A spirituality that takes seriously the kind and extent of alienation – are we not all aliens today? … that has prevailed with increasing power during the past three hundred years must needs pay greater attention than has been out custom to what von Hügel called ‘the life prior to prayer, to those actual onditions in which men and women live and to the questions which these conditions should prompt in the minds of those who believe in an incarnational theology. The bruised, the maimed, the blinded, the starved, the oppressed are everywhere about us, and in each and all of them the Son of Man is degraded and rejected anew. Christian spirituality  does not begin by separating Martha and Mary but by seeing that have work to do.

Alan Ecclestone