Each of us finds our own way to church. Even when faith is part of our childhood, much of church life is learned gradually—often through small practices whose meaning becomes clear only with time.

I grew up going to services with my mother, but I did not immediately understand the purpose of the handwritten notes people submit in church, asking for prayers for the health of the living or the repose of the dead. I began writing them myself much later, when I came to understand how important this simple act could be.

Several years ago, my family visited the Solovetsky Islands and their monastery for the first time. There I heard a story that stayed with me.

A peasant was once making the long journey to the Solovetsky Monastery when he was attacked by robbers. They searched him and discovered that he was carrying a large amount of money. They wanted to take it, but the man pleaded with them not to. The money, he explained, did not belong to him. People from several villages had entrusted it to him so that he could submit prayer notes at the monastery.

“How can you prove that?” the robbers asked.

The man pulled out a thick bundle of notes, filled with the names of people asking for prayers for health and for the repose of the dead. The robbers believed him and let him go.

What a remarkable detail: even the robbers understood that praying for one’s loved ones was something sacred. They recognized that these names, and the money entrusted to carry them, belonged to a realm that should not be violated.

When I told this story at home, I learned that my own family had a Solovki story as well.

When my great-grandfather Alexander was a child, his legs suddenly became paralyzed. His parents prayed to God, submitted notes asking for his health, and made a vow: if their son recovered, he would walk to the Solovetsky Monastery to give thanks.

He did recover. At the age of fourteen, he walked there from the Vologda region—and then walked all the way back. A fellow villager accompanied him, carrying prayer notes entrusted to him by other people.

For many years, when my mother and I went to church, she wrote the notes. I assumed that was enough. Why repeat the names if we both knew most of the same people? Only later did I begin to feel the need to write those names with my own hand.

At first, most of the names I included were in prayers for the living. I worried about people I knew and wanted to ask God to help them. In time, I came to believe that this prayer brought comfort—not because my individual effort possessed some special power, but because it joined the common prayer of the Church, the prayer offered in the sanctuary.

The list of names of the departed also grew. I once heard in a sermon that the dead await our prayers, and that prayer brings them relief, because they can no longer change anything for themselves after passing into the next world.

Whether or not one can fully explain such things, there is something deeply human in the practice. To write a name is to refuse to let a person disappear into abstraction. It is to remember that behind every name there was a life, a face, a relationship, a story.

And yet I still sometimes find myself rushing to church and thinking that there is no time to write the notes. Perhaps I will do it another day. Perhaps I should simply hurry inside before the service begins.

Then I remember the peasant and the robbers. I remember the thick bundle of names that proved the money he carried was not merely his own. I take a pen and a piece of paper and decide to write the notes at church.

This small ritual teaches me that love is often expressed through effort. It is not always dramatic. Sometimes it means remembering a name, taking a few minutes, and entrusting someone to the prayer of an entire community.

The notes may be handwritten, but they carry more than ink. They carry memory, concern, gratitude, grief and hope. They remind us that we are not alone in our prayers—and that even the smallest act of love can become part of something larger than ourselves.