Holding a general audience with visitors and pilgrims present for the first time in more than six months, Pope Francis talked of the power of prayer.
Prayer, he told the crowd, is not always “a walk in the park.”
While it may be easy to “parrot” prayer, “blah, blah, blah,” he said, real prayer requires effort.
Prayer “certainly gives great peace, but through inner struggle, at times hard, which can accompany even long periods of life,” he said.
Often when a person wants to pray, he said, “we are immediately reminded of many other activities, which at that moment seem more important and more urgent.
“This happens to me, too; ‘I’m going to go pray. But no, I have to do this and that.’ We run from prayer; I don’t know why, but that’s how it is.”
But “almost always, after putting off prayer, we realize that those things were not essential at all and that we may have wasted time” on things that were not as important as prayer, he said.
Holding his first live general audience for the first time in more than six months, Pope Francis said he was very pleased to see people “face to face.”
“I’ll tell you something: it’s not nice to talk in front of nothing, just a camera. It’s not nice,” the pope told about 300 people who attended the May 12 audience in the San Damaso Courtyard of the Apostolic Palace.
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