After having examined prayer in the Acts of the Apostles, His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI announced that he will dedicate his next series of catechesis to prayer in the Letters of St. Paul, which always begin and end with an expression of prayer and which have given us a rich range of forms of prayer.
In today's General Audience, celebrated in St. Peter's Square before more than 11,000 people, the Pope explained that the Apostle to the Gentiles wants us to understand that prayer "should not be seen as a simple good deed made to God, an action of our own. It is above all a gift, fruit of the living [and] revitalizing presence of the Father and of Jesus Christ in us"....
"Many times", the Pope said, "we ask God to deliver us from physical and spiritual evil ... however, we often have the impression that He doesn't hear us and we run the risk of becoming discouraged and of not persevering. In reality, there is no human cry that God does not hear. ... God the Father's answer to His son was not the immediate freedom from suffering, from the cross, or from death: through the cross and His death, God answered with the Resurrection".
The apostle, Paul, the Holy Father concluded, teaches us that when we pray "we have to open ourselves to the presence and the action of the Holy Spirit ... in order to turn ourselves to God with our whole heart and our whole being. Christ's Spirit becomes the strength of our 'weak' prayer, the light of our 'dim' prayer, ... teaching us to live while facing the trials of existence, in the certainty that we are not alone, opening ourselves to the horizons of humanity and the creation that 'is groaning in labour pains'".
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