Compassion

"Compassion" is a prayer installation in which the viewer is shown an image loop 3 times. Before each loop a question is asked: "What emotions do these people invoke in you?" "How would Jesus respond to each of these?" and "What prayer would you offer to each person?" The participant is then invited to write out a prayer for some of the people portrayed, and place them at their "feet" (on a bowl on the floor underneath their printouts). The intention is to encourage the participant to outward-focussed prayer.

This is simple concept: find some photographs of people which invite a response from others, create a video loop, and ask some questions of the viewer and then allow the viewer to pray for some of the people shown.

In our case we took some people who are anonymous but whose images are open - in other words, many different contexts and interpretations can be read into their photographs. There were two kids who look poor, a lady who looked middle eastern and an old man who was deep in thought. People then identify with the pictures and pray for the people using an outward focussed prayer.

You can use pictures of people from your church, your country, the world, whatever. I imported them into iPhoto on my Mac, created a new album, created the questions in Photoshop (800 x 600 pixels; the font is Helvetica) asking 1 question on each slide, placed the slides between each series of photos. After each question I repeated the series of photos. My iPhoto window looks like this:

Then export the movie as a Quicktime. 640x480 is fine, because we're going to burn this to dvd next, and that pixel size will transfer across to dvd without a quality loss.

Then open up iDVD, choose "Create DVD from movie..." from the File menu, find compassion.mov and burn away! This means that the DVD will automatically loop in your DVD player without needing to press play every time or setting it on "repeat", which is exactly what you want.

Once you have the DVD, hook up a DVD to a TV and run it. We put it in a room with arrows towards the TV where the viewer would watch the loop, then towards a table on which was written, "What prayer can you offer these people? Write your prayer and place it at their “feet” as an intercession for them with God." We'd provided pens and paper.

Print out the pictures, stick them on a wall, put a bowl underneath each picture, put some arrows on the floor to indicate how the viewer should proceed throughout the whole thing, and you're good to go.

Resource list
TV
Tables (both stations)
TV raised high on table
DVD Player with 2 pin power plug, cable and DVD
Pens
Paper
Bowls (6)
Printout of Images (6)
Pins
Arrows (10)