on prayer | 6

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"What my mother had just taught me, of course, was the first two basic principles of prayer: It requires a disciplined routine and it is an art best practiced by a composed mind and spirit: for that, I came to understand, was what the magazine and manicure kit and Bible were all about . . . she was an accomplished traveler in those lands [of prayer]. [However,] her greatest gift to me was not some principle or other characterizing prayer, but the implicit suggestion that those lands were there to be entered into . . .  "

(Phyllis Tickle, The Shaping of a Life: A Spiritual Landscape)

Those lands are there to be entered into . . . always and everywhere. This I need to remember.
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