Adam S. Miller - Religious Expectations Revealed

To expect a modest arrangement of people and frescoes and bread and hard wooden pews to do what the Hubble telescope does and lay down a through-line to deep space is to court pretty certain disappointment.  But to think that a modest arrangement of these objects has no disclosive power is to miss religious phenomena altogether.  Religious practices do not, like scientific practices, send us far away.  Religious practices work in the opposite direction: they ratchet us down and in.  They display the invisible grace of what was already available.  Saying a prayer isn't like flying off to an exotic locale, it's like squishing your toes down through layers of mud.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 131