low the way is low

Haven't blogged on this blog for a long time, but mean to start soon...indeed now!
I realised a long time ago, as I watched other bloggers, that daily blogging requires energy and commitment.  And I think I have lacked the energy for the last two or three months. This is partly to do with adjustment of medications (a consequence of getting older being that the number of tablets increases)....and sometimes I have just felt exhausted or flat.
I love Robin Mann's song "The way is low!"...it's been rather like that. Both the low road and the seduction to the way of glory.
So I will try and do better.

I feel great today. Autumn weather in Adelaide is just amazing. Balmy days and lovely cool nights.

Writing some more

Further to my recent post about some of the motivational issues to do with blogging (here) I am keen to hear from those who have particular suggestions about things they would like me to blog about.

Although writing, and particularly blogging, always has a degree of self-indulgence about it. One must in the end write for oneself, if others can be drawn into it then that is all the better.

You can either email me at coro35@tpg.com.au or leave a comment in the comments box (just click on comments below this post).

I like to blog about politics, family issues, cooking, culture, music, theatre and film, topical issues, church and religion...and so much more. Really I am just very opinionated!! That is I suppose why you love me................................................ or loathe me!!!!

Writing a lot

I imagine the election has exhausted many of us bloggers. There is so much that could be said, but should it be said. I occasionally get comments form readers of my blog which castigate me for presuming to blog in the first place.

I am always faintly bemused by these (often quite nasty) comments because the real solution for the disaffected reader is to stop reading.

The blogger is not quite so fortunate, if you want people to keep on reading then you have to keep on writing. It is quite clear from the site meter that if I stop for a while, then readership drops off and it takes a while to get back up to speed again. So this is particularly difficult if you are sick, or on holiday, or bored with blogging...or just going through a dry spell.

I say thank you to those who still obviously check back

Almost killing me

I vowed at the beginning of this week that I was not going to blog about the election for a week.
It is almost killing me. But I think it was a good thing to do.

So, this blog about "not blogging about the election" is not a blog about the election, it is a blog about blog content; if you get my drift.

I almost survived the whole of yesterday without deliberately listening to the news or current affairs discussion. I say 'deliberately', because it was impossible to not hear anything as almost every other second comment had something to do with the events of last weekend.

This, too, is not a comment about the election but about the paucity of variation available on talk-radio.

If you think this is a poor excuse for a blog...then you will understand something of my dilemma.

Behind the paywall...a sign of (bad) things to come

This week, for the first time ever, when thinking about subscribing to a magazine I decided it was probably better to subscribe to the edition-electronique rather than the paper edition.

It is a tad cheaper...and probably delivers quicker. It does mean that it won't be lying on the kitchen table!

But I can't help thinking that it's not quite right. But I guess I'll get over it.

Some of you may have noticed that I promote Ruth Gledhill's religion blog (here) from "The Times" of London. It is free no longer.

The Times has decided that they will charge people for the privilege of accessing this sort of material. I suspect that many, perhaps most, of us won't bother.

It is rather different I suggest to buying a whole magazine, I mean half the fun of blogs is not just the blogger's wisdom, but also the crackpot comments. It certainly doesn't seem right to pay for that!

This is part of a user-pays push that is going on worldwide in the Murdoch press. It's suggested that it won't be quite the same in Australia, but we will be paying for some content.

I tend to think that the reader doesn't need to pay for anything; that it can probably all be paid for by advertising, but I guess the difficulty is then that you don't value what you don't pay for.

The Millennial Blog

I have not been teasing you dear readers. There is a certain sense of irony in that since I realised I was about to write my 1000th blog , I have not so much suffered from blogstipation as busy-ness and fluey-ness, with an intervening Synod, Quiz Night; up and coming Parish Council, Confirmation (I can hear you all saying "poor you!"-take those tongues out of your cheeks-)
So here it is.
The ever steadfast Thom Merton provided me with an insight this morning which is worth reflecting on (All the more amazing because he was writing three decades before anyone knew what a blog was):

There are not a few who are beginning to feel the futility of adding more words to the constant flood of language that pours meaninglessly over everybody, everywhere, from morning to night. For language to have meaning there must be intervals of silence somewhere, to divide word from word and utterance from utterance. He who retires into silence does not necessarily hate language. Perhaps it is love and respect for language which imposes silence upon him.

Merton was of course writing about things deeper and profounder than I usually manage to pontificate about.

Thanks to all who read. Here's to the next 1000!!

Coming up!

My steadfast blogger roll tells me that this particular manifestation of my ego will reach a thousand in the next few days.

Should I have a party to push the button to launch the 1000th post?

On having your head chopped off.....

I determined two weeks ago to "do better at blogging", and I will leave it up to you, dear Reader, to decide whether or not that goal has been achieved.
But twice in the last week I have had people challenge my right to make blog comment on the basis of the fact that I happen to be a priest.
In my mind I blog as 'Stephen' not as "The Rev'd Fr", though I often like to talk about religious stuff. But I am also interested in politics, film, culture, family, language and poetry, and education and science.
I can't, and don't, distinguish particularly between myself as person and priest....it is not just my job it is my vocation.
So the critique has been that there are some areas that it is not appropriate or nice for me to talk about. That is a matter of opinion. Certainly there are some things that I would never dream of blogging about. I do not, for example, think it's appropriate for me to expose the private life of my family...or anyone for that matter. So if I am blogging in this area, I try to depersonalise it.
Some people of course can connect the dots better than others, and one child in particular has made me remove stuff about her...glad to do it.
BUT you cannot talk into a vacuum, and people who put their heads out there...politicians and business promoters the cases in point this week....want people to notice them. They cannot expect people just to roll over and accept what they say. And why would they want to?
The question in my mind is, then, why am I as priest/person disqualified from commenting on what is in the public arena? The answer is: I am not.
Indeed, (and many non-Christians don't seem to get this), I actually don't divide my life up into religious and non-religious. My Christianity actually compels me to try and dialogue with the reality of life. I have no time for a Christianity that is so heavenly it is of no earthly use.
I am happy to have my head chopped off when I stick it out there...serves me right for sticking it out.
I don't accept that I can't exercise my freedom to speak out, indeed I feel compelled to do so.
And I get a bit worried about those people who have very clear limits about what religious people should and should not talk about. So very often it seems as though it is OK to speak out if it is 'conservative' and 'nice', and not if it is challenging.
It is at that point we are told to get back into our pulpits.
Well I have news for you........

Quick Response

Within moments of publishing my blog the Hon Alexander Downer had replied by email

Your blog is yet another example of why so many Anglicans have lost faith in the church; superficial, partisan and, for someone who professes to be a church leader,inappropriate.

Alexander Downer

Well I do what I can!!

A waste of time?

The social networking blog Twitter keeps this record of how people blogged yesterday during the inauguration window.
It would seem that entries doubled at the actual time.
What does it mean?

The exact science of blogging

I am sorry that my blogging has been erratic of late (will try to do better). It takes some effort to be witty, intelligent and original every day. I have noticed that many once prolific bloggers fall by the way.
This is particularly likely to happen when a major or minor crisis happens and you just find that the ten minutes you could once use efficiently no longer exists. So I apologise. Some will know that there has indeed been a major/minor crisis which has involved the change of who lives with whom in our family. This has been relatively peaceable, though not without its moments.
It seems to be settling down, and so there is some hope that my life will regain some daily routine.

My pre-New Year resolution

• I will try and do better with blogging. Please hold me to account!!

On being heard

I realised fairly early on in my ministry that I needed to be careful when I preached that I did not overly expose my family's private affairs. In choosing illustrative examples it is not hard for those in the know to put pieces together (2+2=5). Likewise in a small town like Adelaide, it is all too easy to identify folk from scant information.

One also needs to be careful not to say too much, because wrong conclusions can be arrived at, and the overly sensitive amongst us can take umbrage...or feel they have been misrepresented.

It is an even more curious issue with blogging, because it is not a precise art form. I sort of think I am thinking out loud (heaven knows my family think I am odd enough for talking to myself as I go round the house, and the daughter's boyfriend is  faintly bemused  by the fact that I applaud the television...and we sing at each other all the time....).

Trouble is, sometime blogging is taken to be more accurate than it actually is or is intended to be. It looks like accuracy, but it's musings; when we confuse this we get into trouble.

Mind you, musings don't give you permission to slander people. Though readers should also note that what is often being conveyed is impressions, feelings not facts. And the reader may wish that I hadn't felt like I did, but they can't tell me how I did feel.

Then again, another problem with blogging is that you can't be sure you ahve any readers any way!

signposts

These Spring weeks all have something of a sense of excitement, as the days lengthen and lighten there is a new found sense of energy. The jacaranda begin to bloom...and it sends a shudder up anyone's spine who has ever taken a serious end of year exam, as that is the sign that it is that time of year in Adelaide.

Other milestones:

• This week SClark3 will give her final recital...her mother and I remarked thank goodness she doesn't do this professionally (yet) as she is so tense...though her kind Mum noted that she is better than she was! She will sing Schumann and Faure, Gershwin and Weill...really looking forward to it.
• The blog ticker will reach 20000, (goal achieved!)I imagine, in the next couple of days. Thanks to all those of you who read.
  

What end blogging?

Pursuant to a conversation during which my neighbour (who I shall refer to as Dr W for the sake of anonymity)harangued us because his hearing aid didn't appear to be working properly...or was it because I was at the other end of the table (either way W it was like the good old days) we were told that we should be careful lest our lunchtime conversation appear on my blog.
This is not unreasonable, though I would always remove personal comment if asked.
It does raise the question about the way information is now being transmitted, but I shall leave you to think about that.
But I did think the cartoon below was rather fun!

Virtual reality

As I type words into the air (almost) every day I have no idea where they might end up.
The site-count meter clicks over every day, and occasionally I get comments from people I don't know and sometimes from I don't know where. What all this means is a difficult issue to get a handle on.
Is it the extreme manifestation of the alienation that we read about in the novels of the 40s and the 50s? Have we preferred to create for ourselves little cocoons of 'reality' which are no more real than Donald Duck, and is this the biggest survival mechanism of all. Faced with the truth would we all go mad, and so we create a virtual reality which works in a shallow sort of way, but really serves to protect us and our delicate sensibilities.
I often hear Christians talking about a God they seem to have created who bears little resemblance to my God. A God they wish might exist, who has multiple magic wands to wave over any situation.
In so doing they direct all their energies at trying to get this God to wave the wretched thing, largely it seems to me to no avail.
And yet there are other times when it ius all too clear that God does break in, not I think to wave a wand but rather to connect us with truth and genuine reality.
Death is a point where this often seems to happen. Crisis often engenders the need to confront reality. Where it is too callous to play the sort of wand-waving game (we don't mind doing it at marriage or at birth, but at death the stakes are a bit higher, and in a crisis we need to shape up).
I need to stop spending so much time creating a virtual world ...not the blogging...but my life!

Sharpening Pencils

'Tis the day before Christmas Eve Eve,and technically my day off. Though there are lots of things to do, and so I just caught myself 'sharpening pencils'.
This is (amongst others) Stephen Covey's Quadrant Theory (here) which denotes the frustrating tendency we (I) often have to attend to the non-important/non-urgent tasks of life because we are overwhelmed by the pile of stuff we have to get through.
If we map between Important and Urgent then there are four possibilities which motivate how we choose what to do.: Important and Urgent; Important but not urgent, Not Important-but Urgent, and Not Important-Not Urgent

Western societies are very urgency driven. Witness the insidious phone. How often have we broken off something important (be it making love, or listening to someone's sorrow) to answer the stupid phone, only to find it is the dentist reminding us about next week's appointment. that's a whole other blog

The point is that we will often choose to do the unimportant-urgent ahead of the important-but not urgent. This latter quadrant includes: planning and evaluation, thinking about the future, spending time with your beloved, wasting time with kids and so on. The very things that really change life's meaning and improve the quality of relationships. Seldom as urgent as a cut finger, or as insistent as a phone they often get left and very often never get done.

Covey makes the "sharpening pencils" point ...which is about Quadrant IV -Not Important and Not Urgent---that strangely when we are really swamped and feeling ourselves getting buried by competing demands we often choose to operate here rather than get on with the difficult stuff. It's certainly true for me. And I see it as a warning more than anything else, when I find myself sharpening pencils, or typing old school teachers into Google (what I was doing this a.m.) then alarum bells should go off that there is a huger than usual pile that I am avoiding.

This all begs the question about whether or not "blogging" is sharpening pencils. It may be.

At its worst it's just time wasting isn't it. So I try, (at least I try) to do better than that. In that sense I hope it is more Quad II than Quad IV. I imagine that those who think other wise either don't read this or stopped reading some time ago; and those who agree that blogging at least may be important are inclined to accept this opinion.

Well time to go and sweep up the clippings.