God is a tear of love, shed in the deepest concealment over human misery. Not, certainly, the prayer before and after meals, the ritual of animal egoism, but the prayer pregnant with sorrow, the prayer of disconsolate love, the prayer which expresses the power of the heart that crushes man to the ground, the prayer which begins in despair and ends in rapture. But he expresses these wishes in the confidence, in the certainty that they will be fulfilled. In other words, he limits, he conditionates his being, by the world, as a member of which he conceives himself he bounds his wishes by the idea of necessity. It is essential to the effectiveness of prayer that it be audibly, intelligibly, energetically expressed.
Community enhances the force of emotion, heightens confidence.
What we are unable to do alone we are able to do with others. It is an extremely superficial view of prayer to regard it as an expression of the sense of dependence. It certainly expresses such a sense, but the dependence is that of man on his own heart, on his own feeling. Prayer has its root rather in the unconditional trust of the heart, untroubled by all thought of compulsive need, that its concerns are objects of the Absolute Being that the Almighty, infinite nature of the Father of men is a sympathetic, tender, loving nature, and that thus the dearest, most sacred emotions of man are divine realities. The father makes the child an end, and himself the means of its existence.