Common Prayer
In the Lord’s service, we pray together, so that each individual who is taking part in the prayer focuses not on himself and his own needs and interests but on the community as a whole, even if those other needs and interests don’t really move him emotionally much at all.
R. Guardini puts it this way:
He will have to get out of his circle of customary ideas and appropriate a whole world of thoughts infinitely broader and richer. He will have to leave and go beyond the horizon of his own little interests, of small private and personal profits…. He will have to address to heaven some of the requests that do not touch nor interest him directly; he will have to hold up before God these requests with as much devotion as if they were his own, even though they are far from his interests and dictated only by common concern (cited in Richard Paquier, Dynamics of Worship, 50).