Question
Rev. Father Angelo,
I will ask you a short and straightforward question: why is it important to pray?
Thank you and kind regards,
Maria
The priest’s answer
Dear Maria,
1. Praying is important for the same reason why breathing and eating are important for our bodily life. Prayer is necessary to steer our life towards the right goal, namely holiness.
2.Our body and our minds need oxygen. Breathing introduces oxygen in our organism, and at the same time it eliminates toxins.
Similarly, prayer brings God into our lives, helps us to orient everything towards Him, to straighten our thoughts and feelings and, at the same time, it helps to eliminate false goals and false affections.
3. Saint Benedict said that “continuous breath is necessary for the life of the body, and so is continuous prayer for the health of the soul” (Rule, PL 66, 329).
I have noticed that people suffering from lung cancer often say that they feel that their legs are heavy and tired. In other words, they find it difficult to stand. The same happens in our spiritual life. When we pray little and badly we begin to fall, we mistake creatures for the Creator, we regard as an absolute value in our life things that pass. It is real foolishness!
4. Saint Augustine, on the other hand, expounded prayer as the nourishment of our spiritual life. He maintains that “as the flesh derives its nourishment from food, so the soul is nourished by prayer” (De. sal. Doc., 28). And, “as the body cannot live without the soul, so the soul without prayer is dead and fetid” (De oratione Dominica, 1,1).
As a body without a soul is a corpse that decomposes and contaminates everything with its stink, so is the spiritual life of a person who does not pray.
5. We can infer the importance of prayer from its purposes. The four purposes of prayer are: adoration, praise and thanksgiving, request for pardon and petition.
Adoration reminds man that God is the only all-good, who always loves us the most and that it is appropriate for us to trust His will more than our own way of thinking.
Adoration and praise keep our hearts in a spirit of wonder for God’s benefits, which are immense and continuous.
Requests for pardon revives the awareness that we have used His gifts against His love and against our real good, that we have been the cause of His crucifixion and of so many evils that trouble the Church and our neighbors.
The petition for graces reminds us that we are not self-sufficient, and that we can neither do nor obtain anything without His help.
6. If we consider the Lord’s prayer we realize immediately how much light this prayer casts in our life and how useful it is in order for us to set our thoughts and feelings upright and to orient them towards God.
When we say “hallowed be Thy name”, we remember that the objective of our actions must be the pursuit of holiness.
“Thy kingdom come”, which someone translates as “Thy Spirit come” reminds us that the greatest good we need is the presence of God in our souls.
“Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven” expresses our adoration and our love for the Lord and our commitment to put nothing before God’s will.
“Give us this day our daily bread” reminds us that every day we are called to feed on Him, “the living bread which came down from Heaven”. We can do this both by attending mass every day (if possible), and by feeding everyday on His Word.
We feed on His word by reading it in the Sacred Scripture but also by reciting the Holy Rosary, which is a real compendium of the Gospel.
At the same time we ask Him for all the temporal graces that we need (health, work, loved ones, good results etc…) because He is the source and the one who grants every good thing.
Asking God for graces is important not because we need to inform God about what we need, but so as to become open and willing to receive the graces that He has already decreed to grant us.
“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”; the condition necessary to receive graces is that we ask for them with a heart that is free of resentment. Otherwise, even if we pray, we will not receive anything.
“And lead us not into temptation”: this is a great display of humility. If God does not preserve us from the occasions to commit sins, we will always fall.
“But deliver us from evil”; we ask that God keep away from us the Devil, who wanders in the world only to harm us.
7. It is interesting to point out that when we pray, while we set our thoughts and feelings upright in order for them to be oriented towards God, at the same time our soul is filled with Him and becomes open to receive whatever we ask and is in conformity with His will.
I wish you to be always united with the Lord, I assure you my prayer for this and I bless you.
Father Angelo
