Only the self-centered self, lost in an endless orbit around itself, can keep prayer away. How? By refusing to recognize its own need for God, its utter dependence on him, falling thus into a solipsism so perverse as to refuse the very fuel that keeps it in orbit. “The terrifying compliment,” C.S. Lewis calls it, in which God takes us so seriously as spiritual beings that we are free even to spit in his eye, burning our last bridge to beatitude. ~Regis Martin, Why Pray?