Private prayer is the only genuine path to real intimacy with God. In private prayer we allow God to know us and we come to know God differently than distance or pomp or public rituals can ever allow.

Public prayer always presents us with the temptation to make our God either the place or the people with whom we pray. With all its grandeur and satisfaction, it can seduce us to believe that because there is prayer here, this place—these people—must be good. This kind of prayer can make religion itself an idol. Blinded by commitment to the group or the splendor of the place or the moral security that comes with being “obedient” to a system, we find cults and holy wars great and glorious things.

Only in the intimacy of the heart, steeped in the words of the One who is mercy and goodness, justice and peace, can we see clearly the laws we are really meant to follow, the life we are truly meant to live.

Then we come to realize that we all come into this world alone and we leave it the same way. There is no group, however strong their hold on our obedience, who, in the end, go with us to the bar of conscience.

—from The Breath of the Soul: Reflections on Prayer by Joan Chittister (Twenty-Third Publications)