Being the granddaughter of a well known and loved teacher in the Central California Yoga community, you would think that the whole “daily practice” thing would come naturally. You’d assume that meditation and contemplative prayer and, yes, yoga would have firm and solid places in my daily routine. And if you would think that, you’d be wrong. It’s not for lack of trying, trust me. I’ve got more journals and devotionals and devotional journals than anyone ever should have amassed in my bookcases. My good intentions stack up pretty well, however, any actual sustained practice over a long period of time… not so much.

And yet, even with the assumption and expectation being that someone should have intentional, laser-focused time set aside for God at the exact time each day, and that one’s relationship with the divine is predicated on this very punctual meeting with God, somehow in my own erratic and sporadic way, I have still managed to cultivate a rich spiritual life.

I had always felt insecure in my inability to settle on a time with the Spirit and stick with it, though. How on earth could I even consider ministry as a vocation if my prayers come out in short spurts while I’m walking, or as I’m writing an email, or listening on a conference call that has veered from productive to rambly. Shouldn’t I rather be praying in huge three hour chunks starting at 4 am, or some such impossible prescription for non-morning people with attention deficits? At my last discernment review meeting, the following  attributed-to-Martin-Luther quote came up while my prayer habits were being discussed, “I have so much to do that if I didn’t spend at least three hours a day in prayer I would never get it all done.”

That felt a bit like a “gotcha!” point, and it started to sting, until I pointed out that Luther didn’t have a house full of kids, a full time seminary schedule, and a job to juggle. He was a monk. His actual job was to pray. Like, that’s it. I mean, there’s a lot of other stuff monks do that I have just callously shoved aside, but trying to maintain one’s train of thought while a small child keeps yelling from another room for more Goldfish crackers is not something they usually contend with. So that point didn’t impress me much, even though it did gnaw away at the side of me that feels, quite honestly, really crummy about not being able to add “3 hours of prayer” to the list of daily chores.

But then prayer would become a chore. Do you know what people who have ADHD don’t do well? I’ll give you one guess.

I finally felt seen when I was finishing Barbara Brown Taylor’s “An Altar in the World” while waiting in the two-hour long checkout line at the Commissary on the naval base in Lemoore the week that the world started panic buying in response to COVID-19. I had started reading the book as a nightly practice, which, after reading what I’ve said above about how well I can keep up with “practices,” you can understand why I was reading it in the middle of the morning while waiting in line. In the second-to-last chapter of the book titled, “The Practice of Being Present to God,” I received the validation I needed that my all-over-the-place expression of prayer didn’t automatically make me a failure in the spirituality department. In that chapter, she said the words I needed to hear, “I would rather show someone my checkbook stubs than talk about my prayer life. I would rather confess that I am a rotten godmother, that I struggle with my weight, that I fear I am overly fond of Bombay Sapphire gin martinis than confess that I am a prayer-weakling. To say I love God but I do not pray much is like saying I love life but I do not breathe much.” I think I shouted “YESSSSSSSSS!” right there in the middle of the frozen food aisle, (20 minutes left to the checkout lane) causing all the military folks and their spouses to look at me from their places a cart length or two away. If #BBT struggles with a consistent and reliable prayer life, then surely my own inability to live up to Luther’s standards couldn’t be so bad. The take-away from that chapter was that, according to Brother David Steindl-Rast via Barbara Brown Taylor, “prayer is not the same thing as prayers.” Prayers, the formal head-bowed and hands clasped kind, are important, but so is becoming aware of God’s presence in the less-than-meditative moments of our lives. And when you’re busy, those times are much easier to find than peace and quiet. #BBT then explains further, “When I am fully alert to whatever or whoever is right in front of me; when I am electrically aware of the tremendous gift of being alive; when I am able to give myself wholly to the moment I am in, then I am in prayer.”

WOW.

So that moment when I cross Fargo Avenue on my nightly walk and am overcome with the smell of honeysuckle, when it takes over my senses and I am pulled out of my playlist or podcast for a moment, and I can feel God’s goodness—that’s a prayer. When I’m awake at 2:35 am from a bizarre and unsettling dream and my cat instinctively curls up on me and I’m flooded with comfort, that’s a prayer. When one of my kids is feeling feverish and is lethargic, and I’m rummaging through my disorganized medicine cabinet and uttering a string of profanities while looking for a darned thermometer again and I find all three of them at once and laugh out loud, that is a prayer. It’s a prayer when I get off the phone with a friend who has shared devastating news and I exhale slowly, mouthing “dammit.” It’s a prayer when I’m with a group of campers up at Camp Tamarack and they’re learning the words to “Tom the Toad” for the first time. And of course, it’s a prayer when I sit down and formally start out with “Creator God…” too.

I know I should—and will—continue to improve my prayer life, but the relief at not having to conform to the perceived prayer life of every previous religious leader before me has been transformative. Who knows, it might even help me to pray more formally and regularly—as long as we don’t make too big of a deal of it and Martin Luther isn’t the one keeping score.