“Nothing is more fundamental to religion than prayer. . . . Martin Luther declared that religion is ‘prayer and nothing but prayer.’ The nineteenth-century German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher wrote that ‘to be religious and to pray—that is really one and the same thing.’ And Schleiermacher’s contemporary, the German poet Novalis, called pray

To pray is to change. Prayer is the central avenue God uses to transform us. If we are unwilling to change, we will abandon prayer as a noticeable characteristic of our lives.

And one should wish for no prayer, except precisely the prayer that God gives us—probably very distracted and unsatisfactory in every way.”