While Pope Francis has designated all this year 2024 as a Year of Prayer in preparation for the Jubilee of 2025, there is a particular “symphony of prayer” in the Church’s treasure, he pointed out at the general audience of June 19.
This “symphony of prayer” is composed by the Holy Spirit, and it is the Book of Psalms:
As in any symphony, it contains various “movements,” that is, various genres of prayer: praise, thanksgiving, supplication, lamentation, narration, sapiential reflection, and others, both in the personal form and in the choral form of the whole people. These are the songs that the Spirit himself has placed on the lips of the Bride, His Church. All the Books of the Bible, I mentioned last time, are inspired by the Holy Spirit, but the Book of Psalms is also so in the sense that it is full of poetic inspiration.
The Pope noted that something particular special about the Psalms is that “they were the prayer of Jesus, Mary, the Apostles, and all the Christian generations that have preceded us. When we recite them, God listens to them with that grandiose ‘orchestration’ that is the communion of saints.”
Quoting St. Ambrose, who calls them the “sweet book of the Psalms,” the Pope invited the faithful to pray with them.
“Form the habit of praying with the Psalms,” he said. “I assure you that you will be happy in the end.”
Our own prayer
To do this, the Pope offered some particular suggestions:
If we feel oppressed by remorse or guilt, because we are sinners, we can repeat with David: “Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy steadfast love” (Ps 51:1).
If we want to express a strong personal bond with love, let us say: “O God, thou art my God / I seek thee, / my soul thirsts for thee; / my flesh faints for thee, / as in a dry and weary land where no water is” (Ps 63:1).
And if fear and anguish assail us, those wonderful words of Psalm 23 come to our rescue: “The Lord is my shepherd … Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, / I fear no evil” (Ps 23:1,4).If there are Psalms, or just verses, that speak to our heart, it is good to repeat them and pray them during the day. The Psalms are prayers “for all seasons”: There is no state of mind or need that does not find in them the best words to be transformed into prayer. Unlike other prayers, the Psalms do not lose their effectiveness by dint of being repeated; on the contrary, they increase it. Why? Because they are inspired by God and “breathe” God every time they are read with faith.
The Psalms need to become our own prayer, he said, so that we feel almost as if we wrote them:
The Psalms allow us not to impoverish our prayer by reducing it merely to requests, to a continuous “give me, give us…”. We learn from the Lord’s Prayer, that before asking for our “daily bread,” we say, “Hallowed by thy name; thy Kingdom come, thy will be done.” The Psalms help us to open ourselves to a prayer that is less focused on ourselves: a prayer of praise, of blessing, of thanksgiving; and they also help us give voice to all creation, involving it in our praise.
Brothers and sisters, may the Holy Spirit, who gave the Church Bride the words to pray to her divine Bridegroom, help us to make them resound in the Church today, and to make this year of preparation for the Jubilee a true symphony of prayer.
And today we celebrate...