Several years ago, I went through a long, nearly immobilizing depression. At some point during that time, I made a playlist I called “Morning,” with the hope that it would help propel me out of bed and into my day. The playlist was made up of contemporary music anchored in traditional Jewish morning liturgy. Each track contained a mantra of ancient verses that poignantly captured essential sentiments — gratitude, desperation, yearning, connection — and wordless melodies that articulated striving, divinity and even joy.

Traditional prayer was difficult during much of this period — both the words and the time-sensitive strictures of daily prayer — but this playlist was a kind of prayer in its own right. And though it did not, by itself, lift my depression, it proved itself a surprisingly effective reprieve. Playing these prayer-songs as I woke up, got ready for the day, and left my apartment, helped me orient myself around these themes, detaching myself, even if only for a few minutes, from the heaviness that surrounded me.

In a recent New York Times “Believing” newsletter, about modern religion and spirituality, Lauren Jackson shared Serena Alagappan’s poem “The Way of a Pilgrim.” The poem, Jackson wrote, demonstrates “how a refrain — mumbled, repeated, half-meant— can still change you. It can be like a prayer.”

The idea that a poem or phrase can be a transformative portal is a powerful opening for people who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious” or who have stepped away from traditional forms of prayer.........

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