How Women Pray When the World is On Fire

In my late teens, I spent every summer in the woods. Not because I liked them. I feel primarily lost in the mountains. But the woods offered me something that I couldn’t find anywhere else for the rest of the school year: a chance to not care what I looked like. This is what I went into the woods for; to abandon my blow dryer, any all mirrors, and any and all efforts to make myself look like what others expect. And this is how I know so much about spelunking.  

While hiking through the Black Forest or the Blue Ridge mountains, my teen adventure group would put on our helmets and headlamps and explore the underground tunnels and caves that exist within and beneath the mountains like its arteries and internal organs. This is where I learned to breathe where there’s very little air, and this is where I learned how to remain calm when I’m wedged in a dark tunnel, unable to move freely, with the looming presence of a literal mountain above me.  

And this is why my strange, and carefully honed skills in spelunking are coming in handy right now.

When you’re in a tunnel and your backpack for example gets caught on a ledge, impeding you from moving forward. Several things happen all at once; the heart rate goes up, rapid breathing is next, and then the thoughts– which are unhelpful flashes of being trapped in that exact spot for eternity. To be able to maneuver through that panic, I learned to immediately close my eyes.

The external world is so unhelpful in moments of crisis. The sooner I closed my eyes the better. The quicker I could pull myself back from the onslaught of anxiety. And as soon as I could no longer see anything, this is when I could hear more clearly. And I only ever heard two questions, “Where’s the light?” “What’s the next move?”

Even if I was stuck headed deeper into the cave, sensing where the light was, where the entrance to the cave was in relation to where I was stuck, gave me a sense of peace. Then once I had my bearings, I just focused on what I needed to do next. I didn’t try to figure out how to get unstuck.  

And one other thing. When I was down there, eyes closed, training my tiny trapped body not to panic in its trapped-ness, I would sometimes see this gorgeous, pinprick flash of otherworldly light. Just for a quick instant. It gave me this sense that everything’s going to be ok. And that “sense” was more of an actual feeling in my body– like a miraculous calm sweeping through me.  

Later of course, above ground, and out of the dark, I would explain it away with a lack of oxygen, or lack of electrolytes. But when it happens, it feels like a reminder that there’s more good, and more guidance here than we can sometimes recognize or trust.

Somewhere between the gun violence in our country, an assignation interrupted by another school shooting, and scenes from Gaza, and now the ICE raids, my backpack got caught on a ledge deep in a tunnel beneath a mountain. And I couldn’t breathe.  

The rush of panic made everything too heavy. And then right here in the middle of my living room, I closed my eyes and heard those two questions that used to guide me: “Where’s the light?” and “What’s the next move?”

Nothing has felt like enough, everything has felt like screaming into a monolith, hopeless and fixed– like we’re hurtling toward this inevitable recoil to the set ways of the patriarchy, to the systems of unjust power that have no concept of the need to change.

I kept my eyes closed. The external world is so unhelpful in moments of crisis.  

Then I suddenly remembered a documentary I saw years ago titled Pray The Devil Back To Hell. It’s about the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace led by Leymah Gbowee and how these women, Christian and Muslim, came together to end Liberia’s civil war in 2003.  

I opened my eyes, went over to my laptop and started researching all of the global non-violent women-led movements over the past century. And somewhere deep into the history of how women, mothers, known as Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, or the mothers of the disappeared, who ended the Junta’s reign of terror in Argentina, I saw the quick flash of otherworldly light.

I have a word document now titled “How Women Pray When The World Is On Fire” – compiling the times in world history when women came together and shifted what was possible.

This feels like knowing where the light is.  

If the women in the arena, at the end of Saint Thecla’s story, in The Acts of Paul and Thecla, within the context of the first century, can figure out how “to all cry out, in a loud voice as if from one mouth,” I have to imagine there’s a way to find a twenty-first-century version of that same triumph.

There’s a precedent. There are many. All throughout history. And from what I’ve read so far, the red thread that connects them in their movements is that their actions are small, but enduring.  

Their actions are visible, unexpected, and local, in their own backyards. Their actions are about showing up with what they already have access to, or already have on them– like the women in the arena standing up to help save Thecla, throwing cardamon, rose petals and nard from their pockets and baskets to lull the wild beasts to sleep.  

And the way to save ourselves, and each one of us, has always been right here, within. When we can get still and quiet enough to trust what arises behind our closed eyes. This is how women pray when the world is on fire.  

Practice with Meggan at Kripalu

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March 11, 2026

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How Women Pray When the World Is On Fire

June 12–14, 2026