Pope Francis greets a child during his general audience in the San Damaso Courtyard of the Apostolic Palace at the Vatican May 26, 2021. (CNS photo/Paul Haring) 
Prayer is not a magic wand or a way to ask God to be at one’s service, Pope Francis said.
Prayer is a humble dialogue with God to grow spiritually and discover his will for the world, the Pope said May 26 during his weekly general audience.
“In prayer, it is God who must convert us, not we who must convert God,” he said.
The audience was held in the San Damaso Courtyard of the Apostolic Palace, where the Pope spoke at length with people, blessing them or objects they had brought.
One of the many people the Pope spoke with was Belarus-born Lidia Maksymowicz, 80, who spent three years at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp after she was sent there when she was two years old. The Pope kissed the Holocaust tattoo on her left arm and the two embraced.
In his main audience talk, the Pope continued his series on prayer by looking at how people can be certain God really listens to their prayers.
“Sometimes our prayers seem to go unheard, what we have asked for – for ourselves or for others – is not fulfilled,” he said. “Why does he not respond to our requests?”
After quoting the catechism, the Pope warned people to avoid “the risk of not living an authentic experience of faith, but of transforming the relationship with God into something magical”.
Dialogue
“Prayer is not a magic wand,” he said. “It is a dialogue with the Lord. When we pray, we need to be humble” and believe “that God will give me what is right to give. He knows”, the Pope added.
However, what about when the prayer request is worthy and charitable, Pope Francis said: “Why does it sometimes seem that God does not listen?”
Over time, people may see that some things do work out, “but in God’s way, the divine way, not according to what we wanted at that moment. God’s time is not our time,” he said.
“Evil is lord of the penultimate day,” he said, “the moment when the night is darkest, just before the dawn” when it is so tempting to believe the devil has won.
But, the Pope said, “the evil one is never lord of the last day. God is the Lord of the last day. Because that belongs to God alone, and it is the day when all human longings for salvation will be fulfilled”.
