As many of you know, I facilitate a women's prayer group on Monday evenings.
It is an extraordinary group of women who's ages range from 16-82.  At least a
quarter of this group are not computer literate and don't even watch TV so tech
culture is completely alien to them.

This group is very familiar with ASA though, as I often bring prayer requests
from here and when we had our big retreat/prayer ritual several years ago, many
of the women from this group received ASA prayer partners.  So last night I
added our two visitors who have been targeting Gwen and Rosie, to the prayer
list.  It was like trying to explain silicon valley to the Amish.

First, you have to understand that many of the computer illiterate women are
WILPH (women's international league for peace and freedom) members and the
group operates by consensus.  I had printed out copies of posts to bring to try
to explain things succinctly.  The term trolls projected us into a thirty
minute discussion of what a troll was and the political correctness of the
terminology.  We decided that trolls needed to be a term we didn't use as it
didn't speak to the individual and risked creating stereotypes (I'm with you
gals, but could we just say some prayers?)  I also got taken to task by one of
the younger women who does have blue hair and lots of earrings for my post
about pink hair.  I tried to explain that the pink hair image was just my own
little funny view but realized I hadn't a leg to stand on (literally) and had
indeed stereotyped people who have a particular look as being unintelligent.
OKAY, moving onward to the prayer part...

Then we diverged into trying to understand our individuals who are now not
trolls-now there are a number of therapists or retired therapists in this group
so we had a good discussion about just how dissociative our new prayees were.

Then of course, we had to spend some time in deep discussion exploring why
someone would need to be anonymous when they would never meet the person they
were harassing face to face.  It is impossible to explain the Internet, usenet,
ISP's, etc. to people who don't use the Internet quickly enough to assure we
would get to the PRAYERS and the hot cider and refreshments.  Felt like a kid
just waiting for services to be over to get to the rolls and juice in the
church dining hall.

Finally 90 minutes later we had a quick intro to the prayer request other
people had brought, added those to our list and the prayer box, prayed for the
world and humanity, lit candles for thanks and blessings, and got to the
refreshments.

Next time I think I'll just do prayers for disgruntled and dissociative people
on my own and not try to involve this group: barring that, I'll eat well before
praying.

m