Who was Samuel's mother, who prayed for a child at Shiloh?

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Progressive Christian

Last updated on: July 26, 2009 at 4:26 pm by Cathleen Falsani

2009-07-26T16:26:00-07:00 Cathleen Falsani

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GODSTUFF

TWEETS OF THE PEOPLE: ONLINE PRAYER

God has heard it all before.

You can’t afford to take a pilgrimage to one of the world’s sacred spots.

It’s too hard to find a church, mosque or temple while you’re on vacation.

You just can’t find the time to pray.

Thanks to new technological advances, you really have no excuses left for avoiding communing with the divine, even during the dog days of summer.

Earlier this month, a clever fellow in Israel made it possible for anyone, anywhere in the world, at any time, to tuck a scrap of paper with their prayer on it into the cracks of the Western Wall in Jerusalem — via Twitter.

If you “tweet” your prayers to the Twitter account @thekotel, Alon Nil, the service’s 25-year-old founder in Tel Aviv, will print them out on paper and have a group of kind souls in Jerusalem take them by hand and tuck them into the wall for you.

You don’t have to be Jewish to place a prayer in the Wall — also known as the Kotel — the most holy site in Judaism, believed to be last remnant of the Second Temple, and the place closest to the ancient Holy of Holies (and therefore, closest to the Almighty). But you do have to be brief. Even prayers on Twitter are limited to 140 characters (unless you send Nil a private message on Twitter, that is).

Nil’s not the only one in Israel to see the social utility of using Twitter for prayer. You can send prayer requests to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem via the Twitter account PrayForGod or through the Web site www.holylandprayer.com.

The Calvin Institute of Christian Worship at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., has set up six separate “prayer feeds” on Twitter. (You can find them all listed at www.prayerontwitter.net.) Ancient practice meets new technology in the form of tweets with bite-size invocations ranging from hourly prayers from the biblical book of Psalms and hourly “Prayers of the People,” to literally “Praying the hours” with 24 ancient prayers attributed to St. John Chrysostom for each hour of the day.

For Buddhists on the go, there are several inexpensive applications available for the iPhone (including Mani Wheel, OmWheel and iPrayerwheel) that allow you to pray by twirling your phone and spinning the digital prayer wheel inscribed with the Sanskrit mantra “Om mani padme hum” on the screen. Tibetan Buddhists believe that spinning a prayer wheel inscribed with the mantra is as good as reciting the prayer yourself.

If you want to give the prayer wheel a whirl but don’t have an iPhone, you can visit the Prayer Wheel Project at www.manikorlo.org and click a button to “spin” the prayer wheel in Budapest, Hungary.

Muslims are required to pray five times daily at precise times while facing in the direction of Mecca. Several free applications now available for iPhone and BlackBerry devices as well as home computers do the math and the logistics for you. Salaat Time 2.0, Prayer Times for Mobiles and iPray tell you where, when and how to pray and even announce the time for prayer with an electronic adhan, or call to prayer.

Through its Web site www.shivshakti peeth.org, the Shiv Shakti Peeth center in New York offers online temple worship of several Hindu deities, including Ganesha, Hanumana, Krishna, Shiva and Rama. Devotees can listen to recorded bhajans (or devotional songs), mantras or recitations of sacred scripture, and they can even request a special puja (ritual), sacred ashes or a blessing from the temple priest.

No time to jet over to the sacred sites of Fatima, Medjugorje or Lourdes, where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared? From your laptop, on www.fatima.org and www.medjugorje.org, you can pray the Rosary with other cyberpilgrims, and at www.lourdes-france.org, you also can send an online prayer request that will be placed in the healing grotto at Lourdes.

There are thousands of online prayer rooms from seemingly every religious tradition — Beliefnet.com hosts perhaps the widest and largest array — and if you don’t know what to pray for or whom to pray to, you can always light a candle and take a moment to quiet your spirit.

Nearly 8 million people — including 13,000 in the last two days — from 242 countries have done just that at www.gratefulness.org. It’s free, comes with a short guided meditation, and your candle (which you can mark with your initials so you can find it again) stays lit for 48 hours.

You can always find a sacred place in cyberspace — no matter where you are.

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