When technology and faith meet

The good news is that we have a newborn at home (my neice, and she's doing very well). We've had to jump through a few hoops in order to settle on the date for her baptism, but finally we found the day: this coming Sunday.

Before we had arranged the date, I'd had spent some time speaking with the parents of this little angel, outlining the ceremony for baptism, and the responsibilities that would be theirs from that day hence. To be sure, the responsibility to raise a child, and to teach her about faith is something that parents don't take on on their own, so thankfully there are godparents to assist, and others who will come into her life at various moments.

Now that the parents have chosen all the godparents, the last part of the puzzle was to do a sit-down with the chosen ones, to review with them the responsiblities that they are about to undertake, and at the same time, to review the ritual that we will observe in a few days' time. Just one problem: I live in one city, while the parents and godparents live in another. Even more complicated is the fact that the parents and godparents all live in different parts of the same city. This means that we needed to find a way to bring us all together in order to have our tête à tête.

Solution: teleconferencing and three-way calling. These are technologies that have been around for quite some time, but things that are not always used by those of us who don't do distance conferencing for a living. This meant that we had to figure out first who of us had the capacity to accommodate three-way calling, and then put all the players on the line. It took a bit of thinking and a bit of shared splitting and splicing of calls, but finally we all were online, and able to chat.

The call took only about 30 minutes once it was up and running, but without it there would have been a number of emails or other correspondence flying across the internet, and where communication happens in pieces and bits, there is always the risk that something which needs to be said is left unsaid, or that details which should be communicated get left out of the equation, and the result is that confusion reigns.

Thankfully that won't be the case in this instance. Ah, and the baptism in question will go ahead on Sunday.