For anyone who cannot make the trip to Mission San Xavier del Bac in Arizona to pin a personal memento to a wooden statue of St. Francis Xavier and say a prayer, all that is needed is to jot an e-mail message and hit the "Send" key.
Requesting prayers and joining virtual prayer circles has become commonplace on the Internet, as worshipers can e-mail an order of nuns and request a prayer or enter a chat room and ask whoever reads their message to pray on their behalf. But e-mailing a prayer for the intercession of a saint is new.
At the White Dove of the Desert, as the white-domed mission is commonly known on the Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation outside Tucson, the e-mail prayer requests are confidential. The messages are printed out and then tucked beneath or pinned to the blanket draped across the supine figure of St. Francis Xavier. Eventually, they are destroyed, as dozens arrive each week.
"Is it much different than kneeling next to your bed at night?" asked the Rev. David Gaa, the Franciscan pastor who started the e-mail prayer request box this summer. "The idea is to connect with God anywhere. In the moment you are typing, it's another form of devotion."
Father Gaa, who has worked at the 205-year-old mission since 1998, said he also wanted to reach out to people who are infirm or simply cannot afford to make the trip. "I think if somebody in Tucson is e-mailing, they are missing the point," he said. Father Gaa added that people did write letters with prayer petitions and mail them to the saint the old-fashioned way, but that he received far more by e-mail. The Web address is sanxaviermission.org/Saint.html.
The mission gets about 3,000 visitors a week at this time of year, Father Gaa said, and many make that pilgrimage from other countries, bringing with them objects to affix to the saint replica — hospital bracelets, sonograms and other personal effects or notes of prayer. While donations are encouraged for these actual visitors, Father Gaa set up the e-mail prayer request box so that no money could be given online.
But is something lost when supplicants have not actually made a pilgrimage or cannot take in the architecture, the weather, the aromas of their place of worship? Certainly the interactive experience of retrieving holy dirt or water from a site or lighting a candle is lost.
In her book "Give Me That Online Religion" (Jossey-Bass, 2001), Brenda E. Brasher, who has been studying religious Web sites for more than a decade, gives the example of a Hindu temple in India where the faithful wait in line for hours to enter before they are welcomed by the sounds of chanting priests and the scent of embers, along with the smells of fruit and flowers. She contrasts that with a visit to a virtual temple online that features a graphic drawing of a Hindu god and downloadable meditation music and chants.
"Prayer, itself, has changed over the centuries, varies considerably based upon the religious tradition involved, can mean a variety of things to one single person," Ms. Brasher explained in an e-mail interview.
She acknowledged that the "religious experience itself has been altered" by this transition from real to virtual worship, but she said she supported this change.
"Nostalgia is a generational issue," she said. "Where some see loss, others see new possibilities. The computer and computer-mediated communication can be a vehicle for prayer."
And the new generation has embraced spiritual technology, a 2001 study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project shows. "Some 25 percent of adult Internet users — approximately 28 million people — have gone online to get religious and spiritual material," said Elena Larsen, the principal author of the study.
In the report, Ms. Larsen found that these people, whom she referred to as "religion surfers," were augmenting their spiritual lives by using the Internet. She added that after the Sept. 11 attacks, there was a spike in the number of people going online to send or receive prayer requests.
Scott Thumma, an associate at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research who is teaching a course on spiritual surfing at belief.net, compares e-mailing Saint Francis Xavier to sending an e-mail message to the Western Wall in Jerusalem (virtualjerusalem.com/sendaprayer/). These messages, which are also considered private, are delivered to the wall weekly.
Going to the wall is a significant event, Mr. Thumma said, and e-mailing a message there is "not the same as making the pilgrimage and doing it yourself."
"On the other hand," he added, "any prayer offered up anywhere is heard. Right?"