Praying and Loving

Prayer develops that conversation with Christ which makes us his intimate friends:  "Abide in me and I in you" (Jn 15: 4).  This reciprocity is the very substance and soul of the Christian life.  Wrought in us by the Holy Spirit, this reciprocity opens us, through Christ and in Christ, to contemplation of the Father's face.  Learning this Trinitarian shape of Christian prayer and living it fully, above all in the liturgy, the summit and source of the Church's life, but also in personal experience, is the secret of a truly vital Christianity, which has no reason to fear the future, because it returns continually to the sources and finds in them new life.

Is it not one of the "signs of the times" that in today's world, despite widespread secularization, there is a widespread demand for spirituality, a demand which expresses itself in large part as a renewed need for prayer?  Other religions, which are now widely present in ancient Christian lands, offer their own responses to this need, and sometimes they do so in appealing ways.  But we who have received the grace of believing in Christ, the revealer of the Father and the Savior of the world, have a duty to show what depths the relationship with Christ can lead...

Prayer can progress, as a genuine dialogue of love, to the point of rendering the person wholly possessed by the divine beloved, vibrating at the Spirit's touch, resting filially within the Father's heart.  This is the lived experience of Christ's promise:  "He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him" (Jn 14:21)...

Our Christian communities must become genuine "schools" of prayer, where meeting with Christ is expressed not just in imploring help but also in thanksgiving, praise, adoration, contemplation, listening, and ardent devotion, until the heart truly "falls in love."  Intense prayer, yes, but it does not distract us from our commitment to history:  by opening our heart to the love of God it also opens it to the love of our brothers and sisters, and makes us capable of shaping history according to God's plan.

-Pope John Paul II