Sacred Space (website)

Website

Sacred Space is a prayer website that was founded in 1999. It was created by two members of the Jesuit order, Alan McGuckian and Peter Scally, and was managed by the Jesuit Communication Centre, Dublin, Ireland, until June 2008. The site is updated daily, guiding users through a ten minute session of prayer centered on a passage of scripture.

The notion of a website about prayer came to the two Jesuits when they were working in communications. McGuckian and Scally noticed that increasing numbers of office workers sit at a computer for hours every day, often doing repetitive work. They reasoned that people work better if they break that routine every now and again; and prayer is one way of breaking the routine. People as far away as the Arctic Circle and Australia log onto the site. Speaking in The Tablet, Jan 18, 2003, Scally stated, "A person at the computer has a sense of privacy and intimacy; comfortable, upright, and attentive, subconsciously screening out all distractions, he concentrates on the screen gazes in fact on that screen. What better description of the attitude of attentive listening to God?" The appeal of the Internet for prayer is perhaps understandable, not only because it provides the user with the privacy needed for personal prayer, but also because the multi media approach to prayer, now offered by many websites makes prayer more stimulating than a mental exercise. Last year alone its pages were viewed almost 30 million times from over 200 countries.