The following is a slightly paraphrased excerpt from the pamphlet "On the Reality of the Spiritual World" written in 1944 by Friend Thomas Kelley.

The springs and sources of dynamic, creative living lie not in environmental drives and thrusts, but deep within us. Within us is a meeting place with the light, which strengthens and invigorates our whole personalities, and makes us new creatures, with new values and estimates of the world around us, seen through the eyes of direct and spontaneous love.

A leveling of earthly eminences and earthly obscurities takes place. The tempests and inner strains of self-seeking, self-oriented living grow still. We learn to be worked through, serenity takes the place of anxiety; fretful cares are replaced by deep and certain assurance.

How then, does one enter upon the internal life of prayer? Dynamic living is not imparted to us by one heavy visitation of the light, but comes from continuous inner mental habits pursued through years.

Inside of us, there ought to go on a steady, daily, hourly process of relating ourselves to the Divine Goodness, of opening our lives to its warmth and love, of steadfast surrender to it, and of sweet whisperings with it, such as we can tell no one about at all.

Some of you who read this may be well advanced in this inner practice and able to go far beyond this simple and imperfect experience. Some of you may have seen it from afar; some of you have lapsed from it after a short time, accepting the secular habits of mind of our secular age, which sees only time, but not time bathed in Eternity and regenerated by Eternity.

I do not have in mind those formal times of private devotions when we turn our backs upon the family and shut the door of our room and read some devotional book and pause in meditation and in quiet prayer. Those times are important, and need to be cultivated. But the eternal prayer life is something still more basic. It is carried on after one has left the quiet room, and opened the door and gone back into the noisy hubbub of the family group. It is carried on as one dashes for a trolley, as one lunches in a cafeteria, as one puts the children to bed. There is a way of living in prayer at the same time that one is busy with the outward affairs of daily living.