There is no authentic and sincere spiritual life without faith, hope and love; but there is no faith, hope, and love without mystical experience or, what is the same thing, without grace.
To move slowly and deliberately through the world, listening and attending to one thing at a time, strikes us as radically subversive, even un-American. We cringe from the idea of relinquishing in any moment, all but one of infinite possibilities offered us by our culture. Plagued by a highly diffused attention, we give ourselves to everything lightly. This is our poverty. In saying yes to everything, we attend to nothing. One can only love what one stops to observe. "Nothing is more essential to prayer," said Evagrius, "than attentiveness."
~ from THE SOLACE OF FIERCE LANDSCAPES by Belden C. Lane