Surprised By Community: the Spirituality of Blogging

Here is the second of the articles that appeared in the recent MSA Seed Sampler that I wanted to highlight in the series What is a Spiritual Practice. This article is by Tim Mathis who lives in Seattle with his wife Angel.  He currently aspires to be an Episcopal priest, writer and member of the Anglican Order of St Stephen.  He shares the blog Relatively Faithful with his brother Shayne.

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For someone writing about using technology as the practice of a spiritual discipline, I’m quite the Luddite. I hate cell phones, I don’t Twitter, and I’m usually one of the last of my friends to pick up new gadgets and programs. Predictably, I didn’t get into blogs before I started writing one. I thought they were for people that wanted to air their crackpot ideas without going to the trouble of finding someone to validate them with publication. Then I started airing my own crackpot ideas online and haven’t been able to stop. Now, three years, three blogs, and five hundred posts later, I’m hooked on the medium and write regularly with a feeling of responsibility, accountability, and gratitude for a little community of readers scattered around the world. In the process I’ve been surprised to discover that blogging is good for the soul.

I started blogging because, at the beginning of my discernment process for ordination in the Episcopal Church, I was required to type out the story of my religious life to introduce myself to the Rev. Dr. Ann Holmes Redding, the priest who would help me determine whether or not I have a priestly calling. Having just completed my Masters thesis, I’d had enough of writing major documents that only one person would read, so I decided to post my autobiography online in installments for the world to see—or at least the world that had access to my MySpace page. I was humbled and surprised by the fact that twenty to thirty friends read every post.

Since then, this growing online community has shaped me in important ways across the last few years. The process of deciding who you are and what you’ll be is at one level about self-examination; you spend time in reflection individually sorting out the battles you want to fight, and the places where you want to devote your energy. But more importantly, our lives are formed in community when people encourage us to either forge ahead or shift directions. Blogging offers something distinctive; it really is done in an open community.

In my own process of discernment for the priesthood, face-to-face interactions with friends and mentors from the Episcopal world have been essential, but my blog readers have been instrumental at key points. After spending several months in 2008 feeling seriously conflicted about whether to continue towards the priesthood, I explicitly laid down my most troubling questions for my readers, asking them to tell me what they thought. Ultimately, their responses gave me clarity and confidence in continuing on towards ordination, and helped me to determine specifically the type of priest I am going to be—one that thinks, writes, tells the truth, doesn’t take himself too seriously, and does his best work online. Later, in reflecting on this experience in particular when I was dabbling with monastic spirituality, I wrote a personal Rule of Life and included a commitment to blogging as a form of communal prayer.

Every priestly personality wants to help others progress intellectually and spiritually, and to that end I’ve been intentional in writing about my religious experience as honestly and as articulately as possible. My spiritual story across the last several years has been wrapped up in the process through which I have left behind a religious tradition, and hence a community of people, and writing about that has sometimes meant critiquing ideas held by people who I really love. I know that in writing candidly I’ve hurt the feelings of friends and family, or lowered their estimation of me. But the greatest fulfillment I’ve felt as a blogger came when an old friend (who I haven’t seen in years) sent me a long message thanking me for the honesty with which I’ve talked about my experience and told me that it has helped him to deal with some of his own religious questions.

It is true that open community has its drawbacks—anonymous strangers can log on, call you a heretical, idiotic jerk for presenting your heartfelt beliefs, make you angry for the rest of the day, and then never return. That sucks, even if there is some kind of “iron sharpening iron” process there. But thankfully, I’ve found that people don’t respond that way in most cases. Opening your story and your thoughts up for others more often leads to sincere conversations that result in growth, learning, and a sense of friendship—even on the internet. I didn’t cultivate online community intentionally, but interactions there have given me a sense of responsibility and appreciation for the people who read and comment on the silly things I write.

There’s no getting around the fact that blogging is dorky. The term itself sounds like a child’s insult or something, and all of us bloggers are prone to being a little bit too earnest and taking our own ideas a little bit too seriously. Nonetheless, I’ve found that blogging has the potential to be a deeply spiritual practice, cultivating real friendship and providing opportunities for real personal growth. I’m sure that my ideas, religious and otherwise, are still crackpot, but I expect that they are a little bit less so as a result of my blogging community.