To pray means first of all to abandon oneself completely to the will of God, to follow Christ with absolute trust, driven by an irreducible love.
But the nature of prayer is different: it presupposes our encounter with God, regardless of what we can ask or receive. It is a need first of all of the soul to unite with its Creator, with its Father, with its All. Prayer is risky: after a while we realize that God is a person and that he asks us for something, and perhaps something that we do not expect, and perhaps not even desire. Our nature sometimes rebels against God’s requests, and for this reason it is easier to “anticipate” God with our requests, and therefore not to listen to him, not to make us docile first of all to his presence.
Prayer is an outpouring of the heart before God: it is not a relationship between two subjects, but an attempt to become an object to his thought. For the one who thinks, God is an object, for the man of prayer He is the subject. When we find ourselves in the presence of God we try not to acquire objective knowledge, but rather to deepen the fidelity between us and God. What we want is not to know him, but to be known by him ยป.