Thoughts and Prayers

In the aftermath of the election of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil in 2018, interviewers asked the legendary musician Gilberto Gil what Bolsonaro incited in him. Gil’s response was surprising for many: “Everything that I do not comprehend inspires me to pray.” Of all the things that this fascist sympathizer and supporter of the Brazilian military dictatorship might incite in a person, prayer is certainly not the first thing that comes to mind. Yet Gil seems to insist that the incomprehensible hatred spewed by Bolsonaro and his legionaries is an invitation to prayer. This raises questions about the role of prayer, if any, in the context of totalitarian regimes and attacks on democratic processes and institutions.

I teach an introduction to liberation theologies every year in my work as a theological educator. We engage remarkable texts in the tradition, from Gustavo Gutiérrez to James Cone, from Elizabeth Johnson to Delores Williams, from Ada María Isasi-Díaz to Marcella Althaus-Reid, among others. Students are often energized by the readings and I’m regularly filled with hope that theological education remains central to the work of justice. (I don’t think I will ever allow that this feeling be taken from me.) 

Right at that point when the commitment to liberation meets the exhaustion of the end of a semester, we turn to Claudio Carvalhaes’s wonderful book on prayer, Praying with Every Heart. The book contains all the elements students have encountered in previous weeks: prophetic indignation and denunciation, the preferential option for the poor, and critiques of patriarchy, racism, imperialism, and xenophobia. But when students read a book about prayer in a class on liberation theology, they often express confusion and, occasionally, frustration. Their minds frequently turn to that terrifying expression: “my thoughts and prayers are with you,” something we have all become accustomed to hearing precisely when people want to cover up systemic injustice under the rug of piety. What we need, some students protest, is not more prayer. What we need is action and we need it now.

Long gone are my most pious days and the meaning of prayer I attached to my spirituality in the past, which makes me very sympathetic to these claims. Still, I need to fulfill my task as an educator and invite students to pay close attention to how prayer changes when we think of it as part of a spirituality of liberation. The lesson we draw from Carvalhaes in that week is not that prayer dissipates injustice or swiftly resolves it. Rather, we come to see prayer as an important practice for confronting the world's absurdity and its evil forces. “Prayer does something,” Carvalhaes writes. “It is a potent ritual action. Prayer effects a deep circular movement within us, moving between our inside and outside without separation” (62). In this way, prayer is a mode of attending to the world, to its joys and pain. It is a practice that may orient us toward justice when all we encounter is the normalization of injustice. Prayer becomes, then, a discipline of attention. Like Simone Weil famously wrote in her famous essay, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” prayer consists of attention. 

Developing our capacity to pay attention is central to the life of the spirit. In theological education, this practice has taken on new urgency because attention spans have become a major commodity in our time. That is to say, the focus of our attention has been turned into a source of profit and our focus has been harvested by communication technologies. Through complex algorithms, our global economy builds on these technologies to get to know us, explore our desires, fears, and aspirations, and then direct our attention to products that will eventually fulfill those desires. Supposedly.

Scholars and commentators have described this as the “attention economy” and have raised concerns that communication technologies are hindering our capacity to pay attention. I would go further and suggest that this attention economy is actively forming us by directing and shaping how we attend. It is important to be precise here: technologies are not merely tools we use; they are systems that shape us. It is insufficient to think of technology as neutral instrumentation. Rather, we should understand it as a system that captures and organizes attention, constructs digital profiles, and monetizes them. In other words, we must attend to the political economy that underwrites the attention economy—and to the fact that our attention itself functions as its primary currency.

I wonder how this mode of attention is shaping theological formation. In the classroom, this may show up as a growing difficulty in sitting with demanding texts and thorny theological problems, or as diminished interest in listening deeply to others. Perhaps it is manifested as greater awareness and anxiety that there is very little we can do to confront the grave injustices of our time. If theological education involves the cultivation of attention, then our task is complexified by an entire economy constructed around the garnering of our focus. I worry that we have yet to fully grasp how practices of attention that are so central to theological formation are being transformed under these conditions.

I’m reminded of Gil’s words: “Everything that I do not comprehend inspires me to pray.” It strikes me that he associated incomprehensibility with a political figure who offers very little instruction in either attention or prayer. But if prayer is a certain technology to train our attention, then it may be precisely in moments of incomprehension imposed by our confrontation with injustice that prayer becomes necessary.

Prayer would then be a counter-practice for confronting the attention economy and the political environment it sustains. In the context of theological education, prayer demands the formation of attentive subjects, persons capable of perceiving and inhabiting the slow but relentless movement of justice that interrupts the vicious pace of the attention economy. If that is the case, then “thoughts and prayers” would no longer function as a sentimental disavowal of suffering, but as a real investment in the material conditions for which we pray.