Pope Benedict XVI on Prayer

From Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth:

If being human is essentially about relation to God, it is clear that speaking with, and listening to, God is an essential part of it.  This is why the Sermon on the Mount also includes a teaching about prayer.  The Lord tells us how we are to pray.  

In Matthew's Gospel,  the Lord's Prayer is preceded by a short catechesis on prayer.  Its main purpose is to warn against false forms of prayer.  Prayer must not be an occasion for showing off before others; it requires the discretion that is essential to a relation of love.  God addresses every individual by a name that no one else knows, as Scripture tells us (cf. Rev 2:17).  God's love for each individual is totally personal and includes this mystery of uniqueness that cannot be divulged to other human beings.

This discretion, which is of the very essence of prayer, does not exclude prayer in common.  The Our Father is itself a prayer uttered in the first person plural, and it is only by becoming part of the "we" of God's children that we can reach up to him beyond the limits of this world in the first place.  And yet this "we" awakens the inmost core of the person; in the act of prayer the totally personal and the communal must always pervade each other, as we will see more closely in our exposition of the Our Father.  Just as in the relationship between man and woman there is a totally personal dimension that  requires a zone of discretion for its protection, though at the same time the relationship of the two in marriage and family by its very nature also includes public responsibility, so it is also in our relation to God:  The "we" of the praying community and the utterly personal intimacy that can be shared only with God are closely interconnected.

 The other false form of prayer the Lord warns us against is the chatter, the verbiage, that smothers the spirit.  We are all familiar with the danger of reciting habitual formulas while our mind is somewhere else entirely.  We are at our most attentive when we are driven by inmost need to ask God for something or are prompted by a joyful heart to thank him for good things that have happened to us.  Most importantly, though, our relationship to God should not be confined to such momentary situations, but should be present as the bedrock of our soul.  In order for that to happen, this relation has to be constantly revived and the affairs of our everyday lives have to be constantly related back to it.  The more the depths of our souls are directed toward God, the better we will be able to pray.  The more prayer is the foundation that upholds our entire existence, the more we will become men of peace.  The more we can bear pain, the more we will be able to understand others and open ourselves to them.  This orientation pervasively shaping our whole consciousness, this silent presence of God at the heart of our thinking, our meditating, and our being , is what we mean by "prayer without ceasing."  This is ultimately what we mean by love of God, which is at the same time the condition and the driving force behind love of neighbor.