Juggling with Jelly

To blog or not to blog that is the activity

Spent my morning going down my blogroll with comments from a non-blogging friend at the back of my mind; he said to me yesterday "you really like those flipping blogs don't you" and "keep 'em to yourself ...". From those comments I've been thinking that awkward question why do I do this?". Then I reached the philgoodacre.blogspot that descibes the blog-habit thus

(A) blog helps me reflect on my journey, about where I've been, and where I might be heading ... I make these thoughts public, because "others understand better what I have trouble grasping and they help me to continue on my way" (Brother Roger of Taize, 1915 - 2005).

I like that. And without having consciously thought about it before realised that is why I blog. A partial answer to the awkward question.

But perhaps there is more to it than that. Because they never speak of their doubts it seems that most of my friends. acquintances, home-group or out-reach community members are not asking the same theological questions that I am. But some people have and so like Brother Roger I need help along the way. [Sad that Brother Roger was murdered during a worship service the other day.]

There is another advantage to blogging in the Christian blogosphere. I'm dyslexic and have very slow phonological processing and a very poor memory so it helps to get the jump on my vicar. Who, after reading all these blogs, I suspect also has a well established blog-habit himself. Either that or many blogging clergy/theologians/church-leaders are thinking through the same issues as him on films, post-modernism in the church, emergent church, evangelism and a pile of other topics affecting out-reach, mission, and worship.

While my blogroll lists people holding a broadly similar doctrinal basis to mine. A few do have a completely different take on Christian faith. To read how the other end of a broad church approaches something that I hold dear means blowing away the cobwebs and dust and cleaning off the tarnish that I've let settle over many years. That's just as much a part of the journey.

Occasionally one comes across a blog by someone you knew for a while and it allows a little voyeurism reading about the current location of their journey. It is heartening to read that some of them are also wrestling with answers to my questions. If friends, acquintance, travellers in the same congregation discover my blog then we can "continue on our way" together.

There's something of the essence of spiritual journal in blogging. A long forgotten or much over-looked spiritual discipline that prominent Christians in the past used to great personal advantage. With theirs we had to wait until after they died before reading their struggles, joys, perplexity. Had the people of the time known some of what was being written perhaps others would have been help. But now with blogs it is possible to share these thoughts with others and maybe thereby "build up the church". That has to be a fine goal for what is such a solitary habit.

posted by Trevor Jenkins @ 2:21 pm