To pray is, at the least, to look towards God; to pray is to think of God, to speak to God, or to entreat God – whether it be with spoken words or with ideas or mental images or, more simply, with the infinitely deeper but obscure regard of contemplation. When there is none of this, one cannot say that prayer exists, in the proper sense of the word.
René Voillaume (1905–2003)
Contemplative in the Mud 