The angels can know us more intimately and love us when we sing, and they are not asking that we sound like the Philharmonic. They ask us simply to sing because we are harmonic. We are symphonic and in these ways we can connect with the angelic world. I think and feel that the angels wait for us at every given moment. If we alternate song and silence, consciously, with burning attention, every rounded tone carves out the possibility to bridge heaven and earth, to live the material half of the angel.
Prayer is that divine seed whose roots draw food from earthly existence. Like the lotus flower that does not bloom in arable ground but in marshes, prayer thrusts its roots into human misery as if into mud. But the lotus flower does not show any trace of the muddy water from which it drew life; turned toward the sky, it blooms.