Valentine’s Day will be bittersweet for me this year. It marks the first anniversary, minus a few hours, of my dad’s death.

Growing up, we kids always got Valentines from our parents and sometimes those small heart-shaped boxes of chocolates. As soon as we moved out of the house, we sent Valentines to Mom and Dad, as did the grandchildren.

Ever heard that old saying, “To sing is to pray twice”?

I was thinking of it this morning on my subway ride to work. As I’ve said before, I use my subway commute in the morning as a time for prayer. This morning I was going through the words of Psalm 95, a psalm I’ve been working at memorizing. Then I prayed through the names on my list of people who have asked for prayers or are going through some trouble.

“Deliver us from evil.” There it is in the Lord’s Prayer, the central prayer of my faith. The idea that there is evil in the world is one I mentally skirt away from, and yet no person of faith can deny that evil exists. How do you pray when you’ve brushed against it? How do you make sure evil and fear don’t overcome you?

The first anniversary of my dad’s death is coming up next month. I’ve spoken to a lot of friends about what they went through when they lost a parent, how the grieving doesn’t just go away after a month or two, even when the death was expected. I’m particularly grateful to a Jewish friend who explained the ritual she followed after her mother’s death.

Most of us pray for patience very impatiently. Actually, impatience is one of those faults that people don’t mind bragging about. In a job interview, when people are asked about their faults, “impatience” is probably the most common answer. An impatient person is surely one who gets things done.

I think of my mom when she was Dad’s primary caregiver. He didn’t move very fast in his walker. One day, as they were getting from the car to church, Mom muttered to some friend on the sidewalk, “I pray and pray for patience.”

I’ve heard two lines of thought about repetition in prayer. Some people say that you should fill your prayers with new language, that if you repeat the same thing over and over then you won’t concentrate on your prayer. Others say that there’s a value to using a familiar phrase in prayer, that it releases you from getting too much inside your head and lets the spirit work through you.

“That we all may be one.” We say that prayer almost every Sunday. The other Sunday as we were saying it, something clicked in me and I thought, Wow. This prayer is a huge challenge for all of us Christians.

All holidays feel like moveable feasts. I’m ready for Christmas in July and think Easter is worth celebrating every Sunday, which I sort of do anyway (church puts me in a Resurrection mood).

I’d like to propose a mini Thanksgiving right now. Don’t bother with a turkey and stuffing. A celebration of thankfulness will do. Here’s a smorgasbord of what I’m thankful for right now. Got any of your own mid-winter prayers of thanksgiving to add?

Ever wonder why they call it the “practice of prayer”? I think it’s because we’re all amateurs at it, doing it for the love of it. You don’t practice prayer the way a concert pianist practices a Chopin étude, getting it perfect for a performance.

You practice prayer because it’s a tool for life. You don’t expect an audience (beyond the heavenly one). I like the word “practice” because it gets rid of the performance anxiety. Trying to pray is praying. Practice is perfect.

As a child I used to wonder how Santa managed to get all those toys in his sleigh—just the right toys, too—delivered to all the children in the world.

Now, as an adult, I wonder how we grownups get all the presents for everybody on our lists while sending Christmas cards, figuring out what to eat for Christmas dinner, decorating the house, getting the tree, getting everybody to church on time. How do we do it?

The same way Santa did.