Faith & Spirit Quote by E. Stanley Jones

Jones refuses to let prayer be filed under “religious activity,” a discrete box you tick before returning to real life. “The total you” is a deliberate rebuke to the half-hearted, polite spirituality that keeps God at arm’s length while the rest of the self stays in control. He’s not describing a technique; he’s describing a posture. Prayer, in his telling, isn’t primarily about saying the right words. It’s about showing up as an integrated person - mind, body, conscience, desire, fear - with nothing cordoned off.

That phrase also carries a subtle psychological dare. If prayer requires the “whole being,” then fragmentation becomes the real enemy: the split between public virtue and private anxiety, between belief and habit, between the self we present and the self we avoid. Jones is hinting that many prayers fail not because God is absent, but because the person praying is absent, withholding the parts that most need transformation. The line smuggles in a diagnosis of modern religiosity: we outsource spirituality to language while keeping the self unsubmitted.

The second clause flips the power dynamic without collapsing it. “Reaches out” suggests agency and longing; “reaches down” preserves divine initiative and asymmetry. This is classic 20th-century evangelical-mystical synthesis: intimacy without domestication. In a century of war, disenchantment, and institutional Christianity losing moral credibility, Jones offers prayer as encounter rather than performance - a relational act meant to reassemble a scattered self under the weight of a living God.