Twelve Minutes With the Jesuits
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We’ve spent years in conversation with many hundreds of Christian thought leaders, asking them questions. Among these questions is this: What resources have made the biggest difference in your spiritual life? Their answers have been remarkably consistent. This is one of the ten most recommended.
“[Pray As You Go] has become a quiet companion for hundreds of thousands around the world.”
—Emma Hudson
On Ash Wednesday 2006, a British Jesuit named Peter Scally posted a short prayer session online and invited commuters to listen on the way to work. The word podcast had only just made it into the dictionary. The iPhone was more than a year away. The first session opened with the choir of Westminster Cathedral singing Allegri’s “Miserere,” and a reader asking listeners to look around wherever they were and consider the need for mercy there. Scally, who had helped build the Irish Jesuits’ Sacred Space website, planned to keep the project going through Lent and see what happened. By late March, NPR reported that the sessions had been downloaded more than 33,000 times, some in Australia and that the Jesuits were considering an extension past Easter. Twenty years later, Pray As You Go still publishes a new session every day. Apple stopped making the iPod in 2022. The sessions kept coming.
That persistence is worth noticing in a category now crowded with venture-backed apps and subscription tiers. Pray As You Go has neither. The Jesuits in Britain produce it, fund it through donations, and include no advertising. Its makers say more than half a million people pray with it each year and about 134,000 use it in a given month, the largest group in the United States, followed by the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa and the Philippines. Regular listeners come back about seven times a month. By 2020, The Tablet was putting visits to the English-language site at more than 30 million a year, and sessions were made available through Amazon’s Alexa for listeners with poor eyesight or limited dexterity. BBC One’s Songs of Praise featured the app in 2023. And according to its own description, the audience splits roughly evenly between Catholics and Protestants, which, for a Jesuit product, is the more surprising number.
Open the app on a weekday morning and one thing is waiting for you: the day’s session, ten to thirteen minutes long. Press play. Bells ring. Music follows, and it might be plainchant, a cathedral choir, a chamber piece or a song by Ladysmith Black Mambazo. A calm voice, most often British, reads a passage of Scripture, usually the Gospel appointed for that day in the Catholic lectionary. Then the voice asks a few questions. They are not study questions. Which word or phrase stayed with you? Where would you be standing if you were in this scene? What do you want to say to Jesus about it? After each one there is silence, long enough to feel awkward the first time, and you are expected to use it. The passage is read again. A short prayer closes the session, and the app goes quiet. Behind that front door there is an archive of previous days and a menu of other material, including Examen prayers for the end of the day, imaginative contemplations on Gospel scenes, prayers for sleep, prayer guides for mental health, prayers for children, seasonal retreats, and sessions in British and American Sign Language. Many listeners never open the menu. The daily session is the product.
Jesuits and others trained in Ignatian spirituality write the sessions, and the credits list dozens of writers, readers and musicians. The trial, supposed to end at Easter 2006, became permanent after a quarter of a million downloads. By 2008, five million sessions had been downloaded. The app arrived in 2014. Sister versions now exist in about ten languages, among them Spanish, French, Polish, Ukrainian and Arabic, each with its own music and voices. Emma Hudson directs the English original.
The method behind it is five centuries old. Ignatius of Loyola, the Basque soldier who founded the Jesuits, taught people to pray by placing themselves inside a Gospel scene with all their senses, and to end each day by reviewing it for signs of God at work. His Spiritual Exercises assume a director who asks a question and then gets out of the way. Pray As You Go is that director, reduced to a pair of earbuds. For a Protestant listener, the appeal is the method. Most of us were taught to read Scripture to understand it. The Ignatian way reads it slowly, aloud and twice, and listens for what God is saying through it now. Ignatius called the conversation at the end of a meditation a colloquy, a plain talk with Christ as one friend speaks to another, and the app’s questions tend to steer you toward one. The app never explains the passage. It waits with you. For someone who finds Bible study easy and silence hard, that discipline is worth borrowing. It also solves the practical problem that undoes most resolutions to pray: where in the day to make time. Scally built this for a train. It works as well in a parked car.
Todd Hunter, the founding bishop of the Anglican Church in North America’s Diocese of Churches for the Sake of Others, now retired, described his routine in his newsletter last June. “Most mornings, my day starts with using the app Pray As You Go,” he wrote. He listens on the drive to the gym or the office, and when the bells sound, he prays a short prayer of his own, asking his soul to wake up to God’s kingdom. It sets the direction for the rest of his day, he said. Hunter came to faith in the Jesus Movement, served as national director of the Association of Vineyard Churches, and led Alpha USA before becoming an Anglican bishop. That a man with that résumé starts his mornings with a Jesuit podcast says a good deal about how easily the app crosses church lines.
Pray As You Go
Start with today. Get the free app from the Apple App Store or Google Play, or go to prayasyougo.org, where the same sessions stream in a browser. The sessions are also available as a podcast, so you can play them on Apple Podcasts or Spotify without installing anything new. Use earbuds; the music and the silences work better in them. Leave the archive and the retreats alone. Play the day’s session at the same point in your routine for a week, on the commute if you have one, and answer the questions even on days when the passage seems flat. If the vocabulary is unfamiliar, the website’s About page explains the Ignatian approach in a few plain paragraphs. After a week, add the Examen at night. It is Ignatius’s evening review. You thank God for the day, walk back through it, notice where you were drawn toward him and where you pulled away, ask forgiveness, and look to tomorrow. It is the app’s second-best feature and, for people who already read the Bible every morning, may be the better place to begin. If you want a season with a shape to it, the app publishes daily retreats for Lent and other seasons. This past Lent, Cameron Bellm wrote “Holy Longing.”
Two things a Protestant reader should know going in. The app is Catholic and does not pretend otherwise. Readings follow the Catholic lectionary, so a few times a year the passage comes from Sirach, Wisdom or another book not in a Protestant Bible and saints are remembered on their feast days. The wider library has included the rosary and the Stations of the Cross. The daily session itself stays with Scripture, music and questions, and listeners from any tradition can use it as it is. Second, it is not Bible study and has never claimed to be. Its own description has said for years that it is meant as a framework for the listener’s prayer, not a sermon or a lesson. It offers no commentary, no application point and no cross-references. Anyone who wants the passage explained will need a second resource.
The app marked its twentieth birthday in March with Companion Songs, an album recorded with The Porter’s Gate, the ecumenical worship collective, and with Pray with the Pope, a monthly session built around the Pope’s prayer intentions and made with the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network. Scally, who later founded the Jesuits’ online journal Thinking Faith, recorded a message for the occasion. The ministry says its next push is toward families, schools and the Deaf community, and Irish Sign Language sessions were added this year. None of that alters the core of the thing. Tomorrow morning, a new session will begin, about twelve minutes long, and it will start with bells.
Pray As You Go is available for free on the Apple App Store and Google Play.