Everything Happens with Kate Bowler · Everything Happens Studios

What If Prayer Isn’t What You Think It Is? with Malcolm Guite

March 17, 2026·37 min·2 clips

Malcolm Guite reads his sonnet 'Christian Plummet' — written for a friend with depression — in which the speaker descends into a 'cold dark well' and discovers that Christ sinks lower still 'to hold you in his love.'

Prayer starts low. The guest takes up George Herbert’s phrase, the Christian plummet, and finds more room in it than first expected. Then Jesus falls. While writing the Stations of the Cross, he assumes one fall gives a poet enough to work with. The second fall changes that. Repetition matters because a bruise can be struck again. By the third fall, he says he had reached the end of himself as a poet, and that is where depression entered the poem. The word lands hard, partly because it breaks a kind of taboo. Herbert stays close by. His sonnet on prayer, built from tumbling images instead of one neat sentence, gives the guest permission to think without flattening the mystery. The result does not tidy prayer up. It makes prayer feel less like climbing out of pain and more like going down into the real weight of being human, bruised, faithful, still speaking. A friend is there too. The guest says he was writing for a Christian bandmate who had faced depression directly, which keeps the theology from floating away. The poem becomes a hand held out to someone sinking.

As heard by us

Prayer is treated as a way of sounding depth, not offering certainty.

Malcolm Guite reflects on the 15 sonnets on the Stations of the Cross and on how Jesus' repeated falls shape the poems' attention to bruising, depression, and the difficulty of naming pain.

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Why you'd press play

When prayer feels less like a formula and more like a plummet.

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