"Our Simone once took me to task over my ‘sneering’ about prayer. My notion of prayer was juvenile: forget this telephone line to God bullshit, she snapped, hot with impatience. It wasn’t even about God, she said, which I thought must surely be blasphemous. Praying was a way to interrupt your own habitual thinking, she told me. It’s admitting yourself into otherness, cracking open your prejudices. It’s not chitchat; it’s hard labour. She spoke as if all this were obvious. I longed to understand her. It feels always that I am on the edge of some comprehension here but never breaking through to the other side."

Keep your mind firmly fixed on God, and the moment will come when the immortal Spirit touches your heart. Oh! That touch from the Holy of Holies! It cannot be compared to anything. It transports our spirit into the realm of the Uncreated Being. It wounds the heart with love, but a love different from what is usually meant by this term. The light of this love spreads over all creation, over the entire human race in its millennial existence. This love becomes perceptible to the physical heart, but by nature, it is spiritual, uncreated, for it comes from God.

What does this teach us, but the sacred importance and necessity of prayer? We may be certain that whatever God has made prominent in His Word, He intended to be conspicuous in our lives. If He has said much about prayer, it is because He knows we have much need of it. So deep are our necessities, that until we are in heaven we must not cease to pray.

Everything that is absurd and terrible on the world stage, everything that is mundane and tedious in the daily life of humans, forms a contradictory yet nonetheless grandiose picture. Everything, both the noble and the petty, is reflected in one way or another in each of us. From countless contrasts—evil and good, darkness and light, sadness and joy, madness and wisdom, love and hate, weakness and strength, construction and destruction, birth and death—a global vision of Being is formed. Subjected to innumerable torments and insults, humanity is scorned; its dignity is trampled underfoot. In the face of this spectacle, the soul falls into despair. And suddenly, the words of Christ, "A man is born into the world," reach it in their eternal meaning, a meaning eternal even for God. And, under the influence of this joy, it forgets all the sicknesses and afflictions of the past.