Prayers of Reorientation
A Feature Review of
In the Low: Honest Prayers for Dark Seasons
Justin McRoberts and Scott Erickson
Hardcover: Baker Books, 2025
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Reviewed by Emily Cash
In the Low: Honest Prayers for Dark Seasons by Justin McRoberts and Scott Erickson is the newest installment of the duo’s celebrated collaborative prayer books. But unlike the other three iterations—each of which guides readers in a time-bound practice of prayer—this book attends to the experience of “being in the Low,” and offers the specific kinds of prayers one might need to speak (even if wordlessly) from such an experiential space.
The descriptor of “being in the Low” is genius in its generality—while the book specifically references depression and anxiety at several points, anyone who has been “in the Low” intuitively knows the range of feelings and fears in question, regardless of what provoked or sustains that Low experience. This book truly is for everyone: no one escapes being human without seasons ‘in the Low,'” especially given the inhumanity of our modern cultural milieu(s). In the Low would therefore be a tender, accessible guide for anyone navigating a season of mourning or disappointment or terrifying ambiguity. But the book is especially fit for those of us who do not merely visit the Low but frequently abide there, those who have (for various reasons) found sorrow to be a familiar companion.
The book opens with a brief introduction in which McRoberts and Erickson assert that the book itself is meant to be a companion, a kind of secondary passenger that knows sorrow and can therefore hold space for and interpret its presence. They describe the book’s words and images as “excavation tools” to help readers exhume the deep prayer that is inevitably happening in the human heart as it converses with the Divine, even if below the layer of consciousness. They credit Johann Hari’s Lost Connections as the inspiration for the book’s structure, which divides the anthology of prayers into five sections that respectively facilitate reconnection to the present, to the past, to one’s larger context, to one’s values, and to the future. Each section begins with a brief introductory prose reflection and includes an iteration of “The Welcoming Prayer,” posturing readers for the kind of present-anchored prayer built from a vulnerable expression of what is. While the authors clarify the book need not be read sequentially, it is clear even from the section titles that there is a loosely linear progression to the prayers, even if that linearity invites lingering over particular prayers or looping back to preceding sections.
As with their other books, the bulk of In the Low is devoted to paired words and images, which are both mutually-interpreting and mutually-enriching. The nature and discernibility of the correspondence in each set varies: sometimes it is stark enough to immediately imprint on the reader’s imagination, while sometimes requiring more interpretive patience and curiosity. But, cumulatively, these prayers gently and patiently invite the reader to see: to see more accurately (and therefore inhabit more fully) the wonder of her incarnation, her inherent interconnection, her dependence, her smallness, her inherent worthiness, and the rich texture of her life … which includes being in the Low. And, perhaps just as importantly, the book empowers the reader to see her experience of Lowness as (at least partially) responsive to environments that are at odds with human flourishing, and to therefore trust what Lowness exposes and undermines.
Many of the prayers have an instructive quality, calling on the Divine to “teach” or “remind” the petitioner of some particular truth, to help “trust” a given process, or to extend the courage necessary to believe something that, in the Low, feels otherwise unbelievable. And the prayers’ instruction is rich: not only can you sense the authors’ own hard-won testimony behind the words and images, but (for those with ears to hear) they are threaded with the wisdom and poetry of scripture. So the prayers are less raw expressions of Lowness, and more benedictory guides for perceiving and integrating that experience. Not only do many of them read like affirmations, but several are actually encouragements directed to the reader, rather than scripts for the reader’s own second-person address to God. In other words, they are sense-making prayers—or, to use Walter Brueggemann’s language, they are aimed at reorientation, even if they are borne of and offered from disorientation.
On the one hand, this is precisely what makes the prayers a remarkable gift to the reader — it can be almost impossible to get any traction in prayer while in the Low, let alone to pray kindly or intentionally or with vision for oneself. But, even as there is no hint of spiritual-bypassing in the book, it does make one wonder what exactly is meant by the subtitle’s descriptor of the prayers as ‘honest.’ Rather than an unfiltered expression of sorrow (which, I believe, also has an invaluable role in prayer), perhaps these prayers are “honest” because they look so deeply into the Low as to see through it to that which is most real…God’s intimate proximity and tender, integrative, redemptive love.
Personally, that invitation to see brought me repeatedly to the kind of tears that don’t blur vision so much as correct it — the book was, and will surely continue to be, a means of grace to me. It gifted me words that have already intermingled with my own, and images that I (mercifully) cannot unsee. I know I’ll frequently return to this book, not only with different needs, but perhaps even in different ways: I’m already interested to play with reading it in reverse (i.e., ‘reading’ the images before the words), to attempt penning my own prayers in response to the images, and to fill in blank spaces with additional shapes or colors or words.
My main critique of the book is that it lacks any reflection on why one could or should pray while in the Low — or, assuming that prayer is intrinsic to human existence, why one might pray consciously and intentionally with the support of an external guide. That ambiguity potentially serves the book’s accessibility, insofar as it keeps the often-constrictive or triggering trappings of traditional religious expression from unnecessarily discouraging the reader. But, as I see it, the gift of prayer (even when it takes the form of spoken affirmations or self-reorientation) presumes that the Divine is responsive to us in the specificity of our communication. These are the kinds of prayers that I imagine God delights to answer, and I would want readers to be conscious of God’s power and proclivity to give to them in accordance with their expressed desires.
I also wish the book contained prayers that were more explicitly communal (where the praying voice was “us” or “we”), and/or prayers scripted for multiple speakers, so that the reader “in the Low” could easily draw others into prayerful communion.
With that said, this book is an honest treasure: I will keep copies of it stocked on my pastoral bookshelf and keep my own dog-eared copy close at hand, for in it McRoberts and Erickson draw the reader into conscious connection with the God who bends Low to listen to us (Ps. 116:2, NLT).
Emily Cash
Emily Cash serves as a pastor at Valley Springs Fellowship in Warsaw, Indiana. She cohosts the podcastHoly Writ,a conversation at the intersection of literature and scripture, and authors the Substack newsletterDriftwood Prayers. Her scholarly work and ministry explore how biblical interpretation, spiritual formation, and practices of dialogical connection converge in the life of the church.
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