Out of the one billion prayers said on earth every day, only a million request supernatural aid to do something that’s pleasing to God. The other 999 million request “human joy, money and health” – and sometimes even “death to gain freedom from someone who is hateful.” So says Jesus in a dictation to Maria Valtorta1 , a Catholic mystic who wrote extensively during the 1940s.
According to Jesus, prayer places one in the sight of God, the only person we can speak to with the certainty we’ll be understood.
“God has placed prayer in man’s heart, like the need to breathe,” says Jesus. “Isn’t it in fact the breathing of the soul? Prayer is what keeps the spirit alive, always maintaining it in the sight of God.”
But prayer, to touch the heart of God and have its fullest effect, must be pure and not done for human gain. Another way of saying this is God the Father honors the heartfelt, holy and just requests of his children.
A humble and grateful prayer says:
“Father, help me to sanctify myself. My weakness needs You in order to be strong. Father, I want to love You perfectly and cannot. Teach me to do so, You who are Love. Father, I know and remember what You have already given me. Without You, I would be wretched in body and even more in spirit. Thank You, Father, for everything. Please continue with your benefits. I say so not out of a thirst for human well-being. More than for the flesh, I ask you to continue for my spirit, to which I want to give back the Eternal Country. Oh, holy Father, your little creature is sighing at your breast. Support me on the way so that I will not be detoured onto other roads and will come to You, my Rest and Joy.”
While a humble and grateful prayer immediately draws God’s attention, obediently doing His will makes God unable to refuse us anything. “It is not many prayers that obtain results. It is doing the will of God,” says Jesus.
Jesus goes on to point out how much power obedience to God’s will exerts on God’s heart. “I did not redeem you with any act of my own. I could have because I was God, like the Father, and everything is possible for God. I could, then, have cancelled out the sin of the world with one word alone, just as I cancelled out the infirmity, sin, and death of individuals. But to teach man to become a son of God again, I, God becoming Man, wanted to redeem through obedience to God’s will. And consider what obedience mine was! When I had consummated it totally, Heaven then opened upon fallen man, and Forgiveness emerged.”
In the beginning, disobedience had disinherited man. Obedience made him an heir again, bringing him all that is eternal and infinite.
Summing up, Jesus says: “Learn, then, the way to be heard: To do the will of God out of love for him.”
1 Maria Valtorta, The Notebooks 1944, pp. 476-480; used by permission of the publisher Centro Editoriale Valtortiano srl, Viale Piscicelli 89-91, 03036 Isola del Liri FR, Italy