February 25, 2008

There are many ways to favor the unity of spirits and communal prayer. One very original way is that of those who use prayer videos on portable recorders.

Concretely, the most recent generation of the popular iPods allows you to reproduce video formats, and many young people use this format for prayer while they travel on the subway, on their way to and from classes, as they go about the city or just rest in some park.

In 2006 the British Jesuits began offering prayers in audio format in a successful initiative
pray-as-you-go.org, a pioneer in the pastoral use of material for portable reproducers. Now we hear of Jesuits offering our material en these new video formats. “It is so easy “, says Jacques Haers, “to download the clips from Internet and transfer them to MP4 format. Then I put in a DVD and I offer it to my students, who transfer it to the iPods to watch them as they travel. From Louvain, this Jesuit explains to us how in his classes he has incorporated the use of video files as a pedagogical strategy every day more accepted by young people. Father Haers is using prayer videos of the Congregation not only to offer them to his students but also for various pastoral initiatives. The great advantages, according to Haers, is that you can connect the IPOD to a projector and use it as an invitation to a reflection o begin a discussion in a very precise and suggestive manner. I use it at meetings of the Christian Life Communities”, says the Belgian professor.

The problem is the large size of the files and the high price of the portable reproducers, which make this technology unavailable to a great many people. There are many people who are on the other side of this digital divide, which is one of the great injustices of our times. The universal nature of our message draws us toward more open and accessible technologies, even though, it is true, we are delighted that local initiatives adapt them , make them take on flesh and make possible a global proposal “according to times, personas and places.

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