INSTAGRAM MAGICK & “I’M HOLDING SPACE FOR YOU”: POST-CHRISTIAN PRAYER ON MODERN SOCIAL MEDIA
Photo by Caroline Attwood on Unsplash.
In September on X.com, a now-deleted post went viral advocating alternatives to telling someone “I’m praying for you,” including phrases like “I’m here for you” and “I’m holding space for you.” The viral post was not, I suspect, shared by someone from a Christian background — or at least not someone who was an active believer anymore. Responses ranged from rubbishing it as heresy to dismissing it as benign therapy-speak, that brand of language that seems to be less about solving deep-seated issues or mental health problems through regular therapy, and instead promises quick paths to your best self with just a change of wording or mindset. It’s taking some time for self-care, deserving a treat, and cutting out toxicity — whether that’s people, or media, or anything else. The implication of this approach are striking because it begins from the position that prayer needs a replacement — it doesn’t work, and here are some phrases that will. A few well-placed phrases, and you can help someone with their grief, or depression, or just from having a bad time.
It's on Instagram that I also started to see snippets from what I’ll call the “digital new age” — content ranging from tarot card readers to new-age spiritualists who suggested rituals like spreading cinnamon around the house to “bring in good luck” or setting out jars of blessed water to “absorb negative energy” and similar ritual practices. I was struck by this mechanistic form of prayer: do this, say this, and you will be guaranteed results — mentally, spiritually, perhaps even physically if a health potion is to be believed.
At first glance, these two trends seem diametrically opposed. One seeks in the assurances of modern psychological science a replacement for the unreliability of prayer (go to therapy, use these phrases, and you will be fixed); the other, a set of rituals entirely dependent on a kind of prayer, but promising outcomes if certain conditions are met (“scatter coffee on your hearth to encourage peace”). They are kindred discourses, emerging from the wider social context of the decline of Christian culture in North America in the 20th and 21st century, both evincing a desire to have guarantees of spiritual efficacy and peace in one’s life. Perhaps most crucially, both seem deeply uncomfortable with the idea of transcendent prayer, preferring a spirituality grounded in mechanistic acts instead of faith and trust in an invisible, omnipresent God.
Psalm 13, as it is in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, begins with the plaintive call “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me for ever? How long will you hide your face from me?” Psalm 17 similarly begins with a cry for God to hear the Psalmist’s prayer, the Psalmist whose enemies are closing in. In the 31st Psalm the enemies are triumphant and the Psalmist’s life is “wasted with grief, and my years with sighing.” Spend enough time reading the Psalms, even just as literature, and they start to resemble modern life; my job is terrible. I am depressed and I want to die. When is all this going to end? The Psalms swing from total confidence in God’s mercies and his blessings to utter despondency and fear; their variety challenges one-size-fits-all notions of “good” prayer.
For the writers of the Psalms, God’s greatness and mercy are self-evident, just as sometimes is his absence, as in Psalm 13 wondering if the Lord their God will ever remember them again. This is something that anyone who has ever said a prayer has felt — did He hear me? Does he care? Is he there? A priest once told me a favorite prayer for busy days was “Be it unto me according to Thy Word,” those words that Mary spoke in response to God’s promise of a son to her. Maybe a more modern version of Mary might have said, “God, whatever you say, I will accept," a definitely radical statement of surrender and self-denial when viewed from the perspective of 21st century individualism and self-care. But how does that differ from the ritual language seen from Instagram magicians and the therapy-speak which promises just a few changes in mindset or language can bring you positive benefits?
That now-deleted Twitter image hides a deeper suspicion and fear: that prayer just doesn’t do anything and we need to say something else; the phrases of the friend-cum-therapist like “I’m holding space for you” or “you’re in my thoughts” are objectively better because, well, there is no God. There’s just you and me and that’s it. After all, there is a kind of soft anti-Christianity in much of North American society today — not of the hyperbolic, cynical “War on Christmas” kind, but a deeper distrust in institutional Christianity and suspicion about its basic claims. Perhaps it starts with simple distrust based on scientific materialism: people just don’t come back from the dead. But on top of that, who would pray to the Roman Catholic God, with all the sex abuse and homophobia and historical colonialist cruelty? Who would love a God of the likes of the Westboro Baptist Church and similar fundamentalists, who drive around the country to proclaim that “God Hates Fags” at funerals and public events? Who would pray to a God like that? Yet all the scientific and socio-political objections sit on top of the ancient problem of knowing that God has heard you, or wondering if he’s just not listening: I prayed, and nothing happened. Why didn’t God answer my prayer?”
The second verse of Psalm 42 reads, “my soul is athirst for God, athirst for the living God; when shall I come to appear before the presence of God?” and the Psalmist careens between the very human heaviness of their soul and the trust they feel in God. The Tik-Tok trend of social media magicians offers something without all that baggage — the freshness of a new perspective that promises results as mechanically dependable as the algorithm that served up the video. Put these ingredients in a jar, say these words, and the depersonalized energies of the universe will help you pass the test, or get a better job, or even just help clear the negative vibes in your house making you anxious. Perhaps it’s easier to believe in an impersonal, mechanistic Cosmic Energy that can be diverted or controlled like water in a canal or managed with magical crystals and coffee grounds than a transcendent God.
There is a kernel of truth to that initial viral image seeking to re-frame prayer. “I’m holding space for you,” despite its therapy-speak valences, seems to offer up something prayer doesn’t, a statement of availability: “I’m mentally here for you.” It stops short of explicitly saying “I’m here, come talk to me, I can try to help,” but is in the end a kind offer to someone who might be grieving, or in pain. At their foundation, both modes try to provide a sense of trust that is absent from prayer, an answer to doubt and distrust.
Christ says in John 14:27 “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.” The peace of God is greater than the peace of the world, that which we offer to one another. Jesus’s words are deceptively simply; after all, what could be more difficult for us than to simply be unafraid in the face of so much beyond our control? But the peace of the world is fleeting, a limited thing that at best can only provide temporary comfort.
Is it the manual acts of a post-Christian media culture, buying a crystal or burning some incense or whatever magical advice Instagram gives, that offer comfort, trying to “bypass” God? Priests hate this one weird trick! There’s something easier in saying “I have the secret formula” than trusting a God who might not be there. Maybe the popularity of folk magic and psychologizing language is because it feels like you’re doing something real, in the face of so much distrust and uncertainty in the world. Perhaps the true start is viewing prayer not as a series of levers to pull, but instead as a liberating utterance that sidesteps doubt and contrivance and rejects our own heart’s devices and desires, to paraphrase the Prayer Book’s Confession. There is, even in Scripture, a tension between doubt and faith — as Christ says to Thomas in John 20:29, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
The hardest thing about prayer and faith is to take that leap into trust, rejecting the easy assurances of magic and psychology. It certainly isn’t easy, though. Prayer, even in the set form of the Confession of the BCP, offers space for turning away from the deceptive assurances of ritual magic and psychologizing language, the devices and desires of our hearts that confuse us or hinder us; we can say where we have failed, where we have struggled, where we have failed to love or to care for others. Prayer to God allows us to take the first steps into uncertainty, to be vulnerable, and to offer up that vulnerability to a transcendent peace that we cannot find in the world. Like the Psalmist, who always returns from their despair to trust and faith, we can start to pray by surrendering everything in ourselves, both fear and love and all else, asking the Uncreated Creator to simply take it all.
