The Lord's Prayer: What Prayer Is (part 2)

A continuation from yesterday of the excerpt where Pope Benedict speaks about what we learn about prayer in general through Jesus' teaching of the Our Father, a.k.a. The Lord's Prayer. I especially like the contemplations about "formulaic prayer" as a school.

This is what prayer really is -- being in silent inward communion with God. It requires nourishment, and that is why we need articulated prayer in words, images, or thoughts. The more God is present in us, the more we will really be able to be present to him when we utter the words of our prayers. But the converse is also true: Praying actualizes and deepens our communion of being with God. Our praying can and should arise above all from our heart, from our needs, our hopes, our joys, our sufferings, form our shame over sin, and from our gratitude for the good. It can and should be a wholly personal prayer. But we also constantly need to make use of those prayers that express in words the encounter with God experienced both by the Church as a whole and by individual members of the Church. For without these aids to prayer, our own praying and our image of God become subjective and end up reflecting ourselves more than the living God. In the formulaic prayers that arose first from the faith of Israel and then from the faith of praying members of the Church, we get to know God and ourselves as well. They are a "school of prayer" that transforms and opens up our life.

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