by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer
(Feb. 8, 2008) “Prayer is the primary and foremost weapon with which to face the struggle against the spirit of evil,”said the Holy Father from the basilica of Santa Sabina on Rome’s historic Aventine Hill on Ash Wednesday.
“Prayer is a guarantee of openness to others”, he said. “Those who free themselves for God and His needs, open themselves to others, to the brothers and sisters who knock at the door of their hearts and ask to be heard, who ask for attention, for forgiveness, and sometimes for correction, but always in fraternal charity.
“True prayer is never centered on the self but always focuses on others . . . True prayer is the motor of the world, because it keeps us open to God. For this reason, without prayer there is no hope, only illusion.”
This is not the first time in the past month that the Pope has called the faithful to prayer as a way to solve the problems of the world.
On January 18, the first day of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, he called prayer “the royal door to ecumenism.”
“Such prayer leads us to look at the Kingdom of God and the unity of the Church in a fresh way; it reinforces our bonds of communion; and it enables us to face courageously the painful memories, social burdens and human weaknesses that are so much a part of our divisions.”
A much less publicized plea for prayer came 10 days earlier when Pope Benedict pleaded with the faithful to “pray in perpetuity” for the cleansing of the Church of the sex abuse scandal and its victims.
Although he’s often more recognized for his scholarship than his prayer life, Pope Benedict has always had a deep love for prayer, especially liturgical prayer. In his memoir, Milestones, he writes about his view of the Mass as a young boy, calling it a “riveting adventure” during which he moved by degrees “into the mysterious world of the liturgy which was being enacted before us and for us there on the altar.”
Scripture is another way to enter into that exchange between God and man that is prayer, Pope Benedict says. “The whole Bible is a dialogue,” he wrote in the book, Feast of Faith:
Approaches to a Theology of the Liturgy, “on the one side, revelation, God’s words and deeds, and on the other side, man’s response in accepting the word of God and allowing himself to be led by God.”
For this reason, the Church recommends the reading of Scripture as a source of prayer. “For we speak to Him when we pray; we listen to Him when we read the divine oracles,” the Pope wrote.
Another way to learn to pray is with others, he wrote. Perhaps he was referring to his own experience when he suggests, “praying with others, with my mother for instance, by following her words, which are gradually filled out with meaning for me as I speak, live and suffer in fellowship with her. Naturally I must always be asking what these words mean. Naturally, too, I must continually ‘cash’ these words into the small change of daily life . . . I need to feel my way into these words in everything I do, in prayer, life, suffering, in my thoughts. And this very process transforms me.”
However, even when the Christian prays alone, their prayer “is always within the framework of the ‘communion of saints’ . . . whether in a public or liturgical way or in a private manner.
“The Christian, even when he is alone and prays in secret, is conscious that he always prays for the good of the Church in union with Christ, in the Holy Spirit, and together with all the saints.”
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