“Praying is a life-creative method that has its own essential evidence in the act itself.
… It is a double-sided operation, due to an attractive drawing power at work above us and at the same time to a homing tendency in us. … We natively reach out beyond our fragmentary self for completion, and we aspire to find springs and sources of life of a wholly different order from our daily food and drink for the body.

That is, I think, where prayer begins. It is born of our need for spiritual fellowship. … In our best moments of hush and quiet, especially in those high-tide occasions when many human hearts together are fused in silent communion, there often is a palpitating sense of divine presence, an overbrimming consciousness of healing, vivifying currents of life circulating underneath our little lives, and we are filled with joy and wonder. That is the very substance and essence of prayer …

All great prayer is born out of intense earnestness and out of a consciousness that only God through us as a feeble organ of His will, can accomplish what we seek and what we need.”

– Rufus Jones, Pathways to the Reality of God, 1931