Just Like A Prayer

On dreams and contemplation and why manifestation is just prayer without the wonder

At the end of last year I wrote out a list of things that I wanted to manifest for this year. I divided it into sections: Spirit was one section, Wealth & Resources was another. There was also a section called Self, and another called Connect. Within each of those sections was a variety of dreams, hopes, and aspirations for this year: I wrote down things like express more gratitude, deepen my connection to my intuition, write every day, and start a podcast.

There was also a section called Explore, and in it I put the following:

• An adventure that stretches me

• An adventure that nourishes me

• An adventure that teaches me something

• An adventure that puts me in a state of awe

For whatever reason, this section is the part of the list that has most met and even exceeded my manifestation hopes. We’re just past the halfway point of the year and I’ve had all of those kinds of adventures already. I was stretched in London, Oxford, and France; I was nourished in those places, too. I was taught some very clear lessons on the adventures in which I was supposed to be the teacher, as in France and in Northern California and on Catalina Island. I experienced deep awe among the redwoods in Northern California, among sea lions on Catalina Island, in a cave in the south of France, and in a dark, cavernous basilica in the middle of the night in Paris. Next week I’ll be in Costa Rica, in November I’ll be in Portugal, and in between I’ll be in a bunch of other places that hold as much possibility of adventure as anywhere else. I wanted a lot of adventure, I asked for a lot of adventure, and I got it. This is where I’m supposed to say: manifestation works, you guys!

But I don’t think that manifestation qua manifestation was really what was at work here. If I take the word at its roots – to reveal or make evident, to grasp by the hand – I might say that I manifested these adventures by recognizing opportunities and seizing them. This is, in the most important respects, all that manifestation really is, when you think about it: if you direct your energy (your attention, really) toward certain things, you are more likely to work toward their realization, consciously or not. I wanted adventures, and I articulated that want to myself, and that made me more attentive to any and all opportunities to have them.

I have not, I will note, started a podcast. But there are still 5 and half months left in the calendar year, so. maybe I’ll get around to it. That manifestation list was in some respects just a to-do list with extra steps; a task roster boosted by crystals and affirmations.

The manifestation experts say, be very clear about what you want to manifest. Working with the energy of the universe is like working with AI, apparently: for the best results, you need to have a super crisp idea of what it is that you’re asking for, and you need to ask for it clearly and thoroughly, otherwise it might hallucinate and make something up that you didn’t want. And even if you are clear and super descriptive, it will still sometimes give you a hand with six fingers and try to convince you that, yes, that is a very realistic representation of the thing that you wanted. I asked for an adventure in which I would learn something and the universe took me to a mountain in France and kicked me off of the edge of a cliff and taught me to not lean so far over cliffs.

The manifestation experts also say, don’t try to manifest things over which you don’t have any control, and this is both very good and very obvious advice. You cannot manifest winning the lottery or marrying Keanu Reeves, so don’t bother. It’s very much like prayer, in this way: players on the football field might kneel together before a game and pray for victory (#americanthings), but if they win it’s not because God interceded, it’s because they did all of the other things that made it possible for them to win. The prayer is just an articulation of the longing and the will that drove the doing of those other things. I could go out on that field and pray just as hard and just as clearly and light all sorts of candles and brandish a manifestation list that includes the line item Win Superbowl and I’d get squashed no matter what.

God doesn’t care who wins, and God certainly doesn’t care whether you get a billion dollars or marry Keanu. The worst people in the world have billions of dollars; these are the kinds of people who wouldn’t know a manifestation ritual if it hit them in their crown chakra, the kinds of people who risk bursting into flame if they ever pray. Bad people get good things not because they manifest better or pray harder, but because they do whatever it takes to get those things. Machiavelli said that it isn’t enough to be a prophet, you need to be armed; history has pretty much proven his point.¹

Still. I light my candles and I say my prayers and I do my spells and I take my lessons and I embrace all of it because I know, I know, that my relationship to the magic of the world and the universe is core to my experience of it; I believe deeply in my own poetics of enchantment and that means that, yes, I do write wishes on slips of paper and bury them deep in the earth or set them aflame and watch their smoke waft up to the stars. I do pray, I do dream.

When I was around 10 or 11 years old I wanted to be a nun. I really loved God and the church; we belonged to a very hippie Pacific Northwest Catholic church where we sang hymns with folk guitars and the way the light streamed through the stained glass windows on Sunday mornings made me believe that angels were real. I also loved Mary and many of the saints and it seemed to me that a life of contemplation and writing and prayer would be very romantic. I didn’t realize it at the time but there was also part of me that recognized it as a possible escape from an unfair, capitalist, patriarchal world. Obviously that latter part feels ironic—what is more patriarchal than the Catholic church?—but at the time I saw it as a path to at least some form of spiritual power. Nuns had less status than priests but at the time they struck me as more interesting and empowered than the characters in movies and tv shows like 9 to 5 and Tootsie and The Mary Tyler Moore Show.² So for some period of time that was the dream: become a nun and live of a life of being super deep and mysterious and blessed by God.

Then we changed churches because we moved, and the nuns at the new parish were really mean and the priest was bad³ and the dream died a quick death. I kept my Mary statues, though.

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The other month in Paris I got to live out a little bit of my childhood nun fantasy; my dear friend and collaborator Patricia signed us up for a night of adoration at the Basilica de Sacre-Cœur, which involves spending the night in the Benedictine guesthouse there. One of the many notable things about Sacre-Cœur is that it’s the site of 140 years of uninterrupted prayer – perpetual adoration – which simply means that people have been praying there non-stop, night and day, for almost a century and a half. Part of what keeps that going is prayer volunteers who sign up to take prayer shifts between the end of the last mass at night and the first mass in the morning. You stay at the guesthouse, which is as convent-like as anything in your most fevered adolescent nun-life dreams, the ones informed by the convent in The Sound of Music, complete with tiny sparse bedroom looking out over the gardens of the basilica with a single cross above the bed.

I signed up for two hours, from 3am to 5am. Patricia and I attended the Mass, and then sat as the lights were turned out; if you ever go to Sacre-Cœur and do the night of adoration, know that this moment is truly tremendous, when the massive doors clang shut and the lights in the vast, cavernous space go out one-by-one until the only lights are a few small spotlights in the apse and many hundreds of candles. We sat for a minute and then we made our way through the private hallway – the one that the clergy and the nuns use – to the residences and the guesthouse, where we turned in with alarms set for our respective prayer shifts.

When it’s your shift, you go back through the private halls to the side entrance and make your way into the dark, silent basilica. You’re told by the nuns beforehand that it doesn’t matter where or how you conduct your adoration in the space – you can pray or meditate or just sit in silence – the only direction is to simply be there in a state of quiet contemplation. And oh, is it quiet. It is a quiet that you’ve never heard before. There was only one other person in the entire basilica when I went in, knelt in silent prayer in the first row of pews, and it felt as though I had portaled to another world, a world without sound. If you’ve ever been in the furthest depths of a heavily wooded forest at night you might have a sense of this: the darkness and the quiet wrap around you like heavy veils, and you feel at once enclosed and exposed, a small thing in a cathedral of giants. You can hear your heart beat, your blood thrum in your ears.

I spent the first fifteen minutes or so in the nave area in front of the choir and altar, but then wandered to the chapels that circle the back of the basilica, behind the apse. It’s even darker there, and a bit spooky in places. The only light is candlelight. I found a seat in the chapel of the Virgin Mary and settled in there.

Meditating or praying alone in a silent, cavernous dark is very different from doing those things in spaces of noise and light; you start to understand why nuns and monks retreat to convents and monasteries far away from civilization. You get a sense of why Mary Magdalene hid herself away in a cave. When you take away not just the distractions of people but also those of sound and light you find yourself entirely by yourself in a way that you just don’t, say, in the bath. Or even in nature, in some respects; the effect is very much like being in a tomb. If there’s a God to find and you’re looking for them, you’re almost certainly going to find them there in the space where there’s nothing else to perceive. So, yeah, it’s a good place to sit in contemplation, which is exactly what I did. I sat there for the whole two hours and a little bit longer. Just me, by myself, and God, I think. In the dark.

Contemplation isn’t exactly prayer, if you’re being strict about definitions of spiritual practices; it doesn’t need to be directed at God, although when it happens in a church odds are good that God or some God-adjacent energy is part of the whole experience. Adoration is kind of a form of prayer, but unlike the forms of prayer that we usually associate with kneeling and clasped hands and whispered words, it can simply be a practice of being in presence with God (this is especially true for Catholics, for whom Eucharistic adoration – being in the presence of the host – is a whole thing.) Hence the seemingly laissez-faire direction from the nuns for the adoration at Sacre-Cœur: it is enough, in adoration, to simply just be there. And sometimes simply just being there – simply just being – is a practice that can rock you to your soul. It did that to me. I’m still reeling from it, in a way.

Manifestation as a practice is much closer to prayer qua prayer than it is to contemplation or adoration. It’s a form of asking, which is exactly what prayer is on most definitions. The very root of the word means to ask, and that’s how we most often use it: to say that we’re praying for something or someone is usually to say that we are asking God or Spirit or the universe to bend its energy in favor of said thing or person.⁴ Which is also basically what manifesting is, although in that case we’re not asking a higher power, we’re asking our brains and our energy – our thoughts and our intentions – to rally themselves toward shaping or reshaping reality. We’re the higher power, or at least our synapses are.

The distance between prayer and manifestation is probably the reason that I’m not very good at either: when I’m doing one I’m usually leaning in some direction toward actually doing the other. My manifestation practices have a very prayer-like quality in that they can’t help but nod at a higher power; my practices of prayer tend to have the flavor of a manifestation practice in that they are influenced by my suspicion that me and the higher power are somehow the same thing. The fact that I’m far more comfortable with contemplation and adoration – with just being with my thoughts and feelings rather than asking for things – is another complicating factor.

But I don’t think that that’s a bad thing. I was tempted here to make a joke to the effect that my poor skills in prayer and manifestation might be why I’m not wealthy, but I don’t think that the joke would have landed. We take want too seriously in our world; we’re a culture of asking for things, of demanding things, of constantly measuring our worth and our due. The popularity of manifestation is a symptom of this, I think – we no longer pray, or at least don’t believe that God dispenses favor on the basis of prayer, but we still want and we want hard and so we’ve made a religion of wanting and called it the Laws of Attraction and a whole lot of YouTubers and TikTokers and self-proclaimed self-help gurus are making a whole lot of money on what is effectively the new prosperity gospel. If you want hard enough and you want skillfully enough – if you know the tricks of asking for what you want in just the right way (or can afford to pay the tithes for the most powerful secrets) – then you can have what you want, you will be blessed, the Kingdom of Abundance will be open to you.

Which is why I identify more with witches and mystics and dreamers than with manifestors and mind hackers and anyone who charges thousands of dollars to share the secrets of rewiring the brain. It’s also why I still like cathedrals and saints and nuns, and why ritual for me is not about bending reality to my will but about sinking into it more richly and more deeply and asking it – asking myself – ever harder questions while caring less about the answers because I know that it’s the mystery, the dark, the shadows, the wonder that matters, not the things that I can get from them.

But I’m a girl who likes to cover her bases, and there’s still rent to pay and college tuition to cover so I’m still hanging on to that manifestation list and whispering incantations over it and occasionally the odd prayer. If it means that I get myself kicked off a few more mountains as cosmic lessons, so be it. I’ll still keep trying to be deep.

1. The Prince, a book that is frequently misread and misunderstood, but on this point at least he was crystal clear.

2. I did like Julie on The Love Boat and thought that her job seemed kind of cool, but that was fleeting; she never got good storylines.

3. No folk guitars, and he molested altar boys.

4. I have a deeply fraught relationship with petitionary and intercessory prayer. I once had a column at BeliefNet and wrote about the intersection of spirituality and faith and being a ‘bad’ mother, and wrote once or twice about my objections to these forms of prayer and boy howdy the hate mail I got.