There is a particular way Matthew McConaughey speaks when he is circling an idea he does not want to let go of. The sentences roll, stop, double back. A word, “belief,” becomes a refrain, a drumbeat. He is trying to pin it down, to keep it from slipping away.
He began, in a low, unhurried tone, a story about a kind of creeping dread. It was a story about waking up one day and realizing there was less and less to believe in, not in some vague, adolescent sense, but in the hard, unsparing light of facts. This, he suggested, was a kind of death. Not a sudden, dramatic one but a slow and careful dissolution. The disease, he called it: the disease of choosing cynicism with age.
This is the country McConaughey is navigating in his new book, “Poems & Prayers.” It is the country of doubt, the insistence on faith and memory as both as guides and tormentors . This is a land where the heart strains to keep pace with the head, in a society that values nothing but speed.
Matthew McConaughey’s new book “Poems & Prayers” came out on Sept. 16. (Provided by Align PR / John Russo)
Matthew McConaughey finds belief in poetry, prayer
The cover of Matthew McConaughey’s new book, “Poems & Prayers,” is shown. The collection serves as the basis for his five-city “Revival Tour” and includes a series of personal meditations on faith and gratitude. (Provided by Align PR / Robbie Fimmano)
McConaughey is not new to writing. His first book, “Greenlights,” a chronicle of journals kept across three decades, sold more than 6 million copies worldwide. But “Poems & Prayers” resists chronology. It is untethered, arranged instead in fragments: poems, meditations, incantations.
“This is really no timeline,” he said. “It’s just different themes. Things that I was yearning for and trying to understand through poetry. Consistent things that I was praying for: why I would pray, what I would pray for, how I learned to pray.”
He spoke of a Methodist upbringing, a time when prayer was a quiet, habitual motion. It was, he said, less an act of devotion than a simple reckoning with gratitude: a spare, sufficient gesture requiring little more than stillness.
McConaughey makes the case that prayer, gratitude and meditation are not exclusionary. They are, in his telling, simply a way back to belief. And belief, he insists, is in short supply. “Hope is different,” he said. “Hope is something you may get if you’re lucky, if circumstances fall in your favor. But belief has a map. You see how you can get to that dream and make it happen. There’s a pathway to it.”
The path, for McConaughey, has led to the stage.
Matthew McConaughey gives opening address for the “Band Together Texas” benefit concert at Moody Center on Sunday, August 17. The actor will return to the UT campus for an evening of music and spoken word with Jon Batiste at Bass Concert Hall on Sept. 21. (Jeff Johnson/Jeff Johnson/Band Together Texas)
‘Poems & Prayers’ tour to conclude in Austin
On Sept. 21, he will bring the “Poems & Prayers Revival Tour” to Bass Concert Hall in Austin, the final stop of a five-city journey. The event is designed less like a reading than a séance of shared ideals: spoken word, music, conversation.
Jon Batiste, the Grammy- and Oscar-winning musician, will join him in Austin. Other cities will see Bon Jovi, John Mayer, Zach Bryan and Lukas Nelson.
The project, he recalled, began in a careless, almost inattentive way. A suggestion of a book signing, perhaps, or a simple reading at a picnic table. From these small gestures, he had conjured a more elaborate vision: a proper venue, a stage and the quiet, measured excitement of scores playing beneath his words.
But the spoken word is not the point. The point is what lingers after.
“I hope they walk away going, ‘I’m not ready to give up on belief,'” he said. “I hope they walk away thinking, I want to go one step further in my own life to preserve and grow my own character. To salvage my marriage, my relationships, my relationship with God. To go one step further, because I believe in these people, or these things in my life.”
Actor Matthew McConaughey walks the red carpet for “The Rivals of Amziah King,” during South by Southwest at the Paramount Theatre on Monday, March 10, 2024 in Austin. His new book “Poems & Prayers” explores the struggle to hold onto faith in a cynical world. (Aaron E. Martinez/Aaron E. Martinez/American-Statesman)
McConaughey’s new book: A sermon of hope, belief
The book itself is a catalog of attempts at preservation: daydreams in hammocks, bathtubs shared with poems by Lord Byron, 400,000 miles in an Airstream, the guilty stress of ambition, the hope of being a good husband, father, man.
He calls it both a book and a memory — a quiet assertion that sometimes the mind’s essential work is simply to say, with a kind of weary finality, “I was there. That is all.”
What he is resisting, always, is surrender. To cynicism. To the easy disbelief of a world that moves too fast. “Our heads are full, but they’re not in clear communication with our hearts,” he said. “I want my head to keep communicating with my heart. I want my heart to still have a clean runway. And I think other people do too.”
This is the sermon McConaughey will bring home to Austin.
The words, the poems, the prayers are only the beginning. What matters is what the audience does when the lights go up — whether they will walk out of Bass Concert Hall and into the late-summer heat with, as he says, “more hope and belief than they came with.”