Contemplative Presence in the Digital Realm:
How to Create Sacred Space in Online Contexts
In a course I teach on digital media and spiritual practice at General Theological Seminary, my students and I have produced a chart of questions we find helpful as we search for balance in our use of digital media. The first part of the chart focuses on the questions that you would most expect seminary students to be asking about digital media: “Am I using digital media too much? Do I get anxious if I don’t use it? Is it making me feel bad?” We who choose lives of spiritual ministry are often tempted to overuse digital devices in an effort to serve without ceasing.
Conversely, we may shun digital devices in the hope that our abstinence makes us more monk-like, self-disciplined, and spiritual, so the chart also includes a section that asks questions like “Am I not using digital media enough? Am I cut off from others? Disempowered? Am I aware of ways I could be helped by more use of it?” In the center of the chart we ask, “Am I in a balanced place? Am I using digital media in a wholesome, balanced way? Is my use of digital media a path to God? Am I willing to be temporarily destabilized in order to learn something new?”
Many contemplatives have a suspicion of digital encounters and a tendency to think of them as not quite real. One of the definitions of virtual is “not physically existing as such but made by software to appear to do so,” and synonyms for virtual are “simulated, artificial, imitation, make-believe.” If we are not in the room with each other, isn’t our contact somehow less real and meaningful? Isn’t it all kind of fake? How can real spiritual community be created using virtual means?
Those of us who engage in spiritual ministries have learned various ways of creating sacred space. We establish a proper ambience for prayer with silence, candles, incense and music. We know how to bring a particular type of attention to spiritual encounters that enables us to hold and protect the space for others as they speak about their inner lives.
Rituals for sanctifying space in churches and meditation centers are often dictated by tradition and may feel like well-worn paths. In those settings it may be clear who is in charge of these sanctifying rituals, whereas in the digital world rituals for creating sacred space are not yet established and their creation may require more boldness and imagination. We may sense the need for this boldness and imagination yet feel that an unnamed someone else should be in charge of it. What authority do we have? How would we know what to do?
When we are the ones who sense the need for this shift from the ordinary to the sacred, it sometimes means that we are the ones who are called to figure out how to make the shift and implement it. How do we create and provide sanctifying rituals online?
How do we create a prayer on Facebook that cuts through the clutter of the newsfeed and can be experienced as a sacred moment? Can we create online groups that allow our communities greater access to contemplative prayer and sabbath time? Can we create guidelines that will help online groups maintain civil, prayerful discourse?
Conversely, we might ask ourselves how technology can help us to create sacred space in new ways in traditional situations. Perhaps we might use Contemplative Outreach’s Centering Prayer app to time periods of talking in a spiritual sharing situation and gently keep participants from taking more than their share of the speaking time. We might host an encounter online that usually takes place in person. For example, when participants would otherwise would not be able to attend a Lectio Divina session, it can now can easily and effectively be held by teleconference. During Hurricane Sandy when our church was closed I led our weekly Centering Prayer group by video conference, a grounding opportunity for prayer during a crisis. At a recent meeting of spiritual directors, a regular participant who could not attend was able to participate from afar when one of the group placed a cellphone on speaker mode in the center of our table.
Spiritual direction can also be offered by video very effectively to people all over the world, including those who are geographically isolated or physically challenged and who might not otherwise be able to connect with like-minded spiritual companions.
I periodically lead a Centering Prayer group on Zoom, a video conference service similar to Skype. My group is similar in many ways to the Centering Prayer groups that meet online through The Meditation Chapel. Those who are willing to try this format are often surprised at how satisfying the experience of meditating in a digital community can be. Those who find digital groups helpful or even preferable include contemplatives who don't have a local group with which to practice; introverts who feel more comfortable meeting from their own homes; groups who want to try contemplative prayer but don’t have a leader; those who for health, childcare or other reasons have difficulty leaving their homes; those who for various reasons don’t want to be physically seen; and busy people who want to avoid travel time.
One night during our video group, I mentioned how moved I was that we were calling in from such different, far-flung places, making our web of prayer much larger geographically than it would have been if we’d been in the same room. One participant observed that when radio was invented the word “broadcasting” was taken from agriculture to mean spreading seed across a wide area. This seems like a very apt term for an online Centering Prayer group, since this form of meditation comes from the Christian tradition with its parable of the sower spreading seeds of faith. When we cast the seeds of our faithful practices out over a wide area through the use of digital media we are continuing in this tradition.
When we don’t expect anything “real” to happen in the digital realm, it is all the more astonishing when it does. Centering Prayer practitioners sometimes experience a sensation when they are practicing of entering a kind of force field that holds them together in an energetic community. Participants in the video calls have told me that they are surprised to discover that they can feel this sensation just as strongly by video. This sense of energetic interconnectedness does not seem to require geographic proximity but can take place in virtual space.
As we become more comfortable and familiar with the landscape of digital prayer and discover that we can feel each other’s presences there in bodily and meaningful ways, it becomes natural for us to want to explore how to be of service in this space. The more real digital encounter becomes to us the more real it will feel to those we serve.
This article originally appeared in the December 2019 issue of Contemplative Outreach News.
• Prayer Groups in the Era of Social Distancing;
• Some tips on using video for spiritual encounters;
• Information on Centering Prayer for Everyone Online Group programs;
• Online Centering Prayer groups offered by Contemplative Outreach.