Prayer in a multi-faith room
A single space used by several traditions, usually in a hospital, airport or university.
Hospitals, airports, and universities set aside neutral rooms where anyone may pray or sit quietly. Most are deliberately plain, with movable furnishings, washing facilities where needed, and religious items brought out or stored away by each user. The room is shared serially: individuals and small groups use it in turn, each in their own way.
A multi-faith room is one space serving people whose requirements conflict. Some need a direction to face, some need to remove shoes, some need washing facilities, some need to be seated, and some need quiet while others need to speak aloud.
Well-designed rooms solve this with movable furniture, a discreet direction indicator, storage for mats and books, and no permanent imagery. Poorly designed ones solve it by picking one tradition's assumptions and calling the result neutral.
In hospitals it is also the room families are taken to when something has gone wrong, which is a second and quite different job the same space has to do.
Does it have a text?
A setting rather than a practice, so no text belongs to it. What happens inside it is each tradition's own prayer.
When it comes up
Other forms of prayer in Interfaith
- The sequential interfaith service — Each tradition prays in turn, in its own words, rather than everyone praying one blended prayer.
- Shared silence — A held silence that everyone present can fill in their own way.
- Civic invocation — A prayer opening a public or governmental occasion, addressed to a mixed audience.
- Community vigil — A gathering after a death or disaster, usually mixed and usually outdoors.
- Being present at another tradition's prayer — Attending prayer that is not your own, at a funeral, a wedding or a bedside.
This page describes a practice. It does not tell you how to perform it, or whether you should. Practice varies by region, community and household far more than a page like this can carry, and nobody credentialed in the tradition has signed anything here. The full dossier names its sources.