Can you pray with an iPad?

what I would be looking at if I wasn't looking at my virtual keyboard

This is not a product endorsement. Still, I was delighted when Vic asked me whether I might like an iPad as a retirement gift. A sleek little bit of compact technology that I could carry with me to Congo. Remember when laptops were the ultimate in portability? I did carry my beloved MacBook Pro on the last trip, and used it a lot. But it stayed in whatever home I was staying in. An iPad would stay in my purse. But would an iPad do what I needed it to do?

I need a writing machine, or what I learned to call, to my amusement, in 1981, a word processor. Since that green-screened Wang in George McCoy's office in downtown Chicago, where I fat-fingered letters that I mailed to the members of the organization I was helping George run, an antinuclear business group, technology has come a long, long way. A year later I was helping the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists into the new era by urging the editor to splurge on a little box called an Apple Macintosh. As soon as page layout software came up to speed we began putting the magazine together in Qark Express. (It is indicative of what ancient history this is to note that this iPad's officious correction system did not helpfully substitute "quark" for "quark" as I was typing. It does not recognize its own history.)

So I am no technophobe. Still I have been slow to enter the era of mini i-this and i-that for two reasons. 1) They are too tiny for my aging eyesight. I don't like to wear reading glasses all the time. 2) They are not really geared to writing. Texting with your thumbs is not writing. Writing is touch typing without looking at the screen. Writing is letting your ideas flow out through your fingers without having to think about it. Writing is going on and on at length and getting your creative juices flowing and then going back and editing afterward or starting somewhere altogether new.

And for me, writing can be a form of prayer. It directs my thoughts deeper and broader to things I didn't know before I started writing. This means that I have to write without being aware of technology, of how the machine or the pen or paper are helping me or not helping me. These are supposed to be neutral tools, extensions of my own physical self. Above all, I should not have to think about them.

So here I am, nearly four decades after that clumsy "word processor," still, or once again, fat-fingering words awkwardly on a screen. This time I can't even feel the keyboard, so I have to keep looking at it, bowing my head to the technology rather than gazing out at the trees that surround me. And I am writing about the technology rather than whatever deep spiritual thoughts I might otherwise have.

I can hear the techy males in my family say, just buy a separate keyboard, which I may do, but I am resisting for two reasons. 1) I want to travel light. Maybe I will use this little rectangle also as my camera, also as my ebook device. 2) I want to see if I can totally adapt to this new technology. If they put a keyboard on the screen you should be able to write with it, right?

My hands are threatening to cramp up from fitting themselves to to a 9-inch virtual keyboard and my shoulders are tense. But I am doing. Enter than yesterday. No, no iPad. I meant, I am doing better than yesterday. Sheesh.