Prayer, a journey

Our prayer to God is our answer to the prayer God addresses to us. We enter this dialogue with everything we are: as human beings we are longing, question, desire, relationship...and prayer expresses all of these dimensions, as thanksgiving, invocation, intercession, request....The ‘guideline’ for Christian prayer is the prayer of Jesus, the Son of God. In his own prayer Jesus experienced the non-fulfillment of the critical moment of Gethsemani, when he asked the Father to “let this hour” pass him by so that he might be spared the cup of bitterness, but he continued to abandon everything to the fulfillment of God’s will, not his own. Prayer is not an exaltation of human desire, a request that God do our will, but rather the journey through which we come to recognize and accept God’s will. Our knowledge of God continues to deepen, and our relationship with God changes as a consequence of what we know. Experience reveals that a person’s experience of prayer changes over time. It is only by changing that prayer can continue to be a genuine relationship with God, a relationship that does not atrophy but remains living. The goal of this journey and this relationship is the conformity of our human life to the image of God, Jesus Christ.

From: ENZO BIANCHI, Words of Spirituality,
Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, London 2002