"Intimacy of the Heart" by Joan Chittister

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)