Jesus would often withdraw to pray, very early in the morning and to secluded places1. His disciples often found him in a dialogue full of tenderness with his Heavenly Father. And one day, after finishing his prayer, one of his disciples said to him: Lord, teach us to pray2... This is what we should also ask: Jesus, teach me how to treat you, tell me how and what things I should ask you... Because sometimes - even if we have been praying for years - we are before God like a child who can barely pronounce a few poorly learned words.
The Lord then taught them how to pray and the prayer par excellence: the Lord's Prayer. His lips would pronounce each word of this universal prayer with a particular intonation. And he points out the confidence we should always have in every dialogue with God by showing our radical need, because this confidence is the foundation of all true prayer: Who among you, having a friend, would go to him at midnight and say: Friend, lend me three loaves, because a friend of mine has arrived from a journey and I have nothing to offer him...? I tell you that if he does not get up to give them to him because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up to give him whatever he needs. A good part of our relationships with God is defined by confident petition. We are children of God, needy children, and He only desires to give us, and in abundance: for what father among you, if his son asks for a fish, would give him a serpent instead of a fish? Or if he asks for an egg, would give him a scorpion?
The Lord himself becomes the guarantor of our petition: everyone who asks, receives; and whoever seeks, finds; and to whoever knocks, it will be opened. He could not have been more categorical. We will only go away empty if we feel satisfied with ourselves; if we thought we need nothing, because we have been content with very short goals, or because we have made a pact with defects and weaknesses. He filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty-handed3. We must go to the Tabernacle as people in great need before the One who can do everything: as the lepers, the blind, the paralyzed used to come to Jesus... "Praying," John Paul II pointed out when commenting on this passage of the Gospel, "means feeling one's own insufficiency through the various needs that present themselves to man, and that are part of his life: the very need for bread that Christ refers to, using as an example the man who wakes up his friend at midnight to ask for it. Such needs are numerous. The need for bread is, in a certain sense, the symbol of all material needs, of the needs of the human body (...). But the scale of these needs is broader..."4.
The humility of feeling limited, poor, lacking in so many gifts, and the confidence that God is the incomparable Father attentive to his children, are the first dispositions with which we must approach prayer daily. "If we learn in the full sense of the word, in its full dimension, the reality of Father, we have learned everything (...). Learning who the Father is means acquiring the absolute certainty that He will not reject anything. All this is said in today's Gospel. He does not reject you even when everything, materially and psychologically, seems to indicate rejection. He never rejects you"5. He never fails to attend to us. The sense of our divine filiation and the consciousness of our own indigence and weakness must always be present in our dealings with God.
Hablar con DIos