What is needed above all is that we should treat our social and cosmic environment AS AN ACTUAL LIVING BEING, with which we are in the most intimate reciprocal action, though without becoming merged into uniformity with it.
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.