Bless This BlackBerry, For It Has Sinned

There’s an ancient English practice of bringing your farm implements in for a regular blessing–kind of like an annual religion servicing for the tools you use every day. This practice has long since disappeared… until now. This weekend an Anglican priest in Canada is reviving the concept by encouraging folks to come in to have their electronic gadgets officially blessed.

It’s the kind of thing you’d expect from a servant of God whose motto is “don’t be boring.”

Reverend Lisa Vaughn is hoping the unique service will encourage more people to visit her modest church near Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia. From a religious perspective, perhaps a blessed phone will remind users to be a good Christian in all their communications every day. From a marketing perspective, even atheists can get behind a God that promises fewer dropped calls.

This appears to be the first gadget blessing in Canada, but it isn’t entirely new. Earlier this year, Canon David Parrott (in the photo above) blessed laptops and cell phones during the Plow Monday service at St Lawrence Jewry Church in London, England. Like Vaughn, Parrott was extending the traditional blessing of the farm plough to less traditional tools.

So would you pop by church this weekend if you could get your iPod blessed?

[via Globe and Mail with photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images Europe]