My best praying happens in line at the grocery store. A clearly-defined container—anywhere from ninety seconds to a few minutes—provided to me, as a free gift, without the work of trying to figure out how to squeeze some intentional prayer time into the complex, and often stressful, circumstances of the world in which we live. The stability of that moment in the queue, which could just as easily be the time we spend at a traffic light or on a street corner waiting for the bus, also has a cosmic meaning: life itself, in all of its diversity and intricacy, naturally tends towards prayer, which is to say, these pockets of time are not just inconveniences that will eventually be erased with some new form of technology, but are instead intrinsic to reality, constant and organic invitations that rise and fall in the course of a given day for our own human transcendence. In this new year, with babies crying and produce being scanned in the background, let’s have Mass between the chapsticks and magazines. There, we will find Christ, not some far-off deity, or the product of some profound act of piety, but hidden in the stuff, just waiting to be discovered. Ave Crux, Spes Unica.
