In recentre I was wondering out loud if the new centre of culture or western meta-narrative was popular culture itself. PG
commented on how scary a thought this could be which in turn reminded me of the Thoreau quote below, that I use when doing stuff on spiritual disciplines.
“when our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper or been told by a neighbour; and for the most part the only difference between us and our fellow is that he has seen the newspaper or been out to tea and we have not. In proportion as our inward life fails we go more constantly and desperately to the post office. You may depend on it that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters proud of his extensive correspondence has not heard from himself in a long while.”
Henry Thoreau
I wondered about a rephrasing
“when our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us anything genuinely new about God or the world; and for the most part the only difference between us and our fellow is that he has been surfing blog-sphere and we have not. In proportion as our inward life fails we go more constantly and desperately to the computer. You may depend on it that the poor fellow who walks away with the longest blog roll, proud of his extensive list of links has not heard from himself in a long while.” (adapted from Henry Thoreau)
The mere act of rephrasing this is ironical and forces me back to re-look at my walk before God.
I guess it depends if in our reading of many blogs we are interacting and allowing it to change us and truly interacting and involving ourselves, or if we are simply reading them as interesting pick and mix ideas that we can quote in conversations in order to look educated, clever and on target.
*Goes off to sit and be challenged about these thoughts for a bit*
v insightful Richardo! Reminds me of Ecclessiastes – there is nothing new under the sun.
As with most issues (all issues?) I’m sure it all comes down to: balance. I think most of us ‘feed’ off of conversations/reading blogs/emails/news, etc… and enjoy it. But we need to also ‘reflect’/pray/think, etc, about things, and what our response should be… etc. I know I’m sometimes guilty of not doing this. On the other hand, I’m not big on the idea of ‘quiet times’, where we ‘set aside’ time each day to pray, specifically. I’m sure there’s a place for it (ish) but if we are to ‘pray continually’ then perhaps we ought to be able to communicate with God, and think through issues, WHILE we’re reading blogs and suchlike! Still, no doubt that some ‘time out’ is a good thing.