Book Extract: Poems & Prayers by Matthew McConaughey

Like most all of us, I’m trying to navigate and adapt as shrewdly as I can to our changing times. To understand where I fit in, where I don’t, define what I stand for, and what I won’t. But I find myself increasingly tempted to just settle for the false and profane as acceptable signs of our times.

Should I maintain a beginner’s mind and continue to seek the magic in life when the facts deny reason to do so?

How do I stave off the cynics’ disease and still remain a hopeful skeptic?

Are we hoping to survive or surviving to hope? Maybe that’s the point.

To admit that evil is necessary, and choose to rise above it—or not.

To admit the ugly facts and untruths all around and inside us, and still believe.

I think that is the point.

As an optimist and a believer, I’m a man of strong spirit and great faith, but if it’s belief we seek, let’s admit it: we’re not going to find it looking to the evidence.

So, enough with the academic and mathematic equations that aren’t adding up. I think it’s time for us to flip the script on what’s historically been our means of making sense, and instead open our aperture to enchantment and look to faith, belief, and dreams for our reality.

Let’s sing more than we might make sense, believe in more than the world can conclude, get more impressed with the wow instead of the how, let inspiration interrupt our appointments, dream our way to reality, serve some soul food to our hungry heads, put proof on the shelf for a season, and rhyme our way to reason. Forget logic, certainty, owning, or making a start-up company of it; let’s go beyond what we can merely imagine, and believe, in the poetry of life.

MUSICAL BRIDGES FROM THE MUNDANE, POEMS ARE A SATURDAY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE WEEK. THEY ILLUMINATE BELIEF, INVITING NEW WAYS TO SEEK. POEMS ARE SONGS OF ROMANCE, WITH OURSELVES, OTHERS, SPACE, PLACE, AND TIME. HYMNS OF HOLY LANGUAGE, ANGELIC DITTIES OF THE DIVINE, POEMS ARE ALSO PRAYERS, THAT RHYME.

For me, prayer is a time to reset, to catch my breath, and get a spiritual yawn of acceptance and surrender before my call to action. I pray as a means of staying involved in my life and the life of those I love and care for. Prayer anchors me but doesn’t hold me down, giving me a more stable floor from which to fly from. As a proclivity to imitate the divine, the high-mindedness of prayer guides us to a place of intentional surrender that promises more than permission, but freedom. Prayer can also be a scream, a plea, a question, an expression of pain and longing, or a therapeutic means of facing a monster within us.

The origin of prayer is based on worship, where and when we have the humility to bend low and bow, to raise our heart above our head, so we can listen to the wisdom of the sacred within us. But prayer isn’t solely sequestered to ceremony in the synagogues, churches, and meccas of the world. Prayer may also come in the form of meditation, taking a walk to clear your mind, stargazing to feel the humility of awe, creating art, making love, writing, even laughter. All of these practices can be a form of prayer because they’re each a means of revival—of the heart, mind, and the human spirit.

Prayer is paying attention. In a world that constantly consumes our thoughts but distracts us from tending to our spirit, prayer gives our soul a chance to catch up with our pathologically busy minds, providing us with the contentment of self-awareness that gives us enough hope to admit that we actually do have the ability to live our life. In times of chaos, prayer restores order, and regardless of the higher power you’re praying to, a committed belief in our continued improvement is how we first restore order in ourselves.

In a society that suffers from the illusion that privation and possessions equal progress, prayer promotes what I believe is a more genuine definition of the word: the development of human potential to become a broadcaster and receiver of values. Because prayer intentionally aligns us with what we value most, the practice of prayer is progress.

The ultimate goal of prayer is to align our earthly ambitions to be in accordance with Divinity’s Law. This means believing in more than who we are, but rather in who we can be.

Through the inherent tests and approvals of our highest order, prayer helps us discover what we are here to do in this life. And when we can live more in sync with our higher power’s will? We’ve found what is theological code for our purpose.

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Navigation & Livin’ Ditties

Navigation is a compass to help guide our way. We navigate to get out of trouble, to find the path forward, to remain on our way.

Ditties are songs, the written beat poetry of assembled circumstances that naturally convene in real time to make a story, that’s sometimes worth singing. Some mornings I wake up with a certain musical meter in my mind. If I like the sound of it, I’ll do my best to move to the pace of that rhythm throughout the day, to exchange the cadence with everything I see and do. If I keep that meter in the way I think, see, and move, the world around me often responds in kind to my calling, making every interaction I have a rhyming verse in the song that is my day.

And when I’m done jotting it all down, it becomes a ditty. When our life has rhythm we can dance through it, and the struggles start to feel more like snuggles, the broken arms become bruises, and the battles end up being good luck.

Regulation Gauges

With an ebb and flow of consequences for every decision made, calibrations are necessary for every choice we make. Meaning, if you make a profit in one place, you’re gonna get a debt in another. Seldom are all systems running at peak performance.
So how do you keep what’s important to you in the black? The measurements of importance in my life are my health, my family, my marriage, my career, and my relationship with God. I’m always having to recalibrate and adjust the gauges to maintain balance. My career’s taking off and taking all my time? Whoops, relationship with my family and God starts slipping into the red.
My kids and I are each other’s favorite people and my six pack’s ripped? Probably need to spend more time with my wife. And because I don’t want to let any of those go too far south, I have to take inventory, and recalibrate. Remember those Alpine car stereo equalizers in the 1980s? Life’s a balancing act and you’ve gotta keep re-tuning your equalizer to stay out of the red.

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Matthew McConaughey, Poems & Prayers,‎ Headline/ Hachette India, 2025. Hb. Pp. 208

From the Academy Award-winning actor and #1 New York Times bestselling author of Greenlights comes an inspiring, faith-filled, and often hilarious collection of personal poetry and prayers about navigating the rodeo of life and chasing down the original dream, belief. 

Here is what he says about his book: My prayers are my poems are my prayers. I've always relied on logic to make sense of myself and the world. A prescriptionist at heart, I've always looked to reason to find the rhyme, the practical to get to the mystical, the choreography to find the dance, the proof to get to the truth, and reality to get to the dream. I've been finding that tougher to do lately. It's more than hard to know what to believe in; it's hard to believe. But I don't want to quit believing, and I don't want to stop believing in . . . humanity, you, myself, our potential. I think it's time for us to flip the script on what's historically been our means of making sense, and instead open our aperture to enchantment and look to faith, belief, and dreams for our reality. Let's sing more than we might make sense, believe in more than the world can conclude, get more impressed with the wow instead of the how, let inspiration interrupt our appointments, dream our way to reality, serve some soul food to our hungry heads, put proof on the shelf for a season, and rhyme our way to reason. Forget logic, certainty, owning, or making a start-up company of it; let's go beyond what we can merely imagine, and believe, in the poetry of life.

Whenever Matthew McConaughey writes as he did in the extraordinary Greenlights and now the memorable Poems & Prayers, he speaks from the heart. It is truly heartfelt. It is obvious that it is him unfiltered. 

The book extract that has been published here is from the very thought-provoking introduction to this slim volume of poems and prayers. At one level, what he says is so obvious, but the manner in which he articulates his feelings, fears, hopes, and desires, may as well be a prayer on everyone’s lips, irrespective of whether they affirm to the sacred or secular spaces of living. As he says, “prayer is a moral yearning to our own elevated conscience”. To illustrate his belief, there are two prose poems that follow the selected text. These are: “Navigation & Livin’ Ditties” and “Regulation Gauges”. 

Academy Award-winning actor and #1 New York Times bestselling author Matthew McConaughey is a husband and a father, an eternal optimist, a hopeful skeptic, and a man of faith who believes that we should all start sellin' Sunday morning like a Saturday night. McConaughey is a professor of practice at the University of Texas in Austin and co-owner of The Austin FC soccer club. He and his wife, Camila, founded the just keep livin Foundation, which is dedicated to helping boys and girls transform into good men and women through programs that teach the importance of decision-making, health, education, and active living. McConaughey resides with Camila and their three children in Austin, Texas.