on Prayer and Faith

Reading Adrienne von Speyr's World of Prayer, I realize that I cannot add anything to her insights on prayer and faith:

No one can believe without being in constant contact with God...Prayer reconstitutes the interrupted contact of faith with God.  Indeed, faith is not merely an objective, conceptual content to be accepted and applied to life:  The content of faith lives in* the believer as genuine divine life and makes possible* in him the act and state of faith.  Faith is what man has grasped of God, for in faith God reveals himself and allows himself to be grasped by man.

...faith continually is at work on him and presents new challenges to his intelligence and awareness.  So he must continually come to terms with this faith, or rather with the God who communicates himself to him in faith.  This contact with God that is the sign of an alert faith is called prayer.  It is the exchange, the give and take, between God and man in faith.  It is man's Yes to God in response to God's constant readiness with regard to man....

Man can refuse prayer as he can refuse nourishment.  But as the body dies without food, so the soul perishes without prayer, which brings God's bread to it.  Prayer is....fellowship with God [and God never shuts the door against the one who knocks....God is there at all times to welcome his child.]

* emphasis mine. 

Adrienne von Speyr, who died in 1967, was a mystic, medical doctor, wife, and author of some 70 books on spirituality and theology.  As a mystic, she was privileged to enter into the experience of people who prayed, from the apostles to the current time.  She remarks on the humility of these people who allowed themselves to be seen at prayer.  Her Book of All Saints is the record of those she saw, including great artists like Shakespeare, Hayden, Beethoven, etc., whose work was the fruit of their prayer.