8.4.2011

Tonight an unusual situation happened to me in the local catholic church. I was asked to lead the Stations of the Cross (Via Crucis) in Spanish, using the prayers downloaded on my Ipad. Sounds weird, ha?!For those of you unfamiliar with modern technology (see picture below) ipad, aka as a tablet, is a kind of portable computer with touch screen serving also as keyboard. BTW, I believe tablets will soon be as popular as cell phones.

Back to my story, for quite a while now I have been taking regularly my iphone (smartphone) each time I go to church. I usually download sunday readings (here are some interesting links in  Polish, English) or other prayers to my iphone and use it also as a prayer book. I do it for a couple of reasons. Firstly, unlike in many churches in other countries I have never seen in Polish churches missalettes or any other kind of prayer books for the congration to use during a mass. Secondly, to my regret, often times the quality of the readings and sermons in church leaves much to be desired.  Having some good and relevant prayers and readings on my iphone I am usually prepared in case I have to listen to a boring sermon.

Unfortunately, reading stuff from Iphone still seems a bit too avantgarde in a church and I sometimes feel judging eyes of others when they see me doing it. Not to irritate them I try to do it discreetly.

Ipad, which works similar to Iphone, yet is about 4,5 times bigger, is a bit too big to carry it to church as a prayer book. Nevertheless, I decided to take with me to church for today’s rite of the Stations of the Cross, just in case. After the previous rite of the Stations of the Cross at the local church I found on the web some interesting and much shorter version of the prayers in Spanish and downloaded it to my Ipad. The ones read regularly in the local church very extremely difficult, long and generally hard to follow. The first random website I found turned out to have a much better content of the prayers than the ones circulated by the Honduran Catholic Church.

Iphone and Ipad

Once I got to church, it turned out the person leading the rite forgot to bring the book with prayers from home. After a short moment of puzzlement what to do I offered my help telling the people gathered that I had alternative set of  prayers on my computer.

After making sure the prayers were in Spanish I was asked to read them all for 15 stations. To add to the excitment of the moment after starting reading the first station I realized I only had 7% of battery energy left on my Ipad. With God’s help and some energy saving tricks I lasted till the end with 1% left .

The whole prayers lasted about 35 min instead of 1,5 h the week before. Afterwards the people asked me to have the prayers printed for them. They liked the new version so much more, as it was simple and easy to follow.

Life is full of unexpected events. Therefore it is good to be always prepared .