Vigils Reading
March 13
THE DRIVING FORCE
OF THE WORLD
By Pope Benedict XVI
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Lent renews in us the hope in the God who made us pass from death to
life. Lent, fully oriented to the mystery of Redemption, is defined the “path of
true conversion”… Prayer nourishes hope because nothing expresses the reality
of our God in our life better than praying with faith. Even in the loneliness of the
most severe trial, nothing and no one can prevent me from addressing the
Father “in the secret” of my heart, where He alone sees, as Jesus says in the
gospel… Thus, prayer proves to be the first and principal “weapon” with which
to win the victory in our struggle against the spirit of evil.
Christ’s prayer reaches its culmination on the Cross. It is expressed in
those last words which the Evangelists have recorded. Where he seems to utter a
cry of despair: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Christ was
actually making his own the invocation of someone beset by enemies with no
escape, who has no other than God to turn to and, over and above any human
possibilities, experiences his grace and salvation.
With these words of the Psalm, first of a man who is suffering, then of the
People of God in their suffering, caused by God’s apparent absence, Jesus made
his own this cry of humanity that suffers from God’s apparent absence, and
carried this cry to the Father’s heart. So, by praying in this ultimate solitude
together with the whole of humanity, he opens the heart of God to us…
The prayer of supplication full of hope is consequently the leitmotif of
Lent and enables us to experience God as the only anchor of salvation. Indeed
when it is collective, the prayer of the People of God is a voice of one heart and
soul, it is a “heart to heart” dialogue, like Queen Esther’s moving plea when her
people were about to be exterminated: “O my Lord, you only are our King; help
me, who am alone and have no helper but you.” … “for a great danger
overshadows me”. In the face of a “great danger” greater hope is needed: only
the hope that can count on God.
Prayer is a crucible in which our expectations and aspirations are exposed
in the light of God’s Word, immersed in dialogue with the One who is Truth, and
from which they emerge free from hidden lies and compromises with various
forms of selfishness. Without the dimension of prayer, the human “I” ends by
withdrawing into himself, and the conscience, which should be an echo of God’s
voice, risks being reduced to a mirror of the self, so that the inner conversation
becomes a monologue, giving rise to self-justifications by the thousands.
Therefore, prayer is a guarantee of openness to others: whoever frees
himself for God and his needs simultaneously opens himself to the other, to the
brother or sister who knocks at the door of his heart and asks to be heard, asks
for attention, forgiveness, at times correction, but always in fraternal charity.
Thus prayer is never self-centered, it is always centered on the other. As such, it
opens the person praying to the “ecstasy” of charity, to the capacity to go out of
oneself to draw close to the other in humble, neighborly service. True prayer is
the driving force of the world, since it keeps it open to God. For this reason
without prayer there is no hope but only illusion.