They Prayed for This.
I was sitting with my coffee this morning — the second one, the one I make after I’ve accepted that the day is happening — and I ended up in a rabbit hole about a specific year in the 1340s.
I don’t even remember how I got there. Probably one of those 2 a.m. history tabs I leave open and pretend I’ll read properly later. But I read it this morning and I haven’t been able to shake it.
Here’s what was happening in Europe around 1347, more or less simultaneously:
The Black Death was moving across the continent and nobody understood what it was or how to stop it. A volcanic eruption somewhere in the world had already thrown enough ash into the atmosphere to mess with the growing seasons — crops failing not because of anything farmers did wrong, but because the sky itself wasn’t cooperating. Famine was not a crisis. It was just a condition. It was the background. And layered over all of that was a rotating cast of wars and church schisms and collapsing political structures, so that even the people who were supposed to be in charge of things were mostly just arguing about who got to be in charge of things while everything burned.
People in that era prayed constantly.
Not as a figure of speech. They prayed because the ground was failing them. The medicine didn’t work. The leadership didn’t work. The sky was wrong. You woke up in 1347 and survival was genuinely the whole agenda for the day — not a metaphor, not an anxiety spiral, just the literal situation.
I keep thinking about what they prayed for.
They prayed for harvests. For medicine that worked. For someone to be in charge who actually cared whether people lived. For a world where children didn’t die of invisible things in the night. For enough — enough food, enough warmth, enough stability to just get through the week without everything collapsing.
They prayed for exactly the world we built.
And we built it.
We figured out the crops. We figured out the medicine. We know how to treat water and build shelter and keep humans alive and even comfortable on a scale those people couldn’t have imagined. The knowledge exists. The capacity exists. We are not the people praying in the dark because the sky went grey for two years and there was nothing to eat.
We have everything they asked for.
And I read the news this morning.
I’m not going to name names or pick sides because honestly that’s not the point and also it’s too early and I only have so much coffee. But somewhere between the first tab and the third one I found myself looking at a very loud argument about which billionaire deserves government money to go to space, running alongside a story about a war being funded with investor money and fought with the children of people who don’t have any, and I just sat there for a minute with my mug getting cold thinking —
They would be stunned.
Not by the technology. Not by the phones or the satellites or the fact that I have seventeen varieties of scarf within arm’s reach at any given moment. They would be stunned that we built everything they prayed for and then immediately started fighting over whose favorite rich person gets the most of it.
They prayed for enough. We have more than enough. And somehow we turned that into an argument about receipts.
I don’t have a solution. I want to be honest about that because I think pretending otherwise would be a little insulting to how complicated it actually is.
But I do think there’s a difference between hard and impossible. And I think we’ve started treating them like the same thing.
The people in 1347 didn’t have the option of looking toward the light. The light was genuinely very far away. They prayed for it anyway, which if you think about it is one of the more stubborn things humans have ever done.
We’re sitting in the light they prayed for.
We could at least try looking at it.
Stay clean. Stay kind. Stay caffeinated.
— Heather
