To say that prayer is the motor-power of history is one of those paradoxical statements destined to be easily proved wrong as soon as we make a reflection on the experience and the normal observation of life. The common good-sense associates the idea of prayer  with that of persons who get out of history, of daily life with its contradictions and complexities.

Moreover: how to believe in the power of prayer when we think of people who die of hunger, of those who along their journey are victims of a history from which God seems to be totally absent? When we think of innocent men who are still victims of violence and war? When we think of the poor who live at the margin of our cities as human refuses, despised by all and –it seems- forgotten by God?

Must we think that there is very little prayer in the world? Or that God is deaf to the invocation rising to  Him from many persons who have faith? From places of prayer, where night and day human beings do nothing but to transform their own respiration into prayer, supplication and invocation?

These reflections and questions seem to be concluded by a sense of weakness of prayer, rather than by its power.

On the other hand, how can an experience made up of silence, lived in the heart, expression of freedom of conscience, influence the great vicissitudes of human history? Of the social and economic phenomena? Of diplomacies? Of decisions concerning an all together community? Or simply of such a dynamism of human freedoms as getting entwined in the relations among persons? Or of the unforeseeable events of life, which are totally out of our decisions?  

Again: isn’t prayer a personal experience, taking place in the heart of a person, in the secret of one’s conscience, as the Gospel recommends?

These questions prove how much provoking is the reflection we are asked to make on these pages and how it is not taken for granted at all; how many deceits are contained in these statements, with the risk of changing them into a hyperbole to be taken back to the common good sense; or, on the contrary, with the risk that they may suppose a faith understood as a magic talisman, which presumes to reduce God’s freedom within the boundaries of our desires, or to bend Him to our requests.  

Biblical suggestions

Before difficult questions, the high way is the one that interrogates the Word of God.

The Holy Scripture is full of episodes, which narrate the invocation of man to God and the compassion of God for the prayer of His faithful; episodes that speak of the efficacy of turning to God in order to face the situations of life or the value of intercession.

Joshua fought against the Amalecites, while Moses was in prayer, with his hands raised towards God to invoke his help against the enemies. The  prayer of Moses was so efficacious as no sooner had he lowered his arms than the sorts of the battle changed; they turned to be propitious to the army of the Israelites as soon as Moses raised his hands again as a gesture of supplication.   

Abraham used her capacity of mediation with a prayer destined to save Sodoma and Gomorra; His prayer interceded for the city with a daring negotiation, almost to convince God to modify the decisions He had already taken.  

Queen Esther sought in God refuge and help in a situation that, from the human viewpoint  appeared to be impossible and without return; she risked her life with her prayer. Examples could go on being multiplied.

In each of these testimonies there is a deep faith in a God who compromises himself with our human history, which is not extraneous to Him or far from Him, but rather participated in solidarity. Prayer rests on the certainty that God cares for the sort of his people; on the conviction that God is attentive to the invocation of His children.

The Gospel is wholly a narration of the tender heart of God, in the life of Jesus who bends on every suffering, who listens to every invocation, when it is the true expression of little and humble hearts. The answers of Jesus to the invocations of those who cry to him are always above the expectation of those who ask, as in the case of the centurion who asked just a word and received a visit of Jesus; or Barthimeus who asked the sight and received a new sense of his existence…

In his words, Jesus teaches us to pray asking without fear, up-to the point of being importune, as in the case of the widow in the parable. The invitation He addresses to his disciples is that of an untiring prayer, with full trust of being listened to, above all when prayer is made not in solitude, but “in groups of two or three”, in community, in the trust of solidarity among brothers and sisters in faith. He taught us  that the most important prayer is that which we turn to God, calling Him Father, the prayer made with hearts of children, convinced that the Father cares for our life; thus there must be no hesitation to pray, “Your will be done”, so great is the certainty that God’s Will cannot but be love, benevolence, solicitude, namely the will  of a loving and merciful Father. 

The prayer of a disciple is the one that is born from a life lived with the heart of children.

The history of Jesus teaches us to consider important not the life of great protagonists on earth with their decisions, but first of all that which concerns each of us: our existence, the passing of our days, the events, the relations…Prayer is the motor of a history whose protagonists are common folks, the humble and the little ones, who count nothing in the history of great protagonists, but are well present in the heart of God.

The icon of Nazareth

I wish to stop on an important dimension of Jesus’ life, the most mysterious and difficult to narrate, being it wrapped in silence: the Nazareth time. We know that Jesus lived thirty years of his short existence in the normality of a life common to all the boys and youths in the Palestine of his time: He was among others like anyone, yet so very much different from them. Son of God and Son of man. We cannot think that Jesus saved the world only during the three years in which He spoke and made miracles, manifested himself in the extraordinary essence of his nature as the Messiah. Jesus was Messiah/saviour also during the years in which his life had nothing to be narrated: a life of silence, being it too common, too ordinary, too equal to that of each of us. It is very difficult to say in which sense the life of Jesus at Nazareth contributed to carry on the human history; we can only imagine it.

I like to think that salvation for us passed through His living as Son; through the silence in which Jesus treasured up the love of the Father for humanity and his decision to save it; through prayer that nurtured his relation with the Father and constituted the “place” of the encounter, heart-to-heart, to make more and more his own the truth that he one day revealed to Nichodemus, “God has so much loved the world as to give his only Begotten Son for it”. 

Therefore, Nazareth has been a motor for the human history, filling it with mystery and silence, with love and sharing; he has put in it, as germ of a new life, the decision ready to become a sacrifice of life so that humanity might know such a love as it is stronger than death. The icon of Nazareth, namely of the time in which Jesus was so much similar to us as to be among us like any of us, constitutes the paradigm of our ordinary Christian life and our prayer.

Dimensions of Christian prayer  

The listening to these Biblical suggestions consents us to bring to evidence some aspects of prayer, to enlighten our reflection.

Prayer is an experience of communion and faith: to be in relation with the Lord Jesus, to pray with Him to the Father, feeling his loving eyes on us. Let us think of the nights which, according to the Gospel, Jesus spent in silence and prayer, namely in communion, in dialogue, in listening to the heart of the Father. Our prayer also is, above all, staying in communion with the Father together with Jesus, and in the silence of the encounter making more and more mature our trust in the love He nourishes for us, the certainty of his mercy, the trust in his promise of being at our side, beyond every human evidence. Prayer is love and trust and abandonment, sometimes experienced, more often believed. In the certainty of Love, we learn to believe that the way God loves us, though at times it is incomprehensible, is always surprising and stronger than any human love. Rooted in it, we can face also the pang of suffering, in the certainty that the Lord Jesus is near us to suffer with us, he who faced the trial of Calvary.

To meet in prayer the heart of the Father is to believe that the love we receive is not only for each of us, but for all men and women, for each person. God takes care of all his children, of those who know Him as well as of those who not even know his name; of those who recognise him and of those who refuse him; of those who are aware of him as well as of those who shut up themselves in their daily life..

Prayer contributes to make the heart of man human, that is, he makes us feel the responsibility and the beauty of living according to the dignity that the Father has bestowed on us, by creating us to his own image and similitude.

Living with hearts as sons and daughters changes history, because it makes persons who know to be loved and, therefore, persons who inhabit life with such peace, serenity, sense of fullness as it sets us free, because we feel satisfied at heart. It changes history because it makes us to recuperate the dimension of such a fraternity as it does no longer allow us to be one against the other, but makes us live in solidarity and in search of the common good

If prayer means staying with God, it gradually leads us to have His own viewpoint on history; indeed to believe in the mysterious design He has on the world and on history, above all believing that it is a design of love running along the ways of our human history, without violating it. Thus, prayer gradually leads us also to share the same love of God for the world, and therefore, prevents us from being stranger to it, rather it helps us to get interested in it. When history, in the entwining of acts of freedom and interests, becomes humanly incomprehensible, prayer helps us not to take the distances, but to do as Moses did who implored mercy for his people by being among them and their wickedness, to the image of what Jesus would do on the Cross:, “He who had never known sin, was seen by God as sin in our favour, so that we might become through him the justice of God” (2 Corinthians, 5, 21).

This is actually what the saints have done when they found themselves in the crucial knots of  human history: let us think of E. Stein, of Fr. Kolbe, of  M. Theresa of Calcutta and of many more anonymous saints who, in the hell of human history, never stopped living with dignity and love. Their love make history visible, it gives us the possibility of starting afresh: love is the motor of our life.

Prayer immerses us in such a love as it changes history

I think this is the conclusion where our reflection has taken us to: prayer is a moving power of history because it is the experience of a love that changes the human history and transforms it, giving new sense and value to it.  

It carries to the heart of the world the love of Easter, which is renewed in the decision with which, each of us, in the tiny fragment of our own history, lives the same dedication with which Jesus handed himself over to the Father for the life of humanity. It carries in the heart of the world the hope of those who believed that suffering and death are not the last words of life, but that, beyond the suffering and contradictions of the present moment, there will be the possibility of a renewed world: a world in which the blind, the crippled, the limping, the weak and defeated…will see the recognition of their dignity; they will be the first fruit of a renewed world.

Thus we can pray, “Your Kingdom come”, the Kingdom of the little ones, the healed sick people, the desperate people set again on a journey…The world will manifest itself in the beautiful image according to which God thought of it and wanted it. 

Paola Bignardi
Via Aldo Moro, 7
26010 Olmeneta (Cremona)