Benedict XVI affirmed in his Wednesday catechesis that on our own, we “cannot respond to [our] own fundamental need to understand.” The Pope said that while we may delude ourselves into thinking we are “self-sufficient,” we often experience our own “insufficiency.” 

The Pontiff said man “needs to open himself to something more, to something or to someone that can give him what he lacks, he must come out of himself toward the One who is able to fill the breadth and depth of his desire.”

He continued: “Man bears within him a thirst for the infinite, a nostalgia for eternity, a quest for beauty, a desire for love, a need for light and for truth which impel him toward the Absolute; man bears within him the desire for God. And man knows, in a certain way, that he can turn to God, he knows he can pray to him.”

Quoting St. Thomas Aquinas, the Pope defined prayer as “an expression of man’s desire for God.” Benedict XVI explained that this attraction to God, “which God himself has placed in man, is the soul of prayer.”

Benedict XVI said in his May 11 catechesis that prayer “takes on a great many forms, in accordance with the history, the time, the moment, the grace and even the sin of every person praying.”

“Man’s history has in fact known various forms of prayer, because he has developed different kinds of openness to the ‘Other’ and to the Beyond, so that we may recognize prayer as an experience present in every religion and culture,” the Pope noted.

However, the Holy Father added, all prayer has one thing in common -- it is “written on the heart of every person and of every civilization.”

“Before being a series of practices and formulas,” the Pope said, prayer is “an inner attitude, a manner of being in God’s presence.”

“Prayer is centered and rooted in the inmost depths of the person,” he continued. “It is therefore not easily decipherable and, for the same reason, can be subject to misunderstanding and mystification.”

And prayer isn’t easy, Benedict XVI readily acknowledged: “Prayer is a challenge to everyone, a ‘grace’ to invoke, a gift of the One to whom we turn.”

“In prayer,” Benedict XVI explained on May 11, “man considers himself and his situation before God, from God and in relation to God, and experiences being a creature in need of help, incapable of obtaining on his own the fulfillment of his life and his hope.”

The Pope noted that given the “dynamic of this relationship with the one who gives meaning to existence,” a typical gesture of prayer is that of kneeling. He said that this gesture -- while it can have other meanings -- can declare “limitations” and that one is “weak, needy, a sinner.”

“In the experience of prayer,” the Pontiff continued, “the human creature expresses all his self-awareness, all that he succeeds in grasping of his own existence and, at the same time, he turns with his whole being to the One before whom he stands, directs his soul to that Mystery from which he expects the fulfillment of his deepest desires and help to overcome the neediness of his own life.”

The essence of prayer, he explained, is the attitude of “turning to ‘Another.’” Benedict XVI also called it “an experience of a reality that overcomes the tangible and the contingent.”

“The prayer that is openness and elevation of the heart to God, thus becomes a personal relationship with him,” the Pope added.

The Holy Father then quoted the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “In prayer, the faithful God’s initiative of love always comes first; our own first step is always a response. As God gradually reveals himself and reveals man to himself, prayer appears as a reciprocal call, a covenant drama. Through words and actions, this drama engages the heart. It unfolds throughout the whole history of salvation” (No. 2567).

At the end of his weekly audience, Benedict XVI invited the faithful to pray more: “Let us learn to pause longer before God, who revealed himself in Jesus Christ.”

“Let us learn to recognize in silence,” he continued, “in our own hearts, his voice that calls us and leads us back to the depths of our existence, to the source of life, to the source of salvation, to enable us to go beyond the limitations of our life and to open ourselves to God’s dimension, to the relationship with him, which is Infinite Love.”

In English, the Pope added: “Let us resolve to pray more frequently, to listen in the silence of our hearts to God's voice, and to grow in union with the God who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ.”