(Psalm 19:2)

"The more profoundly I take root in my freedom, the clearer it becomes to me that nothing is more opposed to it than the desire for isolation, nay, that the recognition of essential freedom has its correlation in the feeling of oneness with the whole of nature.
As a metaphysical being I am, of course, my own creator. But, regarded empirically, I am nothing at all by virtue of myself. I owe my talents and my point of departure in life to my parents, my earliest influences to my country; I owe to my age the mental content which I share, the impulses which drive me on; and finally, I owe to the whole earth the manifold experiences which have made me what I am today.
I myself, as a conscious person, may put down to my own merit only the fact that, assuming my existing energy for work, I have worked at myself unswervingly - not its possession even is due to myself, and much less its success.
It is not I who evoke my thoughts, they come to me.
Thus I am inseparable from the universe. If I accept myself, I also affirm the universe; if it is my duty to perfect myself, this duty implies the further duty of cooperating as much as ever I can in the perfecting of the world.

I can deny what this world is today just as little as I can deny my personal condition. The latter is the product of all that has ever been; if the processes of the world had taken a different course, I too would be different. Conversely, however, the world would necessarily be more perfect if I were more perfect, so that its future character is conditioned on all sides by the volition and achievement of its present elements.
And of all the elements without a single exception: even the transient gesture of every individual continues to be effective through æons of time.
Thus, no one can or may sever himself from the whole.

This truth, of which only few are aware in peace days, inspires the impulses of most people during a war of defence. Every individual among the combatant nations feels the desire to give his life for something greater, every one of them feels that he should join with his fellows, that he may not cut homself off, that he must share in the fate of his nation, be it crime or happiness or death.
My consciousness lives beyond the sphere of national boundaries, therefore I cannot be a party to this strife. But events touch me no less profoundly for all that: just as there are beings who must represent, according to their nature, certain special aspirations, so there are others who are destined to embody what is general and common to all.
And this generality is no abstraction: it is a living entity, it is even more concrete than anything particular is, since the latter only serves it as a transient means.
All the profoundest and most essential powers of life are superindividual and supernational; it is these which give significance and direction to particular events. The consciousness of the metaphysician is directly rooted in them. His participation in the processes of the world consists in lending expression to these powers.

And this participation is no less important than that of the warrior.
What would have happened to Europe if the contending voices had not been drowned again and agin by a single one, which could not countenance any partisanship and only knew of love? - The profoundest will of humanity spoke through this voice.
The more self-conscious humanity becomes, the more must this will dominate, the more will it animate from within all special aspirations…"

Count Hermann Keyserling, The Travel Diary of a Philosopher, volume two (Jonathan Cape, 1925, pp. 370-71).

Asking people to pray is like telling the wind to blow,
the ear to listen, the eye to see.
We cannot not pray, anymore than not be, once given the gift of existence.
We can only shut it out or deny it.

Prayer is simply the conscious dimension of being
when it opens out to receive all that is:
gift, marvellously, gratuitously there;
word of communion with all things,
who hears their silence of wonder,
adoration before G-d who is
the source and end of all.

Prayer is also the birthing of each person,
the creative revelation each is called to become,
the etching of a mysterious face
reflected by the Mystery we contemplate,
the knowing I+N Truth
as we come to know ourselves,
Spirit breathed
by the Thou who call and loved.

Silence then is the plenitude of the Word.

Adapted from Dom Cyril, Prior of Charterhouse, as quoted by
John Skinner in Plymouth Diocesan Year Book 2000 (pp. 44-5).