Buon Natale

Dear Pope Francis (standing, second from left), who taught me the word Lampedusa, whose smiling face I felt beaming from Time covers all over New Sagaya last Sunday, and who is celebrating Christmas Mass in Rome this day --- Merry Christmas! May your earthly mother rejoice in her work being carried to such completion and your blessed Mother ensconce you in her mantle.

This is such a humbling, overflowing time of year. The cold weather (-17 this morning as I picked up one final gift) ensures that we'll probably stay parked for the next few days. I do not sled or stroll in single digits. We wish you a Merry Christmas. May your mug overflow and your public radio stay wired. Snuggle in! The miracle isn't dependent on us doing a thing, planning or preparation-wise. God is great.

I'm always in search of a resplendent Christmas(s), and regret that an impressive strain of stomach flu will keep me home tonight. I'll light candles and remember that Mary herself knew the resplendent Soul, with no need of the trappings I'm tempted to chase. It's the warmth of love, from one soul to another, that gives us security. So at this time of year I try to balance my sensory desires with the knowledge that God alone fulfills me. I've been reading a little bit of St. John of the Cross. He rivals Augustine in threatening the allure of my own appetites. Thank you to the friends who passed the book along. The guy is hardcore and I knew little of his biography until now.

I still like sparkly stuff.

 

sthughofcluny.org

 

 

If You Want To Sing Out, Sing Out

After almost two weeks as a blogger, it's high time for some wild generalizations and sweeping conclusions about this experience from yours truly, no?

First -- as predicted, my debut and the ensuing shock waves have apparently shut down Wikipedia. Weird.*

Speaking of the mighty wiki, let's start there. Think of Wikipedia as the town square, layered with a feast of fliers on every Dickensian lamppost. Its senior contributors keep a tidy aesthetic and I generally trust them on matters of democratic access to information.

As for the motley crew of websites that allow much of this information to flow so freely, let's be clear. Facebook is the detention hall, or your living room, or the lounge at the Senior Center, depending on your demographic. We're passing around artful doodles of this and that, with all the productivity of an episode of Wheel of Fortune. We're quite literally spinning our wheels. I know that some people can visit Facebook without clinical side effects, I just don't know if I'll ever be one of them.

The Facebook News Feed has become like our customized morning newspaper, and maybe tweets are a broader form of email, like the braggart descendant of IM. Or (for the Lutherans, not to mention the Luddites), Twitter is for nailing missives to the doors of your neighbors, be they friend or foe. Like the boy in the tweed cap selling newspapers, breathless as he paces the square, offering insistent headlines. And hey, news flash, I have totally been putting stuff on Facebook that belonged on Twitter! That's where you put links to articles. It's just the rules, evidently. We're passing notes (back to the detention metaphor) with our tweets, where Facebook is more like decorating the walls in the hallway. Ah, the Facebook ...Wall. I daresay M. Zuckerberg and I would not have been friends in school.

Pinterest, as far as I can tell, allows us to peek in everyone else's windows and spy on them. Or sift through their storage units.

As these distinctions in egalitarian media are becoming more accepted, it brings me to the idea of a blog. I wrote my first in 2001, and it was a labor of love. Love, of course, was spelled h, t, m, l and my page's theme was sparkly red Hello Kitty. (I know, I'm a badass.)

This was before FAQs were expressed as such, and blogs were still called weblogs, as if some vital data was being logged. Doesn't it sound like part of a nautical chart? The term was soon handily shortened to 'blog. I begrudgingly gave up that apostrophe, and the term weblog, once I realized it sounded like the equivalent of offering to send you a facsimile, using the facsimile machine. My blog was an offshoot of a Yahoo! account, and I extracted the codes from their tutorial, copying instructions from my laptop onto fathoms of Post-It notes. It took me about a week to put up exactly four pictures of our move from Alaska to Nevada. I built a few more scrapbook-ish pages and let it go at that.

It's been fascinating to read the blogs of people I know, over the years. Their design choices display personality in a way that's slightly more organic than Facebook or MySpace templates. I celebrate the moment we all had a slot on these centralized sites as a net gain since it includes many more people than blogging ever will. But all our pages look the same. I digress.

My point is one of decision, mindfulness --- I don't want to be shouting in your living room. If the Facebook News Feed has become the morning newspaper, then its full-page ads are boring me. Mine included. Maybe a blog can be a more settled space to opine. I'm no longer standing in the street, wringing my hands over rotten tomatoes, but instead resolving to go inside and make you a sandwich. If you tuck the pickles into your napkin and toss them, I'll never know. Take it or leave it, the etiquette of what we're doing online bears examination.

Thanks for the support and networking from so many dedicated  bloggers, Catholic and otherwise. And the readers. There appear to be some readers!

There's a million ways to go, you know that there are.

* Una voce, friends.