Why do Orthodox Christians pray to saints instead of just God?

People come to the Orthodox and say, why do you pray to saints? I could not become Orthodox because I have a hang-up about praying to saints. There are a few things we need to make clear. Number one, what is prayer? Prayer is simply to ask or to request something of someone else. That is all it means to pray to God. When you go to God, you are asking him to have mercy, or to help you find a job, or whatever else.

But praying in this sense of the word, to request, to ask, can also be done to somebody else. You may tell your mom, pray for me please, Mom, I have a test tomorrow. What have you done? Essentially you have prayed to your mom. You have made a request of her to intercede to God on your behalf. That is it. Number two, is it biblical? Yes, absolutely, because we see it over and over again in the New Testament: people continually going to the brethren and asking for their intercessions and their prayers.

And if people did it to the saints when they were alive, why do we think we cannot do it now? St Paul says that no one is dead, because all are alive in Christ. The saints have not vanished from the cosmos. They are not dying and decaying in the grave. They are, in St Paul's words, alive in Christ. We have a continuity in our spiritual life of being able to access all of the saints because they are not dead. Christ has destroyed death. It is really that simple.