a truly Christian inner life) is to a large extent a struggle against precisely these enemies, which it is impossible to defeat alone, without the help of God’s grace.