#Pickupyourphone

And Follow Me

I don’t know about you all, but I can’t get enough of the #stayprayedup ads from the Hallow (#1 Prayer, Meditation and Sleep) App. “Pray without ceasing” has a certain poetic ring, I suppose, but it lacks pizzaz. “Stay prayed up” on the other hand…especially when accompanied by the chest-thumping, bicep-flexing, manly hoops-shooting video footage of Markie Mark and Mario Lopez…I must to my upper room and close the door, like, right now.

#Stayprayedup makes intimate conversation with the Almighty sound so…diesel fueled. I’m a domestic woman who owns goats and drinks 85 fluid ounces of tea a day, and those words make me want to steer a lifted truck through a brick wall, while strafing I don’t even care what with a heavy barrage of gunfire.

My prayer companion of choice has, until recently, been my St. Andrew’s Daily Missal. I’ve had it for over a decade, and it’s beginning to look like a little worse for the wear, in that it sheds a flurry of pages like autumn leaves if you so much as breath on it. Maybe that’s why it’s become such a burden to pull it out for morning prayers. But I think I can actually trace this strange malaise to the day I saw the Hallow App Super Bowl Ad Teaser.

Perhaps you remember the one I’m talking about. It began with a black background, and the words “for the first time ever…” as a pulsing orchestration—the-general-on-the-cusp-of-sure-defeat-speech track—began to crescendo. “Join over 100 million Christians…During the Big Game.” And then. That hand hit the holy water. That music hit its crashing climax.

Until that moment, my idea of a perfect day involved six hours reading, six hours drinking tea, and six hours reading while drinking tea. Until that moment, a good prayer life, to me, meant finishing a decade of the rosary without falling asleep. But at that moment, I found myself wishing passionately—desperately—for enormous biceps. And maybe even a personal relationship with the Lord.

How could a frayed breviary compete with the slick, purple interface, the ergonomic, faceless haloed head of the Hallow icon, and the sweet sounds of Mark Wahlberg, or Jesus Jim, or (swoon) Jonathan Roumie, reading me to sleep? These days (when I’m not in prayed-up power-lift beast-mode), I’m sleeping like a baby. I’m not gaining as much insight into the gospels as I initially anticipated, but after all, a good night’s sleep is something Christ prized very highly, too, as you may recall from the Garden of Gethsemane—“Take thy rest,” I believe were his exact words. There was something else in that chapter as well, but seeing as I can’t remember the context, I don’t think it can have been very important.

And good sleep is just one of the many perks I’ve experienced as a Hallow premium subscriber. I know there are some that will cynically decry the product promotion on Hallow’s social media. I am not one of them. If Jonathan Roumie is praying for peace in the Middle East with the Triple XL Magnum Steel He Man’s Rosary, I’m ordering one in every color. Do you think hair of that caliber emerges from a head not singularly blessed by Providence? Clearly something’s working. I anticipate an increase in my own follicular volume very shortly, and…huh? Oh. Yes. Also maybe peace in the Middle East. That would be very cool, too.

Occasionally they trot out a nun to read meditations, too, and that’s fine. She’s nowhere near as attractive—I mean effective—as the above-mentioned triumvirate, but she has some good things to say about the missionary spirit. And every once in a while, their Instagram team posts a quote from a saint or a reading—they’re boring. Very old school. But it reminds me of something—a feeling I used to get when I’d pull out my old missal…something peaceful, and remote. Old as eternity, young as a new day, something as far from the shiny profiles and the constant beyond of my cold blue screen…

Boring, like I said. But luckily there’s a sudden blare of masculine power-rock coming from my phone, and there they are—Markie Mark and Mario, fist bumping and sweaty in the way that only jacked, righteous men can be…holiness is back, baby, and looking better than ever! Stay prayed up, my friends.