Why We Pray: Israel, Gaza and Complexity Tolerance

How the psychology of prayer can help us navigate complexity

I’m speaking at a free summit hosted by Natasja Pelgrom called ‘Stewards of the Sacred’ which you can check out here. A reminder that New Ways of Knowing tickets are 30% off for paid subscribers. Also, Jim Rutt has generously waived his fee and we can now offer 10 more scholarships.

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Recently, I found myself on my knees in prayer. Head bowed, hands clasped. Rainy light bled through my window as miles away a brutal conflict raged in Israel and Gaza. My mind was filled by the inexcusable barbarism of Hamas, the unjust suffering of ordinary Palestinians, and questions of where it will all lead.

Why I had chosen to embody a posture of prayer, physically and existentially, wasn’t entirely clear to me. Prayer is an ancient practice, one we often turn to in times of uncertainty. Today, we’re bombarded by a 24 hour news cycle that promises to remedy our uncertainty, but the conflict between Israel and Hamas has led to a chaotic breakdown in sensemaking across mainstream and social media.

College students at elite US universities protest in sympathy with the barbaric acts of Hamas. An Israeli policeman interrupts a reporter to demand he ‘say good things’ before promising to slaughter Hamas. On social media, people argue over historical maps of Israeli and Palestinian territory, debating cultures they don’t understand, and places they have never been. 

The complex reality of the conflict creates an overwhelming amount of contradiction and uncertainty for anyone watching from afar. In our attempts to regain a sense of control, too often we respond to its human tragedy and political complexity by asking ‘what position do I need to take’ instead of ‘what feelings are asking to be felt’?

This is a piece inspired by the second question, and an attempt to unravel another that’s been gnawing at me: was it worthwhile for me to pray? Does it ever make sense for anyone to pray in response to geopolitical events?

To answer that, I’ll explore the psychology and sociology of this most ancient of human practices, and apply it to a concept called ‘Complexity Tolerance’ that can shed light on what happens in the cultural and media conversation at times like this. Above all, I will examine the surprising role prayer can still play in a technological world, and how it can open us to new ways of knowing that we desperately need. 

Why We Pray 

When we think of prayer, we might picture a simpler time. Another age, before our high-tech, complex and relentless information ecology started overwhelming us. So what value does this ancient practice have in helping us navigate what’s happening in the Middle East today, or to thrive in a world that seems so far removed from any sense of peace and tranquility?

To answer that we need to examine what exactly prayer is. This isn’t an easy task, because there are many lenses through which to view the act of prayer, from theology and psychology to sociology and neuroscience. In their book The Psychology of Prayer: A Scientific Approach, psychologists Bernard Spilka and Kevin L. Ladd argue that all these frames are important to understand such a vast and universal human behaviour. They define prayer as: 

“...an appeal to a higher power, invariably a deity conceptualized in a relational sense. It can be formal or conversational, enunciated or silent, utilizing written words, song lyrics, or contemporaneous utterances; it can be carefully circumscribed or spontaneous, public or private, involving gestures, body postures, oral formulas, repetition, concentration on particular topics, meditation, and various emotions; it can also stimulate or be stimulated by our emotions.”

For most native English speakers, our concept of prayer will be heavily influenced by the Judeo-Christian forms, perhaps best expressed by Rabbi Emeritus Marc Gellman in a 2008 article in the New York Times.  

“When you come right down to it, there are only four basic prayers. Gimme! Thanks! Oops! And Wow! [...] Wow! are prayers of praise and wonder at the creation. Oops! is asking for forgiveness. Gimme! Is a request or a petition. Thanks! Is expressing gratitude. That’s the entire Judeo-Christian doxology. That’s what we teach our kids in religious school.”

For many secular people, prayer may have a connotation of wish-fulfilment and fantasy; something irrational that gets in the way of practical action. This misreading usually ignores the vital cognitive and social functions it fulfils, and how widespread it is.

In a time of declining religious attendance globally, prayer isn’t going the same way. In the US, a Pew Research survey from 2008 revealed that 76% of Americans surveyed pray at least once a month, with 55% praying daily and 16% weekly. 38% who put down ‘none’ for religion nevertheless reported that they prayed once a month. 

In her book Strange Rites, Tara Isabella Burton argues that the ‘nones’, people who often identify as ‘spiritual but not religious’,  have created ‘remixed’ religions whereby they pick and choose different practices, theologies and moralities and bundle them into personalised spiritual practices. Considering how many practices are theoretically up for grabs, why is prayer still so popular? Perhaps because it fulfils an essential psychological and social function that we can’t live without.

Prayer and Agency

Prayer may do something quite specific that makes it unique as a practice for dealing with complexity, intensity and a lack of control. In her paper A Sociological Consideration of Prayer and Agency, scholar Anna Sun argues that the act of prayer is fundamentally linked to how we manage agency - our experience of being an active participant in the world. Prayer is, as she points out, both private and social. Private, in that it’s deeply intimate and personal. Social, because as Wittginstein argued, communication is inherently a shared activity. As Sun puts it, "you cannot have a private language that is only meaningful to oneself…” In other words, ‘The divine cannot merely exist for only one person… the normative quality of the divine comes from the fact that it is treated as the divine by many others.” Prayer is a practice that connects ‘me’ with ‘us’ and ‘it’.

In this way, prayer has a unique role in how we understand our agency because it blends our internal and external locus of control. Locus of control is an idea in psychology, and increasingly sociology, that explains whether we interpret our lives as being controlled by our inner world and actions (internal locus of control), or by forces outside of us (external locus of control). Prayer paradoxically brings both together - I make a conscious action to pray to the divine, which is outside of and beyond me. 

This ability to reframe our locus of control is essential in the times we live in. As both Daniel Schmachtenberger and C. Thi Nguyen have argued, modern life places tremendous pressure on us as individuals. There are constant demands on our sensemaking and morality. Being engaged in culture involves being asked to answer over and over: ‘Where do you stand? What do you represent? What’s good and what’s ‘problematic’? On an issue like Israel and Palestine, this pressure is heightened considerably.

A recent Onion article titled The Onion Stands with Israel because it seems like you get in less trouble for that points to this condition. When we look at a large geopolitical tragedy, we are faced with the dissonance of being bombarded by information about it but unable to do anything significant. Socially, we’re often pressured into having a position that’s acceptable to our in-group. Under these pressures, something has to give, and the easiest solution is to go with the status quo. But increasingly, there is no status quo. We live in a time of shifting sands, a fractured media landscape and competing memetic tribes. 

Sometimes we fall into a particular position to appease our tribe. At other times, we might decide to bury our heads in the sand. Or, to occupy a seemingly safe ‘meta’ position where we say a lot but mean nothing. All of these choices usually lead to poor sensemaking, inhumane perspectives, and faulty reasoning that can’t capture enough complexity to move us toward meaningful, compassionate action. Regardless of what strategy we employ, we are often responding to untenable demands on our agency.

This is why prayer can be such a powerful practice. At its core, prayer is a practice whereby we recognise, accept and process the limits of our agency. 

Prayer and Categories

So how is this relevant to us when we’re doom scrolling through news about the Israel and Gaza war? It has to do with the relationship between agency and our perceptual frame on the world, which involves the categories we put things in. For example, “Palestine is righteous, Israel is oppressive.” A complex, horrific event forces us to challenge our categories, which are partly what we use to act in the world.

As John Vervaeke has argued, horror always exists in the space between categories. Zombies are both dead and alive. Werewolves are both animals and humans. Terrorists are both humans and monsters. When we’re faced with this kind of disruption of what we thought was ‘normal’, we run the risk of losing our centre, freezing and being unable to act meaningfully. We risk being stuck in a nightmare where we can’t move our legs to run or flex our arms to fight. 

As philosopher Charles Taylor argues in his paper ‘What is Human Agency?’, one way to respond to overwhelming demands on our agency is to practice ‘radical self-reflection’. Our ideologies and categories give us a ‘yardstick’ by which to judge our own actions and those of others, but what happens when that yardstick doesn’t cut it any more? To put it another way, what should we do when our existing categories are out of date? For Taylor, we have to go into ‘radical questioning’. Then, he writes, 

“...what takes the place of the yardstick is my deepest unstructured sense of what is important, which is as yet inchoate and which I am trying to bring to definition. I am trying to see reality afresh and form more adequate categories to describe it. To do this I am trying to open myself, use all of my deepest, unstructured sense of things in order to come to a new clarity.”

I would argue that you can’t do this without breaking your existing frame, and you can’t do that unless you orient yourself to a power greater than yourself, however you might conceive that. You can’t let go into nothing; there is always some deeper ground of being or perception to catch you. Prayer does exactly this; it is an act of faith, an act in which we willingly let go of categories and open ourselves to new ones. 

The nature of those categories matters. To expand our awareness, they should include more complexity and compassion than our previous categories. As sociologist Hans Joas argues in his book The Creativity of Action, the relentless choices and ‘increased contingency’ we’re faced with in the world today, for example “what position should I take on Israel and Palestine?’ can be met by developing our ‘empathic faculties’. For Joas, an essential part of figuring out what we “wish to do, ought to do, are able to do” can only be done by people “empathising with the unique circumstances of their partners in action and action situations.”  

Prayer alone won’t change the situation you’re seeing while you’re doom scrolling. It won’t help you comfort a mother desperately pleading for her daughter to be released by Hamas. However, what it can do is help us develop more complex and empathetic categories that can help us handle what we’re faced with, and determine how to act within our capacity.  

Inherent in this is understanding what kind of actions we actually have the power to take, which is usually much more local and personal when we’re confronted with geopolitics. In New Ways of Knowing, we’ll explore a previous step in that, which is mapping out our ‘spheres of agency’ (knowing where we can have an impact and where we can’t) which is crucial to being able to take meaningful action. To then act meaningfully within those spheres, we have to build our complexity tolerance and emotional resilience.

Complexity Tolerance

The temptation to turn away from the complexity of the world today is powerful. Maybe, like me, you’ve fantasised about running away to an off-grid cabin. Or joining a community in the wilds that won’t be affected by the violence and blindness of modern society. But there is no escaping something we are all part of. There is only adaptation. 

So how do we adapt to an increasingly complex world? We learn to expand our window of ‘complexity tolerance.’ I first heard this term from author and mindfulness teacher David Treleaven, in a film we recorded together in 2021. The term is borrowed from psychiatrist Dan Siegel’s concept of the ‘window of tolerance’. 

Siegel’s theory is that we all have a range of emotional experiences we can comfortably process. This is our ‘window of tolerance’, or ‘zone of optimal arousal’. However, when we go beyond it we can lose ourselves. As Siegel describes in his book The Developing Mind:

“A flood of energy may bombard the mind and take over a number of processes, ranging from rational thinking to social behavior. At this point, emotions may flood conscious awareness. Some have called this an emotional “hijacking,” “breakdown,” or “flooding.” In such a situation, one’s behavior may no longer feel volitional, and thoughts may feel out of control.”

Treleaven, drawing on the work of Siegel, suggests that the same capacity applies for how we cope with complexity. When a problem is complex, it changes as we’re trying to make sense of it. As Nora Bateson argues in her idea of ‘transcontextual knowing’, that asks us to take a fundamentally different stance to reinterpret the problem, because it changes across multiple overlapping contexts. We have to be flexible, to dance with nuance, contradiction and uncertainty. If we can’t, or don’t know how to do this, too much complexity hijacks our ability to make sense effectively and sends us into a kind of fragmented, aggressive or dissociated state.

In Siegel’s model, our emotions 'hijack’ our thoughts. I propose that when we leave our complexity window, our thoughts hijack our emotions. We start to override unbearable feelings with simple narratives, ideologies, conspiracy theories or solutions. It should be noted that these processes are likely intertwined, as many cognitive scientists and psychologists would point out there isn’t really a binary between ‘thinking and feeling’; our consciousness always involves both.

We all fall out of our window of tolerance, no matter how hard we try to hold multiple perspectives or resource ourselves emotionally. In Siegel’s original model, we go into hyperarousal (fight or flight) or hypoarousal (shut down). In the complexity tolerance model, hyperarousal equates to doubling down into false certainty. Alternatively we might fall into hypoarousal, a depressed state of freezing and shutting down. This equates to a state of political apathy, nihilism and cut-offness. 

The question then becomes how to stay in our window as often as possible. How, in a world of increasing political, social, and technological complexity, we stay present and focused. How do face complexity head on, not to deny it or hide from it, but to embrace it?

Breathing Complexity 

No one has a full answer to that question, but it certainly involves feeling deeply and thinking flexibly. Increasing our complexity tolerance is a process of building our emotional resilience and our cognitive flexibility at the same time. We also need to develop our knowledge base around a particular problem or situation: reading up on history, gaining context. All of this helps us to navigate and embody many perspectives at once. Not to ‘know what to do’ or ‘know how to solve it’ but to have enough of a working understanding that we can orient ourselves within the issue at hand. 

Building emotional resilience means expanding our capacity to feel. To really feel. To feel so deeply we are moved and wounded and raw. Along with prayer, relational practices like inquiry and therapy can play a role in this, as can intentional compassion like the Buddhist practice of Metta, in which we actively engage in loving kindness toward others. 

When faced with the horrors humanity is capable of, it’s completely natural we might choose to cut off or avoid. I do it all the time. However, I’ve noticed I lose part of myself when I do. The reason to cut off is that it feels impossible to act if I’m too impacted by what’s happening in the world, or even by people I care about deeply. It makes it hard to get things done, to move forward. However, as Brené Brown points out, “you can’t selectively numb emotions”. If only. Instead, numbing exacts a heavy price. By not feeling particular emotions, we cut ourselves off from the very feelings that connect us to the depths of our humanity: our empathy and connectedness.

The temptation is either to function or to feel. We can do both. As well as practices that help us to feel and relate, we need to be able to do that while still keeping our agency, focus and discernment. To be mindful and connected to ourselves without, as some Zen masters have put it, becoming a ‘stone Buddha’ that can pay attention non-judgmentally but not really engage with the world. Attention and discernment, through meditation and contemplation practices, combined with embodiment and relational practices, help to ground us in the present moment and the reality of the body. 

For paid subscribers, I have a guided ‘Centering Practice’ I’ve found useful, which you’ll find in the ‘reading and resource’ list at the end of this piece.

When we allow ourselves to feel and discern at once, we find new depths not just in ourselves, but in the situation we’re trying to make sense of. This is the idea behind a practice I developed with Trish Blain called Clay Manning. It takes the idea of Steel Manning - a rhetorical technique in which we take our opponents strongest argument and use it as a basis for our own response. In essence, giving them the benefit of the doubt and taking their position seriously. However, this only touches on what John Vervaeke refers to as ‘propositional knowing’, or ‘knowing that’. To really feel another perspective, we have to engage with what it’s like to be them. Clay Manning is a process whereby we allow ourselves to be touched and impacted by their perspective, while still staying rooted in our own. Clay moulds, but only to a point.

Feeling multiple perspectives at once is hard, but we can at least try. Just how hard it is has been on my mind a lot as I’ve watched the war between Israel and Hamas unfold. Like many, I’ve been reflecting on the parallels between October 7th, 2023 and September 11, 2001. I was 13 when the World Trade Center was attacked, and for much of my teenage life, Islamic terrorism was one of my biggest fears. The international school I attended was seen as a target, so we had several lockdowns in which we’d hide under our desks while Mossad agents roamed the halls looking for security weaknesses. Shortly after I graduated, two of my school friends were murdered in an Islamic terror attack in Brussels airport. I can empathise with the blinding hatred toward Hamas, and an overwhelming desire for revenge.  

At the same time, I have traditionally been sympathetic to the struggles faced by the Palestinian people and critical of the Israeli government’s policies. Like many around the world, I’ve also felt a strong sense of injustice around the civilian deaths in the air strikes of this war. Over the last few weeks, I’ve also been going through a very intense process in my personal life which is defined by uncertainty and powerlessness, lending an agonising combination of emotional and cognitive uncertainty. As I’ve tried to hold all of this, I’ve fallen out of my window of complexity tolerance multiple times. 

Beauty and Hope 

This, eventually, is what would lead me to pray for the first time in a long time. Prayer felt like the right thing to do, because none of the personal associations and feelings shared above really give me meaningful insight into what’s happening in Israel and Palestine. They don’t provide me with good sensemaking tools to come to a clear position. They don’t significantly affect the agency I have in the situation. 

Sometimes our only option, when we feel lost, is to let go. To release our grip on what we’re holding and open ourselves to what we don’t know, and what we can’t yet feel. Closing our eyes in prayer is not an act of escaping reality or spinning truth into something more palatable, but an honest and visceral engagement with reality and the truth of what is. As Mark Twain put it in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, “you can’t pray a lie.” 

Prayer is deeply connected to our sense of truth, and also to our sense of beauty. Faced with horror, we can easily lose touch with beauty and hope, and become mired in confusion and grief. Prayer is at its heart a return to a beauty beyond us, even in a context where it seems unthinkable or inappropriate. It brings us to what the German mystic Meister Eckhart called ‘the place in the soul that neither time nor space, nor no created thing can touch.’

This is a quote the Irish poet and theologian John O’Donohue was fond of. O’Donohue’s explanation of prayer is one of the most beautiful I’ve found. He writes in Eternal Echoes:

“One of the most tender images is the human person at prayer. When the body gathers itself before the Divine, a stillness deepens. The blaring din of distraction ceases and the deeper tranquility within the heart envelops the body. To see someone at prayer is a touching sight. For a while they have become unmoored from the grip of society, work and role. It is as if they have chosen to enter into a secret belonging carried within the soul; they rest in that inner temple impervious to outer control or claiming. A person at prayer also evokes the sense of vulnerability and fragility. Their prayer reminds us that we are mere guests of the earth, pilgrims who always walk on unsteady ground, carrying in earthen vessels multitudes of longing.”

For O’Donohue, prayer is a return. As he describes it, “There is a place in you that has never been wounded, where there is still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you…the intention of prayer, and spirituality, and love, is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.”

When we touch that sanctuary, we touch all other living people. And in this way praying for another isn’t an act of demand for their suffering to end, even if we desperately hope it will. It is a reminder that every human being dwells in that place, and that even when faced with the most horrific depravity and pain we can make our way back there together.

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For paid subscribers there is a ‘reading and resource’ list below the paywall line. This one includes a Sensemaking 101 session with Daniel Schmachtenberger around agency from a few years ago I felt was relevant to this piece, along with a short review of Freddie de Boer’s new book ‘How Elites Stole the Social Justice Movement’ and some recommended shows and podcast episodes.