Prayer is “dialogue with God” and spontaneous spoken prayer is an “anchor” to cling to, remembering that when the apostles who saw Jesus in silent prayer asked him how they should pray, he taught them to recite the Our Father, in which “there is everything”. Therefore “do not fall into arrogant pride and do not despise spoken prayer, the prayer of the simple”.
Spontaneous vocal prayer was the subject of Pope Francis general audience continuing his series of catechesis on prayer.
Speaking again from his private library he said: “Prayer is dialogue with God; and every creature, in a certain sense, ‘dialogues’ with God. In the human being, prayer becomes word, invocation, song, poetry … The divine Word became flesh, and in the flesh of every man the word returns to God in prayer”.
In the Bible we learn to ensure that “everything comes to the light of the word, that nothing human is excluded, censored. Above all, pain is dangerous if it remains covered, closed inside us…. A pain closed within us, which cannot express itself, simmers, it can poison the soul: it is fatal”.
“The first human prayer – Francis later said – is always a vocal recitation. Lips always move first. Although we all know that praying does not mean repeating words, yet vocal prayer is the safest and it is always possible to practice it. Feelings, however noble, are always uncertain: they come and go, abandon us and return. Not only that, even the graces of prayer are unpredictable: at some moment consolations abound, but on the darkest days they seem to evaporate completely. Prayer of the heart is mysterious and at times hidden. The prayer of the lips, the one that is whispered or recited in a choir, is always available, and necessary like manual labour.”