Streaking Toward Sainthood
How Hallow Makes the Parasocial Personal
“Hello, and welcome to Hallow. We’re grateful to pray the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary with you today.” This is the first thing that greets me every morning—okay, the second. The first is my alarm clock, but I’ve barely thrown the covers off before I’m being welcomed into prayer with my friendly “Hallow guides”—the voices who guide me through the various prayers and meditations with which I begin my day. If you’re unfamiliar with Hallow, it’s a popular Catholic prayer and meditation app that has taken the world by storm.
For me, every day starts with three things: Hallow, my rosaries, and a strong cup of coffee. Most weekdays my getting ready for work routine is itself an act of prayer to center myself as I prepare to greet whatever the day brings. I’m either praying the Rosary while making the bed or listening to the Daily Reflection with Bible scholar Jeff Cavins while brushing my teeth. Abby and the Daily Saint keep me company with my coffee, and sandwiched somewhere in between, Jonathan prays with me through the morning offering, St. Michael prayer, and litany of humility.
Whenever non-Catholics or non-Christians ask me about my faith, I generally respond that I was “born Catholic.” This statement is, of course, technically incorrect. I’m what we typically term a “cradle Catholic” since I was baptized at less than two months old, but being raised by parents who were Catholic school teachers and 12 years of Catholic education instilled in me this instinctive sense that being Catholic is somehow baked into my very DNA in the same way as my hair color or ethnic heritage, hence the “born Catholic” statement. I grew up attending Mass. I received my sacraments. I metabolized prayers and doctrine and knew in my bones that I had no reason or desire to question that when I received Holy Communion during Mass, it was the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus. Check, check, check, and yet, I never understood the meaning of a “prayer life,” because if I’m honest, I can’t say I truly had one. I knew Jesus. I believed in him, I loved him, but it was the kind of love one feels for a favorite storybook character. I couldn’t honestly say I had an intimate, personal relationship with him.
Then along came Hallow. I began this journey a little over two years ago, or so my Hallow streak tells me. I started with just the Rosary; then I added a few more prayers, a study of John’s Gospel with Jeff Cavins and Jonathan Roumie (who portrays Jesus on the hit TV series The Chosen), and before I knew it, I was hooked on prayer in a way I’d never been before. I can’t say how long it took for me to notice that the app was logging my daily prayer habit, and the first time I noticed, I admittedly cringed. It felt, somehow, like my resurgence of prayer was being, there’s no other word for it, gamified. What was this anyway? Spiritual baseball? How long was it going to take before I struck out?
I considered turning off the streak setting, but something prevented me. I noticed these small tectonic shifts in my daily routine; instead of reaching for a book with my cup of coffee in the morning, I was reaching for my rosaries. I wasn’t putting off prayer. Even though the feature to set aside daily time for prayer in Hallow is labeled a “routine,” this felt less like routine and more like ritual. I was being held accountable, and because I was, even if an app was taking my prayer attendance, I was showing up.
At first, that was all it was. I was showing up. I was trying, I was getting into the rhythm and building my endurance. Then suddenly I wasn’t just pressing “Play” anymore. I was entering into prayer in a way I never had before—fully, honestly, and completely. Not to say my mind didn’t and doesn’t still wander sometimes; I’m human, but I’m committed. As the streak days ticked upward, as I passed the six-month mark, and then the year mark, I realized that I’d formed a habit of prayer. This wasn’t a game. This was real. What seemed at first to be tracking my prayer the way smart watches track steps was in fact providing the building blocks for a real relationship with Jesus.
It’s hard at this distance to pinpoint when I had my own sort of road-to-Damascus moment, but I think it occurred several weeks after I started praying with Hallow, when I was completing the “Journey through John” challenge with Jeff and Jonathan—a meditation on John’s Gospel. This was, incidentally, around the same time I’d begun watching The Chosen, so being guided through a Gospel meditation by “TV Jesus” (as Jonathan Roumie is affectionately nicknamed) was crystallizing it all for me in a tangible way. Maybe it was the woman at the well. Maybe it was Jesus weeping at the tomb of Lazarus. Maybe it was the moment Mary Magdalene encounters Jesus and hears him call her name in the garden after his resurrection. Wherever it was, somewhere in the middle of it, I fell in love with John’s Gospel because entering that narrative and walking it with Jeff and Jonathan showed me how John narrated his journey of falling in love with Jesus, and I realized that I was falling in love with Jesus too. Maybe quietly, maybe not intensely, but the kindling had been laid, and the flame wasn’t going out.
So, I kept the streak going. When I looked at that number now, it wasn’t a mark on a scoreboard. It was a reminder. A testimonial. It was God saying: you did it. You showed up for me. You brought me your mess, your joy, your confusion, your whatever, and you sat with it and with me. It was also around this time that I started noticing Jesus’s voice (real Jesus, not “TV Jesus”) quietly speaking to me while I prayed the Rosary, particularly the Sorrowful Mysteries, which meditate on Christ’s Passion and Crucifixion. Why those mysteries specifically matters less here than that Jesus was speaking to my heart. One morning, I was praying through a particular difficulty when I heard (with the ear of my heart, in the middle of the second Sorrowful Mystery), “Do you know what your problem is? You think your problems are bigger than me.” Okay, Jesus. Message received. Then, and every now and then ever since, I will sometimes feel (or imagine) him standing behind me with his hands on my shoulders when I pray. I don’t have visions; I don’t hear voices; this is all in my heart, but it’s there, and it’s real.
On it has gone over the last two years—Advent challenges, Lent challenges, deep dives into the lives of the saints, all of it, please, and please, Jesus, can I have some more? Then it happened. Sunday, May 3, 2026, my two-year “Hallow-versary.”. I went through my usual routine. “Thank you for praying with us. We look forward to praying with you again soon.” I reflexively checked my streak before tapping “Done,” and…”1.” Excuse me? 1? I became an English teacher to have a legitimate excuse to be bad at Math, but I knew that was off—way off. “It’s fine,” I told myself. “I know I’ve been showing up for two years straight. Jesus knows I’ve been showing up for two years straight, and he’s not keeping score—not in the competitive sense anyway. So just start over.” But I couldn’t. I felt like I’d lost something—the history, the documentation, the testimonial proof of the habit I’d built. The clock had reset, quite literally, to the beginning of my journey, and I found myself once again asking that question: Do I turn off the streak setting? What does it matter if I keep track?
I suddenly remembered a 2025 Salon article by Amanda Marcotte in which she critiqued, not altogether unreasonably, the gamification of the prayer streak: “At first, Hallow didn’t seem so bad, even though I blanched when it immediately gamified the spiritual experience by congratulating me for maintaining my ‘streak’ of daily usage. (My best was three days ‘praying’ in a row, which falls far short of my workout streak on Apple Fitness).” Marcotte openly admitted that she downloaded Hallow as a non-religious journalist for research purposes, and her observations about the gamification of prayer are merely a sideswipe in an article that critiques other aspects of the app, but the gamification point was the one that stuck. Sideswipe or not, the blow landed hard enough in my brain to still sting over a year later when I saw that streak reset.
Was Marcotte right? Had I been duped? I could almost hear the Bangles taunting me in my head: Was I only dreaming, or was this burning an eternal flame? The answer came to me in a series of counter-questions: Was picking up your rosaries again being duped? Was returning to the Sacrament of Confession after over a decade being duped? Was studying the Catechism with Fr. Mike Schmitz and diving into the Great Adventure Bible study with Jeff Cavins, participating in and gradually taking on leadership roles in church ministry being duped? Answer: no, no, a thousand times no. Was all this possible because of Hallow? Not exclusively, of course, but Hallow brought me to the water, and once I drank, I couldn’t get enough.
While Marcotte makes a reasonable argument about gamification, the argument only scratches the surface, overlooking the transformative work Hallow is doing in people’s prayer lives. Hallow isn’t merely an app that houses prayers and meditations. It fosters a prayer life through building habit and creating community. Users join “community challenges,” prayer campaigns often focused on significant seasons in the Church calendar such as Lent and Advent. We also join to pray for the victims of natural disasters, mass shootings, and other tragedies.
This community is also fostered on a more personal level. For me, as a single person who lives alone, Hallow’s most appealing feature is that every meditation is recorded by a “hallow guide” who prays along with the listener, which lends a deeply personal and communal aspect to prayer. These guides are all Catholic and all walking along the same journey of faith as the rest of us, and they aren’t simply reciting prayers or reading a script. They’re praying with us and for us. In addition to the Hallow team guides like Abby and Francis, there are well-known voices like Jonathan Roumie (AKA “TV Jesus”), Jim Caviezel, who portrayed Jesus in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, and singer/songwriter Gwen Stefani of No Doubt fame. Yes, you read that correctly. The voice who belted “I’m just a girl” at my 13-year-old self out of a boombox in my bedroom now prays the Litany to the Most Holy Name of Jesus with me. Make of it what you will.
Critics argue that these “celebrity” guides do little more than draw fans, making it “cool to be Catholic.” Eric Sammons argued on The Crisis Point Podcast that “the only reason they’re on Hallow is that they’re famous.” One element of Hallow that lends an air of familiarity and intimacy to prayer is that each of the guides, including the “celebrity” guides, are designated in the app only by their first names. One might call this a parasocial relationship—a one-sided construct in which a fan feels that they’ve established a connection to a media figure who has no clue they exist.
Yet characterizing Hallow as a parasocial, fan-based interaction grossly undermines the reality. When I pray the Rosary with Jonathan or the St. Michael Chaplet with Jim, I’m not merely listening to someone recite prayers. When they press “Record”, they’re actively entering prayer in the same way we are when we press “Play”. Does being guided through a prayer meditation by actors who portray Jesus on screen enhance the meditation experience? No more than gazing on an image of Jesus or a crucifix. In fact, as a blind person, I particularly value these audio meditations because sacred art is inaccessible to me, and when I hear Jonathan read the Gospels or Jim recite a scriptural meditation on Christ’s seven last words, I’m entering into the narrative of Christ’s life and walking the path he walked for me 2000 years ago.
This is not a parasocial illusion of intimacy. This is prayer, purposeful and powerful. In fact, the Hallow guides frequently choose to record and lead prayers that carry specific significance for them. Take, for example, Jonathan’s devotion to the Surrender Novena—a nine-day prayer meditation that focuses on surrendering everything—worries, struggles, and fears—to Jesus and asking him to “take care of it.” Jonathan has shared on numerous occasions that he discovered this prayer during what he’s described as the lowest moment in his career, when he had no choice but to get on his knees and surrender everything, which eventually led to him being cast in The Chosen. That testimony inspired me to begin the ritual of praying the Surrender Novena in Hallow at the start of every school year, surrendering my work, my responsibilities, and my students into Jesus’s care. Whenever I pray in Hallow and hear those now-familiar voices praying with me and for me, whenever I tap “join” on a prayer challenge and see the thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of people praying along with me, I’m reminded of St. Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 12:26: “If one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it; if one part is honored, all the parts share its joy.”
I’ve also stumbled across various articles during the last year suggesting that I’m not alone in my resurgence. The National Catholic Register reported this past March that dioceses across the country are witnessing an astonishing uptick in their OCIA (Order of Christian Initiation for Adults) programs. In my own home state of Florida, for instance, the Diocese of Venice welcomed 1,072 members into the Church this year. Coincidence? Perhaps. (Only God knows if this is proof or providence). Some of my readers know I’m an academic at heart, and the data needs more unpacking than is called for in this space. For now, I’m just experiencing and witnessing something that, to me, appears quietly miraculous.
On February 18, 2026 (Ash Wednesday) Hallow reached the number 1 spot in the App Store, beating out ChatGPT and WhatsApp, but while the upticks of prayers prayed, streaks held, and app downloads logged might appear to be mere datapoints or scoreboard entries, they’re pointing to something more powerful. They’re a witness to the power of prayer to change lives—one of which was mine.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I did successfully troubleshoot and restore my streak. 773 days strong! (Not that I’m counting or anything, and if Jesus is, I’ll find out eventually).