The Lord's Prayer: What Prayer Is (part 1)

I fell away from reading this book, for a variety of reasons that had nothing to do with the book itself. Back into it, I am once again so thankful for the way it spurs me to think in ways that both new and yet seem like something that we already knew. Ratzinger here speaks about what we learn about prayer in general through Jesus' teaching of the Our Father, a.k.a. The Lord's Prayer.

The other false form of prayer the Lord warns us against is the chatter, the verbiage, that smothers the spirit. We re 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 wil 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 between love of neighbor.

Jesus of Nazareth by Joseph Ratzinger (a.k.a. Pope Benedict XVI)

I will continue this excerpt tomorrow but wanted to break this up so that we can more easily contemplate it.