PRAYER

Prayer is said to be our personal encounter with God. Through prayer, God, our Creator and Father becomes present to us, close to us, eager to listen and speak as our most intimate friend. But God is more than a friend. He is the almighty, so powerful and great, so that we do not come to Him all our secrets, even those we would never dare say to a friend and bringing Him a long list of what we want and need.
Because our Father is so great, and we, for all our nearness to Him, so weak, nothing in fact, our soul opens up to Him and bows before Him in adoration. But because at the same time we are aware that He is our loving Father, that adoration is inextricably linked with love, filial confidence, joyful gratitude and praise. Realization of our complete dependence on God, and of His infinite fatherly goodness towards us, makes us naturally turn to Him for all the needs of body and soul, confident that He will not fail us. Knowledge of our infidelities and acts of ingratitude fills us with humble sorrow, and the firm resolve to correspond more generously to His goodness.
These four aspects of prayer life-adoration, thanksgiving, petition, reparation - are also known as the four ends of prayer. Scripture is full of examples of these prayers. A true Christian cannot but pray, for his relationship to God is not an impersonal or artificial thing that touches His life only remotely. Precisely because God is his Father, he must pray, he must have towards Him that continual Christ has commanded it, and thought us how to pray, by the Father anything in my name. Ask and you shall receive..." (John 16:24). And often in the Gospel we see Christ retiring into the desert to pray, sometimes spending whole nights and days in colloquy with His Father, such as when He made the forty days' fast before the start of His reason for prayer is its vital role in our spiritual life; without it we cannot be saved, for the graces we need can be ours only through prayer, " Ask and you shall receive" (Matt. 7:7).
Our prayer, in order to be truly Christian, must have certain essential characteristics. Prayer is speaking to God with respect and love in order to adore and praise Him, to thank Him, to obtain pardon for our sins, and to ask for His favors and blessings for ourselves and for others. In prayer we also listen to God who reveals to us what He wants and expects from us