I have a little more than a passing interest in the politics and history of Ireland and Northern Ireland in particular, from whence my father’s family of 17th century Scottish transplants emerged.
One of the blogs I follow on this subject is the Unionist blog Slugger O’Toole which offers very thoughtful commentary on Irish and British politics from a Unionist – but not sectarian – perspective. It is very hard not to conflate the two when discussing Northern Ireland, Glasgow or Liverpool-based football, or Canadian history (yes they all have a Protestant v Catholic underlying animosity). This is especially true if you only know a little bit about what you’re talking about. The more you know, the more nuance you will find.
And so here this morning, buried in this review of a new personal history of Ireland by Fintan O’Toole is a really nice succinct quote about sectarianism:
…here we have the essence of sectarianism, the inevitable by-product not of misunderstanding, but of understanding to the point of caricature without compassion and human respect. Such an environment could only fail to foster a political culture able to sustain the give and take of a mature democracy. It made the recourse to violence more immediate and appealing.
That is really a good and useful description of a dynamic that usually unnecessarily complicates the already complex politics of colonization and conflict. It strikes me that overcoming dynamics like sectarianism is work that can be done by each of us personally in order to engage with the bigger issues of policy and politics that affect all us collectively.
I’m single handedly trying to lift a near dead art form up from a seven year slumber. It seems like everyone stopped blogging in around 2015 In the intervening years folks would post “I really should get back to this” blog entries but then would find themselves deep in Facebook world where their writing was hard to find and search and sometimes limited only to friends. Or they would post on twitter where the link sharing would happen but without the added reflection and sometimes you’d have to battle bots and trolls to participate. Sure twitter threads are okay. But why not just blog?
(And when I say “folks” I mean me. Projection is a specialty of mine)
I get why folks don’t blog and would rather post on Facebook. It seems like it needs too much work, seems too polished. Requires a regular schedule. So I want to make it easier with a few things that might help you get blogging. (Again, even)
Get a free platform with an RSS feed. If you don’t know what that means, just sign up at Blogger or WordPress. Those sites have good mobile interfaces so you can write from your phone (like I’m doing right now). They come with great templates. They are upgradeable and transferable to your own domain and they can export your posts. An RSS feed is how we can subscribe to your writing via a newsreader like Inoreader.
Don’t be perfect. It’s a blog, not the front page of the Globe and Mail. Think out loud, make typos (typos drive engagement, lol), put half formed ideas out there. Post whenever you want. Whatever you want.
Don’t worry about your brand. I think this one hamstrung me once I had a professional redesign my site in 2015. My brand IS learning and curiosity and half thought out ideas that folks are interested in. I support innovation and learning. That’s messy and edgy sometimes. Also I’m human. It’s nice to read words written by a human. But I don’t blog to sell my brand.
Give stuff away. If you make things, give some of them away. Blogging is a gifting culture. We up lift one another. My site here is full of stuff that I have made and others have made that has been released into the wild. Generosity is beautiful. Having said that, let us know how we can hire you or buy your art, because that’s how you make a living and it’s nice to give back.
Share links and quote people. Sometimes a blog is a place for your opinions or personal thoughts. Also take time to share good things on the web. The etymology of “blog” is a contraction of the word “weblog” which comes from the idea that we log cool things that we find on the web. You want to know who is REALLY good at that? Dave Pollard especially his periodic link collections. Incredible things to read and think about.
Comment on stuff you read. Facebook has done a marvellous job of colonizing conversation. I have seen some amazing threads there with all kinds of useful content shared and explored. Same on twitter. But, can we find them again? Are they indexed and easily accessible? Nope. They are fleeting. Facebook and Twitter are happy they happened because it improves their semantic learning, but they aren’t interested in your community or your colleagues or you. So go directly to people’s blogs and share your thoughts. I am interested in you.
Basically I’m encouraging you to blog with just as much care and attention as you do with a Facebook post or a tweet. but by blogging you are doing it outside of those places in the wild where everyone can see it and participate. You don’t need to battle trolls or get drawn down algorithmically generated attractor basins because of what you write. You will be free.
What other tips do you have?
This morning this quote came through the email via Richard Rohr’s daily meditation. it’s Thich Nhat Than writing on the Christian practice of communion.
The bread that Jesus handed to you, to us, is real bread, and if you can eat real bread you have real life. But we are not able to eat real bread. We only try to eat the word bread or the notion of bread. Even when we are celebrating the Eucharist, we are still eating notions and ideas. “Take, my friends, this is my flesh, this is my blood.” Can there be any more drastic language in order to wake you up? What could Jesus have said that is better than that? You have been eating ideas and notions, and I want you to eat real bread so that you become alive. If you come back to the present moment, fully alive, you will realize this is real bread, this piece of bread is the body of the whole cosmos.
If Christ is the body of God, which he is, then the bread he offers is also the body of the cosmos. Look deeply and you notice the sunshine in the bread, the blue sky in the bread, the cloud and the great earth in the bread. Can you tell me what is not in a piece of bread? The whole cosmos has come together in order to bring to you this piece of bread. You eat it in such a way that you become alive, truly alive. . . . Eat in such a way that the Holy Spirit becomes an energy within you and then the piece of bread that Jesus gives to you will stop being an idea, a notion.
Thich Nhat Hanh, Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers (New York: Riverhead Books, 1999), 106–107.
I love that. It reminds me of the power of acknowledging the simple and everyday sacred with a simple and everyday ritual. It uses a mindful practice to raise the ordinary to the sacred.
About seven years ago I was working at a conference called Awakening Soul as a facilitator and as a poet who captured the keynote presentations and the harvests from the world cafes I was leading. One of the speakers was John Phillip Newell, a prolific writer on Celtic Christianity informed by his time as warden of the monastery on Iona in the Hebrides.
His keynote contained a similar idea to Thay’s about the Eucharist. He spoke about the cosmology of matter and meaningfulness. He said that the bread in the Eucharist stood in for “the matter that matters.” Somehow in the dance of speaker and poet we also added that the wine is about the spirit that flows. The matter that matters and the spirit that flows. A simple ritual used to acknowledge the profound meaning of Jesus being together with his dearest friends on the last night of his life. If you have been with a dying person or in a situation like that you know the feeling of that moment. Only at birth and death does one experience it.
Later that night Newell and me and five other people all found ourselves talking around a dining table in our shared accommodation. We got on to telling the birth stories of our children and as the night deepened, the stories became more and more profound. Not all the stories were good news One was about a still birth. Others were funny like the way Caitlin gripped my knees so hard that the two of us were screaming in different kinds of pain when our son was born, much to the midwife’s amusement.
It was late in the night when our circle of stories drew to a close but before we all went to bed I suggested that we mark the end of this very sacred experience with a small communion. All we had was a bottle of Laphroaig whisky and a bar of Bowen Island chocolate. And so we passed these two elements to each other offering the simple blessing: this is the matter that matters and this is the spirit that flows. And it truly transformed our little gathering into something quite sacred.
Today I stood on the beach you see in the photo above, in a very isolated and sacred place on the south flank of Haleakala on Mau’i. It is a place where the first Hawaiians arrived on this island, a black cobble beach with incredible waves and the stunning 8000 foot high flank of the volcano behind. And as I stood there I felt my father very strongly. He sailed in these waters as a naval officer in the 1950s and he knew the power of the simple and transcendent. He knew deep in his bones about the communion that I am talking about. he knew to take time to stop and acknowledge it. That knowledge served him well in his death back in December and it has served me well in my grief journey since then.
And it served me well today, remembering in a simple act that “this is the matter that matters, and this is the spirit that flows.” That little prayer is your gateway to remembering that you belong to the cosmos.
Maybe returning everything to the blog.
Just perusing through some of the stories of the Desert Fathers and found this little anecdote.
“Abba Joseph asked Abba Pastor, ‘Tell me how I can become a monk.’ The elder replied, ‘If you want to have rest here in this life and also in the next, in every conflict with another say: “Who am I?” and so judge no one.’”
That’s probably good advice before I go on Twitter.