A diminutive, gray-haired senior had pulled aside a plastic lawn chair from a display outside the supermarket and made herself comfortable with a paperback novel.

There she sat, oblivious to the cars passing closely by as drivers volleyed for parking spaces, or the multitude of shoppers, families and children, running, walking, yelling and speaking in different languages.

She had made her little oasis of rest in the middle of an ordinary day of busyness, and I thought, “It’s true. Wherever you go, there you are.”

Young children are famous for the same thing. What parent doesn’t have stories of the youngster who laid down in the middle of a family get together and promptly went to sleep or sat themselves down in the grocery store aisle and decided it was time to take those animal crackers off the shelf and have a snack?

The regular encounters that often slip by unnoticed, like the young woman hustling her elderly mother across the parking lot with an arm wrapped lovingly around her shoulder or the angry parent remonstrating a young child’s errant behavior as they shop, can be important lessons in the spiritual life and opportunities to pray within the circumstances of our daily living.

That is where holiness happens, in the messiness of ordinary life.

Like in the elevator of a local parish where a gentleman arrives every Saturday for Confession and to pray before the Blessed Sacrament. Watching closely, you will see him pulling an oxygen tank behind him. Over the course of time, as his health deteriorates, he starts to use a walker, and then a motorized scooter, all the time taking the oxygen tank with him.

It is not necessary to wait for the right time and the right space to pray, to worship, to gaze in wonder and awe at the things of God, often missing the holiness right in front of our eyes every single day.

In his book “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,” Trappist monk Thomas Merton relates a mystical experience that happened one day when he was running errands for the monastery. He writes, “In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness. … There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

With this epiphany came Merton’s understanding that he didn’t have to step out of the world to experience God.

It is not necessary to wait for the right time and the right space to pray, to worship, to gaze in wonder and awe at the things of God, often missing the holiness right in front of our eyes every single day.

While we may never have a mystical experience like Merton’s, we can take our spiritual lives and our prayer lives to the streets, the supermarket, the playground, in times of war and peace, famine, drought or abundance, and there make a difference.

Surprisingly, Merton’s epiphany is memorialized by a state-sanctioned “Thomas Merton” plaque on the corner of Fourth and Walnut – almost as rare as a mystical experience.

Mary Clifford Morrell is the author of “Things My Father Taught Me About Love” and “Let Go and Live: Reclaiming your life by releasing your emotional clutter.”