Prayer is the uplifting of the human personality to God. We not only uplift our minds by submission through Faith to his revealed truth, and our wills in acknowledgment of his divine sovreignty, but also our bodies. In prayer the whole man ‘empties himself’ in union with our Saviour to the glory of God. (Phil. 2; 7-11.)

‘But also our bodies’. ‘The antithesis of mind is body’, writes Father Vincent McNabb, and therefore the ‘antithesis to mental prayer should be bodily prayer. But by a figure of speech the whole range of non-mental prayer is called after its chief part, vocal prayer. It would be incorrect to think that the other forms of bodily prayer are neither greatly practised in the Church nor greatly valued. The Church, like her divine Spouse, “knows what is in man” too well to neglect any object or function whereby the impact of the world may be deadened and a new force added to the world of unseen realities.