Noticing is already prayer.

A directee told me recently that she had not "prayed" in three weeks. She had been busy, grieving, distracted, tired. Mostly tired.

I asked her what she had noticed in those weeks. She paused. Then, slowly, she began to list things: a moment of light on the kitchen floor that had stopped her on a Tuesday morning. Her son's hand reaching for hers in the car. A song that came on, suddenly, that she hadn't heard since college. The smell of the woods after rain.

When she finished, she was quiet for a long time.

"You have been praying constantly," I said. "Noticing is already prayer."

It is not that we should never sit down with our Bibles or our liturgies or our beads. Those practices are quiet engines of the contemplative life. But on the weeks when we cannot manage them — when grief or weariness or the sheer load of being a person take all our small attentional currency — God does not vanish. The morning light still finds the kitchen floor. The hand still reaches.

Spiritual direction is, in part, the practice of helping each other see how much praying we have already been doing without calling it that.