In the last few weeks several of you have told me you’ve seen me out running. While I’ve been a casual runner since college, this month I’ve started training for my first road race in almost twelve years. (I’m going for the title “Fastest Priest in Charlestown,” which I don’t think will be very hard to achieve.) Adding some more serious track workouts into my running schedule has reminded me that athletic training has long been one of the core metaphors for Christian spiritual life. “An ascetic” has come to mean someone with a particularly strict regimen of spiritual self-denial—a monk living on lentils and water in the middle of the desert, wearing a hair-shirt or something—but in fact the Greek word askesis means exercise, practice, or training. Ascesis is what athletes do. And ascesis is what people of faith do. We train our minds. We exercise our souls. We show up for our “spiritual practice”!

But my new workout schedule has also reminded me of something crucial to both kinds of exercise: finding the right setting to make it possible.

You see, for scheduling reasons I tend to go to the track for an interval workout twice a week: once right before I pick Murray up from school on Wednesdays, and once early on Saturday mornings, before we get going on our plans for the day. On Wednesdays, the track is empty. School is still in session; adults are at work or on errands or whatever they do on Wednesday afternoons. It’s just me, the sun, and an occasional baseball practice. I have the whole place to myself.

Saturdays are a different story. On Saturday mornings, the soccer field inside the track plays host to several dozen of Charlestown’s kindergarteners and first and second graders, who are just learning the sport, and to several dozen more of their parents and siblings, who spill out onto the track to chat, drink coffee, throw lacrosse balls, ride tricycles, and so on.

This is a terrifying thing. The average six-year-old does not exactly have much control over their soccer ball; the typical three-year-old tricyclist is not paying much attention to the traffic on the track. And while I’d never begrudge them use of the playing area—they, after all, have reserved the field for the morning and I’m intruding on their space to use the track—it’s rather alarming to see someone sitting cross-legged, reading a book, in lane one at the finish line when you’re trying to run 400s.

Suffice it to say that my Saturday workouts train a rather different set of skills from my Wednesday afternoons: careful attention in case I need to swerve to avoid a toddler, gracious patience as I remind myself I don’t own the track, intercessory prayer that the ten-year-olds throwing a lacrosse ball across the track (why not in the ample free space around them? I don’t know) don’t bean me.

For many of you, the life of prayer is something like this. Perhaps you are the audience for the book I once joked about writing when Murray was a baby and a toddler, which I’d call Praying One-Handed: Spiritual Life for the Overwhelmed Parent. Perhaps you’re like my friend and mentor Cathy, who used to say that she’d perfected the art of praying in parking lots while waiting to pick her kids up from something or other. Perhaps your distractions come from within: the internalized cacophony of fear and anxiety, grief and despair that has leapt from our TVs and our smartphones directly into our brains. Or perhaps, setting your intention to be just a bit more “spiritual” in 2022, you arrived at the track of prayer to find that things were quite busy and went away, finding that your spiritual training plan wasn’t going quite so well.

You might say that I should just change my schedule and find another time to run. Or you might say, to be perfectly honest, that dodging kids and balls and off-leash dogs is itself pretty good training for a road race in Charlestown. I don’t know which one of those is right; but I do know that training under less-than-ideal conditions has value, in spiritual exercise as much as in physical.

If we only ever pray while on retreat—if we only ever turn to God when our minds are calm, and our homes are quiet, and our to-do lists are done—we’ll only ever learn to see God in those tiny, rare, tranquil moments of our lives. To run alone on a track is a wonderful thing. But to run through the chaos of life, rejoicing in it nevertheless… that is truly divine.