Pope Francis: audience, “giving praise is like breathing pure oxygen”, we must do it “above all in moments of darkness”

“In that moment of apparent failure, where everything is dark, Jesus prays, praising the Father. And His prayer also leads us, the readers of the Gospel, to judge our personal defeats in a different way, to judge differently the situations in which we do not see clearly the presence and action of God, when it seems that evil prevails and there is no way to stop it”. Pope Francis said this in the catechesis of today’s audience, dedicated to the prayer of praise and live streamed from the private library of the Apostolic Palace. “In those moments, Jesus, who highly recommended the prayer of asking questions, at the very moment when He would have had reason to ask the Father for explanations, instead begins to praise Him”, Pope Francis noted, asking: “To whom is praise helpful? To us or to God?”. “The prayer of praise serves us”, the Pope explained, and “paradoxically, it must be practised not only when life fills us with happiness, but above all in difficult moments, in moments of darkness when the path becomes an uphill climb. That too is the time for praise”. “Like Jesus, who in the dark moment praises the Father”, he continued off the cuff: “Because we learn that, through that ascent, that difficult path, that wearisome path, those demanding passages, we get to see a new panorama, a broader horizon. Giving praise is like breathing pure oxygen: it purifies the soul, it makes you look far ahead so as not to remain imprisoned in the difficult moment, in the darkness of difficulty”.
Valentina Bombelli