As the social self can only be developed by contact with society, so the spiritual self can only be developed by contact with the spiritual world.

And such humble yet ardent contact with the spiritual world--opening up to its suggestions our impulses, our reveries, our feelings, our most secret dispositions as well as our mere thoughts-is the essence of prayer, understood in its widest sense.

No more than surrender or love can prayer be reduced to "one act." Those who seek to sublimate it into "pure" contemplation are as limited at one end of the scale, as those who reduce it to articulate petition are at the other.
It contains in itself a rich variety of human reactions and experiences.
It opens the door upon an unwalled world, in which the self truly lives and therefore makes widely various responses to its infinitely varying stimuli.

Into that world the self takes, or should take, its special needs, aptitudes and longings, and matches them against its apprehension of Eternal Truth.

In this meeting of the human heart with all that it can apprehend of Reality, not adoration alone but unbounded contrition, not humble dependence alone but joy, peace and power, not rapture alone but mysterious darkness, must be woven into the fabric of love.