Prayer Opens New Horizons
God is good; he is there for all that is small and also for all who are small. That is why we can talk to him without embarrassment about the very personal matters that are in themselves so small yet for us so large. At the same time, however, prayer must become a path for ourselves on which we gradually learn to see more. It must not end in our shutting ourselves off in our egoism. Through prayer we must become more free, we must set less value on ourselves and more on him and thus discover the real purpose of prayer: to ask God for the salvation of the world—even today. Even today we must have confidence that he—and he alone—is able to save the world at this hour. If we, as Christians, lose this conviction and come to believe that the salvation of the world depends on us, if we have no further confidence in God and are willing, at most, to let him enter just our private world, then the door is shut against him and the world becomes ungovernable and beyond salvation. To be a person who prays is to be a person who has faith. And that, in turn, means to be a person who has hope. Or, in other words, it means to be a person who believes not merely that there is perhaps a higher being somewhere, about which we know nothing else and that does not attract attention to itself; on the contrary, it means to be a person who believes that God is God and that we can place our hope in him—who believes that God is God and that the world is neither a matter of indifference to him nor has it fallen out of his hands. It means that we must open the world only to him because he can act and wants to act, even if he does not always do what we expected or asked him to do in our prayers.
Co-Workers of the Truth: Meditations for Every Day of the Year by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger pp.299-300