Connection and Continuity

Usually, I take a moment each day to read some blogs. I have a few personal friends and acquaintances who keep them, there are the more-famous ones (dailykos.com for liberal junkies, the blog of the moderator of the Presbyterian Church in the USA), and there is a great blogring for Presbyterian Bloggers (pcusablog.blogspot.com). I find it so amazing to read the lives of people I do and do not know and to discover what things are, to them, worth writing down.

Sometimes, I wonder if it's creepy. I imagine most of us do. We have our ways of explaining the practice away: it's an act of personal expression to blog - if you don't want strangers reading about your life, don't write about your life on the internet. But even if we have accepted that this is a twenty-first century bourgeois media concept that we really dig, it can feel a little odd for us.

But here is why I truly believe in things like blogging, like the Facebook, like myspace: I believe that connection and continuity are so important in this world. You see, we're all made of dust and we'll all be dust again in only a matter of time. And we are faced with a world full of mystery and challenge and hope and revelation and wonder. Even those of us who spend entire lives searching for the answers never find all of them - only some of them. And they tend to answer questions like who, how, where, when, what - but few of them get very close to that big capital-W "Why?". Sure, you've proven to me that evolution is entirely possible - but why? Maybe you explain away God by saying that we are genetically programmed to seek something higher. Why?! Why is there morality? Why is there a need for art? Why do I so love the sound of a thunderstorm?

There are clues. Even the wonder itself has an answer-like quality to it: there is the empowerment of not knowing. There are, for religious folk like myself, things like the Bible, which I don't believe to be the inerrant word of God but instead a powerful testimony to something that happened on this earth that seems unavoidably other-wordly. And there are connection and continuity. Why do we study history? Some say it's because we don't want to repeat our shameful pasts. I say maybe so - but I think the more important thing is that we desire continuity. We have a sense that, from Jesus to George Washington to Bela Bartok, we're somehow all in one boat that's headed somewhere. And even if we don't know where that is, we're fairly certain we'd like to make it. And things like the Facebook, like blogging, like myspace help us to connect to one another while we're here, so we can at least feel empowered by wondering at life together.

Nothing terribly triumphant or groundbreaking in these thoughts, I'm afraid; just something to put on the table.

Blessings to you all (all two of you who read me).