On power in prayer, action, and the mirroring of individuals and societies
An essay
I wrote this piece for my dear friend Mamoudou’s newsletter called Loosies last month. While this essay is not necessarily about any particular imaginary death, I feel compelled to share here because a lot of what I wrote about inspires the subjects I explore in this newsletter. Thank you to Mamoudou for giving me a reason to write this piece. I hope you enjoy 💗
I’m sitting outside at the Lot Radio, listening to a soundtrack that I’m having trouble distinguishing from the construction happening all around me. Metallic sounds of techno and noise come from the speakers that perfectly complement the sounds of tractors moving ground and pushing dumpsters across the street. This neighborhood has been full of excavation activity since I returned to it from travels two weeks ago. As I walked into the Lot, I saw one massive truck carrying slabs of concrete. It attempted to turn onto a narrow street, inches away from crushing a tiny two door Toyota bug of a car. I couldn’t stay for the end result, so I crossed the street while accidentally locking eyes with the construction worker who was assigned the task of guiding this truck to not crash into its surroundings. He laughed, reading my mind, and shouted over all the noise, ‘pray for us!’ to which I responded with a nervous laugh. I just remembered that now, as I’m sitting down to write this, to say a little prayer for him and all the people working with huge metal objects. May they find ease in the rest of their workdays, may they be protected from harm’s way, and may tiny Toyota be safe.
I don’t want to say that prayer will fix *gestures widely* {all of this}—it won’t, just as I can’t pray my depression away without turning to any of my other tools like therapy, journaling, reaching out to friends, affirming myself, and nourishing my mind and body. Those things are hard to do when I’m feeling low. In these moments, prayer forces me out of my tiny little bubble, and sometimes it offers me the jump start I need to return to my tools. It’s part of a cycle—prayer reminds me that just because I’m small, that doesn’t mean I need to continue to make myself small.
Lately I’ve found so much power in prayer. Over the course of the pandemic, I’ve gravitated towards spaces where I’ve connected with other Muslim women from around the world. On several occasions, we’ve come together to pray for someone who was in need, or for a group of people who were actively being oppressed. I’ve seen group prayer before at the mosque on Fridays when the Imam begins and ends his khutbah (sermon) with a prayer, and I’ve seen the ways in which it can move many, myself included, to tears. But I’ve never been involved in this level of intimate group prayer until recently.
I realize a lot of people are used to hearing prayer talked about in a Judeo Christian context. Within Islam, when I talk about prayer, I’m talking about two different rituals.
First, there’s salat, which is the practice of praying to God specifically, 5 times a day. There are many experts of Islam who can define what this practice means in a more scholarly way than me, but for me, it’s about expressing my gratitude and love for God through a specific set of Arabic words and phrases. I use salat as time to receive what comes, whether that be revelations, a deeper understanding of myself, or just taking note of the distractions that arrive.
After completing salat, I have an opportunity to sit in prayer for others. This is also known as duaa. Sometimes that means praying for myself, and a lot of the time it means praying for other people who are suffering, or who are just a part of my consciousness at any given moment. I think the two acts go together well because ideally, after praying to God, I am in a clear state to pray for others. But they don’t have to happen in that order, sometimes I just pray for other people randomly, in the middle of a conversation—may anyone reading this feel loved and supported and held today, in the ways that they need. This kind of behavior is also built into the way that we speak to each other in Arabic, often sprinkling duaas into our conversations.
I think there’s tremendous power in both actions, but there’s something especially profound about the act of coming together with other people, to direct pure thoughts towards another person or entity. I’ve navigated mental illness all of my life, whether I’ve been aware of it or not, and one version of depression is a chemical inability to feel all the goodness, love, and compassion there is in the world. On my worst days, I have said to others that I know there’s tons of love that pours out for me, but I am incapable of feeling it. It’s as if all my love receptors are suddenly involuntarily shut down. When I come together with others in prayer for someone else, I try to tap into something deep, imagining my spiritual self physically connecting to the receptors of the recipient of my prayers, receptors that may be temporarily shut down as mine have been. I send not only my words to the subject of my prayers, but visual and emotional energy, too.
My prayers can only take me so far. I can’t stop thinking about how depressed and mentally ill this country and world is—not just the people who make it up, but the actual environment itself. I can’t stop thinking about how self harm looks to me these days—from skin picking (and digging, if I’m being totally honest), to neglecting the needs of my body, to not communicating my needs; how similar that is to digging for oil in places we shouldn’t be digging in, life upending climate change as a result of environmental negligence, global greed from political leaders, mindless violence in every corner of the world. On some days, self harm for this country looks like electing officials into office who actively cause harm and move us backwards in time. On other days, self harm is a police force armed in the name of ‘safety’ who are only capable of violence, paranoid thinking, a lack of empathy, and destruction.
Perhaps prayer is an action towards progress. Maybe collective prayer reminds us that we deserve better, that we don’t need to be self destructive as a society. Maybe the power in prayer isn’t just about ‘thoughts and prayers’ in the emptiest sense of the word, but in the ways in which we can temporarily remove ourselves from the bubbles we exist in, to think and direct our energy towards something much bigger than any one individual. I like to think of collective prayer as an action that enables us to see the tools we have at our disposal to help one another, allowing us to be kind to each other in radical, non-transactional ways.
If I am a tiny little microcosm of society as a whole, I’d like to imagine that my prayers and actions towards my own healing reflect out to society in some positive way. That possibility keeps me motivated these days, a reminder that there must be millions if not billions of others like me, causing the same ripple effect.