Hallow: A Meditation Startup’s Leap of Faith
Meditation in support of mental health has become mainstream, popularized by breakthrough apps like Headspace and Calm. One Silicon Valley startup, Hallow, is rising among these tech behemoths and offering its users exposure to a competitive advantage that isn’t featured on other meditation apps: ancient Catholic prayer exercises. I interviewed the CEO, Alex Jones, and Head of Growth, Alessandro DiSanto, both co-founders of San Francisco-based Hallow, to hear how exactly their company was going to grow in our less religious, less traditional, less institutional world.
According to Hallow’s description in the App Store, the company “offers guided prayer and meditation sessions to help us grow in our faith lives and find peace and stillness in God.” Hallow was founded in 2018 as a public benefit corporation by a group of friends who attended the University of Notre Dame together, but who were not necessarily religious themselves. Jones explained his background to me:
I was raised ‘Catholic’, only in the sense that my mom dragged me to mass and the sacraments. I never prayed, certainly didn’t feel any sort of community, and didn’t care at all about my faith. I quickly became agnostic and even more so atheist despite coming into a place like Notre Dame.
His atheism was challenged throughout college, though, and by way of influence from his wife and friends, Jones reconverted back to his Catholic faith and now calls himself a “full-blooded Catholic.” His dream is to expose people to the same spiritual experience: “I am not trying to sell this app to you. I have an awesome relationship with God. All I want to do is introduce you to Him.”
After Jones’s reconversion, he became increasingly interested in meditation and wondered if there was any common ground between his faith and the practice of mindfulness: “After asking my friends and priests about this intersection, I quickly realized the absurdity of the question. The Catholic Church has over 2,000 years of these meditative practices and examples of contemplative life.” He tried one practice, called Lectio Divina, or a meditation on the Divine Word of God that prompts one to focus on a word or phrase that stands out to them within a passage. “I did Lectio Divina based on the Lord’s Prayer and the word that stood out to me was ‘hallowed’. It was the most beautiful experience and it changed my life.”
Along with co-founder Erich Kerekes, Jones and DiSanto began to build a core team made up of businesspeople, engineers, and theologians with prestigious employment experience ranging from McKinsey to PwC to Goldman Sachs. Geographically, the team lives across the United States, but they come together for the greater purpose of exposing the riches of the ancient Catholic tradition in prayer to anyone searching for depth beyond the existing inward methods of secular meditation.
After reaching its Kickstarter goal of $20,000 last year and receiving multiple investments from angel investors around the country, the team knew the idea was gaining traction. They began developing its content quickly and extensively and the investments continue to pay off. The numerous reviews in the App Store boast an average 4.8-star rating and, to ensure user satisfaction, any rating below 5 stars is responded to personally by the Hallow team. Online reviews of the app often comment on the high quality product, not just compared to existing outdated religious apps, but also to other popular meditation apps. “We want the app to look like something that came out of Silicon Valley,” says Jones. And it does. Hallow invests highly in its people, its development, its recording equipment, and its sacred prayer knowledge to produce content in categories like Challenges, Praylists, Dailies, and, most recently, TED Talk-like Guest Sessions.
To accelerate growth, the Hallow core team is focusing efforts in SEO on “Catholic meditation,” appearing on Catholic talk shows, pushing social media marketing campaigns, and traveling internationally to religious events, such as 2019 World Youth Day in Panama, to spread the “peace be with you” to other Christians. They are striving towards developing a new channel of communication between individuals and God, using tried and true Catholic prayer exercises. As DiSanto puts it, “The Church doesn’t have a content problem, they have a marketing problem; we want to leverage the best of Silicon Valley in terms of interface, brand, and persona. We want to deliver the message in a way that people aren’t used to hearing it.”
And Christians are just the low-hanging fruit, the tip of the iceberg, for Hallow. Could this tech company triumph over today’s secularization of meditation and the worship of mindfulness to introduce non-Christian users to greater internal peace through a richer relationship with the Divine?
Hallow’s unique, stimulating, intuitive interface certainly engages the user just as well as its competitors; the striking purple theme displaying playful tiles of prayer options on the Discover screen immediately warrants trust in the developers of the app. Several options for customization, including selecting a Guide (Francis or Abby), setting a Prayer Goal, playing ambient tones or Gregorian chant, journaling, and saving Favorites, reflect professional and thoughtful design.
The content within the app, however, is what sets Hallow apart from other meditation apps. The two competitive advantages, Jones says, are depth and breadth:
We saw the emergence of Headspace leading the way in meditation and leveraging Eastern Buddhist traditions. Calm followed soon thereafter, wanting to pursue a secular version of meditation. Then we had other apps wanting to be even more secular than Calm, like Ten Percent Happier. Hallow goes the opposite way of all these apps. We aren’t starting where competitors are leaving off. We want to be more spiritual and want to offer something completely different. Then you look at the types of Catholic meditation that exists; there is vocal prayer, rosary, the Ignatian Examen, chant, singing, Lectio Divina… We are much more broad and we are rooted in faith.
While other meditation apps are becoming more shallow in their purpose, Hallow is searching for depth. While other meditation apps are becoming more narrow in their content, Hallow is expanding its breadth. And all the while, Jones says, “Prayer very explicitly pushes you to grow in virtue in a way that just pure mindfulness meditation can’t.”
Hallow prefaces each meditation by reminding the user of a far deeper purpose, which secular meditation apps will inherently never achieve: the conversation with God and prayer intention with each session deepens your relationship with Him and allows you to pass your burdens on to Him. In contrast to Headspace’s and Calm’s invitation to just deal with the mental stress you know you have, Hallow does an excellent job in explaining how to shift that mental stress to God and to trust in Him. The various Praylists allow you to personalize prayer to your own mental needs and assist in Calmness, Joy, Gratitude, or Letting Go. And you’re becoming a better person by doing it: “Go try our Humility Praylist and try telling me you’re going to have a bigger ego after that,” suggests Jones. The implication is that you can’t. That is how prayer works.
Secular meditation stops at it user; it is circular, inward, and even isolating. Secular meditation isn’t a relationship, but an echo inside a human mind that only hears the same thoughts that it speaks. And, as much as users want to believe secular meditation is a spiritual exercise, it is only mental. By definition, exercising a spirit implies a belief in a personal God or gods, which secular meditation apps neither encourage nor mention.
And what about the negative mental and emotional consequences of mainstream secular meditation? I asked the Hallow core team to share with me their research into these side effects. Despite its numerous benefits, there are a number of potential risks beginning to surface from recent studies including increases in ego, demotivation, sensory dissociation, and panic. DiSanto shared with me a particularly disturbing story related to meditation. “A crazy one from Headspace,” he said, was an instance mentioned in a blog post from the app’s website. Andy Puddicombe, co-founder of Headspace, mentioned a situation in which a woman came to his clinic and cried, through tears, “Sometimes… sometimes, I just think of killing my baby and ending it all.” I read Puddicombe’s chilling response:
Through the lens of mindfulness, that dark thought is no more or less meaningful than a sad, happy or excited thought. We cannot say that a thought is inherently good or bad.
Puddicombe does caveat at the end of his blog post that taking action based on this “dark side of the mind” would necessitate a phone call to a local health professional. Is that the best standard meditation has set for us?Meditation guides who tell us that thinking about killing your own child can’t be definitively good or bad would be the first step onto a steep, slippery, relativistic slope of justifying negative thoughts, internally masking them as positive ones, and then potentially rationalizing action on them. This relativistic side of meditation can only be a learned echo chamber of secluded thoughts, nurtured by no one else and loved by no one else.
Sacred meditation is a prayerful two-way conversation with a higher being (in Hallow’s case — God) and achieves a different purpose. Rather than promising relief from mental stress, prayer makes sense of suffering by offering pain, stress, and anxiety to God, who, through his Son, Jesus Christ, became human and experienced the same pain with us. Mental calmness and clarity can be a byproduct of these spiritual exercises with prayer, but even if they are not achieved, prayer offered to God strengthens the relationship with Him. In Christianity, this relationship with God helps to achieve the goal of the afterlife, joining the communion of saints united in Him. Whether you believe in God or not, that alone is more than anything secular meditation can offer.
I asked Jones about obstacles the Catholic Church is facing today and whether that presents a hindrance to Hallow’s mission. I mentioned to him the decline of religiosity in the West and what Hallow’s response would be to the trend. Jones referenced the Pew Research Center’s study on religiosity and the statistic that over a quarter of Americans now say they are spiritual but not religious:
When you look at the decrease in religiosity in the United States, what people fail to see is that almost 80% of the decrease is replaced by the new “spiritual, but not religious” segment. This is a huge opportunity for Hallow. Spirituality is still important for these people. They are falling away from the institutional aspect of the Church. We are all falling away from the institutional component of corporations, banks, religions… But these people still wonder about the deeper meaning of the universe.
DiSanto echoed Jones’s comment on America’s distrust in institutions: “People don’t want big government, big pharma, big food or big banks. They want hyper-localized, decentralized brands and companies.” Although the non-institutional trend may avert some users (i.e. the fear that the Church is ordered under the Vatican and is prone to large scale bureaucracy and corruption), both Jones and DiSanto say Hallow has this additional competitive advantage: “Our users all tend to meet in the same place every Sunday. That’s not something a secular meditation app can say.” To account for this association, Hallow is exploring development and integration into local parish life (responding to societal attraction to decentralized brands) for existing and potential users and diocese.
Catholicism is not separate from the Catholic Church. But DiSanto explains that bringing people back into the Catholic Church, where they can find greater peace in the sacraments and the community, is not the first step or goal of Hallow:
Forget about the theology, forget about politics, forget about the sacraments. Just try and talk to God. If you find you don’t have a personal connection with Him, then nothing I tell you about Catholicism will matter. If you do, then we can journey together to answer the bigger questions.
He further explains that all people, no matter their faith experience, need to be heard in the Church: “Never take away the voice of the person who is asking the really hard questions; there’s a reason why they are asking them. Maybe they have been hurt in their personal life. Listen to them.”
Hallow offers prayer sessions open, as Catholicism is, to all. It is a place to start, even if you have never had a prayer life and even if you don’t believe in God. A note to the unbelievers and the skeptics, whom I commend for reading this story of Hallow this far, that question whether a prayer life is possible or necessary: Doubt is an inherent part of faith. Christians sometimes doubt the existence of God, just like you may sometimes doubt the inexistence of God. That is why they call it a leap of faith; it is a leap that jumps over the mortal expectations and tangible evidence we are so comfortable having as humans. Although Catholics believe faith is never at odds with science, we are so used to holding the answers in our hands and seeing solutions before our eyes. Theists and theologians are often regarded as outlandish and naïve, as famously illustrated by philosopher and theologian Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in his Introduction to Christianity, but they recognize that a leap of faith is needed to meet with God. If a relationship with Him was anything less than this leap, He would only be lauded on the same level as other mere earthly concepts and objects.
Hallow’s core team is taking a leap of faith by leaving their lucrative jobs to join the company fulltime. Hallow’s users are increasingly taking a leap of faith by purchasing subscriptions to the prayer app. Hallow’s mission is to encourage everyone to take this leap of faith with them, to let peace be with everyone, and to introduce the world to building a better relationship with God.
As I ended my interview with Jones, I joked, “Maybe when you’re all millionaires, I can write your biography for you.” He laughed and said, “That would be the worst case scenario.” Perhaps there are worse scenarios, but Jones, DiSanto, and the Hallow team continue to prove their altruism through their work. People and startups like these, prioritizing a spiritual purpose, not a profit, is what the Church and the world need.
This is not a paid endorsement of Hallow. You can find Hallow in the App Store and on Google Play. A permanently free version of Hallow is available.
