When you pray, do not pray half-heartedly. Pray with every part of your being. Let your physical body resound to your intention, your feelings and you thoughts. Let prayer manifest in your life's motives and in your aspirational body. Beyond all else, trust that your prayers will be answered as they are needed to be answered... Let your prayer carry the sound of your deepest love, for most surely Love is the cause of life and Love is its own effect... Love is universal, so part of our life's work is to become so universal in our words, thoughts, feelings and deeds that we become "the sounding box of God".
It is all too easy and too simple to disdain as "superstition" everything one cannot understand, but the ancients themselves knew very well what they meant when they used symbolic language...the Spirit can always come back to breathe fresh life into the symbols and rites and give them back their lost meaning and the fullness of their original virtue.