"The troubles with prayer are multiple, then. Prayer resists being turned off and on like a tape player. It cannot be regimented or legislated… Nor can it be a desperate human effort to placate or motivate an angry, distant deity.

"Many people who have thought long and hard about prayer (and prayed a lot) don't seem paralyzed by these difficulties. Indeed, they suggest solutions to all the problems mentioned. For them, prayer seems unselfconscious, a matter of sinking into God, becoming one with God. Poet Jessica Powers describes this 'disappearing act' into God: 'I walked out of myself and into the woods of God's mercy and there I abide.'

"People who repeatedly try to be at one with God, to discover again and again their union with their maker, find that no matter what happens, they can go through it with grace. Their prayer seems to be a constant immersion, a burning awareness that what's human is holy and that what seems insignificant is bathed in divinity. Their prayer is a deliberate movement to the quiet pool of the inner self where I meet the God who is lover-creator-friend. The French phrase je me souviens means 'I remember,' but more literally, 'I return to myself,' and in so doing, to the source of my life. Such prayer can be all-pervasive, a persistent habit of finding God's presence everywhere.

"Can we really pray everywhere? Even in the emergency room? the retirement center? the jail? the bar? the traffic jam?

"That legitimate question deserves a clear answer. Many theologians would say that God continues to create everything and divine energy pulses through all creation. Hence God is in everything, no matter how odd the setting seems."