Munching on the wheat

There have been a few recent posts about the state of the Quak­er blo­gos­phere. New blog­ger Richard M wrote about “Anger on the Quak­er blogs”:http://quakerphilosopher.blogspot.com/2006/08/anger-on-quaker-blogosphere.html and LizOpp replied back with ” Pop­corn in the Q‑blogosphere?”:http://thegoodraisedup.blogspot.com/2006/08/popcorn-in-q-blogosphere.html.


The way I see it, there’s not real­ly much need for anger on the inter­net. There’s sure to be some­thing hor­ri­bly offen­sive to your spir­i­tu­al sen­si­bil­i­ties right around the next link if only you click. Not only do we have dozens of dif­fer­ent def­i­n­i­tions of “Quak­er,” there’s absolute­ly no lim­its over who gets to call them­selves a Quak­er. If we want to feel embat­tled or self-righteous we all have blogs we can vis­it, but is this real­ly the way toward our indi­vid­ual or cor­po­rate spir­i­tu­al growth? Is this the way to build a new move­ment of Friends?
The web is a land of blur­ri­ness. It’s like the open vocal min­istry of an unpro­grammed meet­ing tak­en up a notch or three. We have the new vis­i­tors right off the street, seek­ers who heard about Friends on Wikipedia or Beliefnet and went instant­ly off to start a blog. There’s those meet­ing reg­u­lars with their par­tic­u­lar issues, dare we say hang-ups, over par­tic­u­lar top­ics who get bent out of shape if oth­ers min­is­ter on them. Out in the cor­ners are the cranky meet­ing back-benchers, trouble-makers who don’t mind pass­ing on third-hand gos­sip or spread­ing half-truths if it will make them the cen­ter of some­one’s atten­tion. With this kind of mix it’s no sur­prise there’s conflict.
There will be dis­agree­ments. Many times we can share our under­stand­ings and grow but some­times the gap is too large to bridge and we have to shrug our shoul­ders and agree to dis­agree. The bound­aries of Quak­erism have spread out so far that no one is ever going to agree that every­one call­ing them­selves a Friend real­ly has claim for the name. In past cen­turies this has led to nasty fights that have destroyed our com­mu­ni­ties. Nowa­days we have the “Back” but­ton. One of the dis­ci­plines we need to learn is how to use it.
We don’t have to read every post and we cer­tain­ly don’t need to close­ly fol­low every Quak­er blog out there. We are what we eat and our Quak­er blo­gos­phere is what we let it be. If the Quak­er blogs seem too angry then maybe it’s time to trim your blogroll.
Trim­ming away annoy­ing and time-wasting sites does­n’t mean we keep to like-minded blog­gers. I don’t focus on blogs with a par­tic­u­lar the­ol­o­gy or ones that come out of a par­tic­u­lar Quak­er tra­di­tion. What unites my favorite blogs is the care and dis­cern­ment that goes into them. These blog­gers are open to those who use unfa­mil­iar lan­guage, lis­ten­ing to where the words come from, and they’re curi­ous and open to learn­ing and ten­der with their com­ments. This is what true min­istry looks like, no?
_ps: If you want to con­fuse peo­ple, write a post with an evoca­tive name and then take out the ref­er­ence. “Wheat” comes from the “para­ble of the wheat and weeds”:http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2013:24 – 30;&version=31; which LizOpp intro­duced in the “com­ments of her post”:http://thegoodraisedup.blogspot.com/2006/08/popcorn-in-q-blogosphere.html and which I elab­o­rat­ed on in an ear­li­er draft of this post._

4 thoughts on “Munching on the wheat

  1. I’ve noticed that it’s not just an angry Quak­er blo­gos­phere, or an angry blo­gos­phere in gen­er­al, but rather a cul­ture seri­ous­ly marked by anger. For me, anger is usu­al­ly a defense mech­a­nism respond­ing to when folks trig­ger my wound­ings: I rec­og­nize it’s a place where I need some seri­ous heal­ing, where I need to expe­ri­ence God’s peace, and I hope to help oth­ers find that as well. I won­der if that should be part of our Quak­er tes­ti­mo­ny as well … peace as in no war and peace as in a whole spirit.…
    I, too, tend to find myself drawn to the more authen­tic post­ings rather than the most infor­ma­tive or struc­tured or branch-oriented. I want to hear peo­ples’ sto­ries, jour­neys, where they are find­ing God reach­ing out and embrac­ing them. I want this to be a wor­ship­ful expe­ri­ence rather than a con­sumeris­tic one: when I find myself anx­ious that I’m not read­ing enough or miss­ing out on some­thing, it’s time to take a step back.
    Thanks for writ­ing this post (and work­ing in a ran­dom title — nice!).

  2. Y’know, Mar­tin, I feel like I should com­ment here, but I find myself unusu­al­ly qui­et… or else a post might be in the mak­ing and I’m keep­ing my thoughts to myself!
    Blessings,
    Liz Opp, The Good Raised Up

  3. Hmmm… sor­ry, Mar­tin, but I can’t join in your con­cern about anger in the blo­gos­phere, when it seems to me that [start­beat­inglamemetaphor] there’s a hole in the blo­go­lay­er itself. To con­tin­ue to beat upon the lame metaphor, I sense the oxy­gen has hissed out. [/endbeatinglamemetaphor]
    The Blogs, to put it more plain­ly, are nei­ther as fun nor as col­le­gial as they once were. I sense that peo­ple are los­ing inter­est. In regards to the gen­er­al state of affairs, I’m in no posi­tion to elab­o­rate fur­ther (because I would be guessing).
    But I can say from per­son­al expe­ri­ence, my own blog evolved from a sim­ple plat­form to urge Amer­i­ca to cel­e­brate a good quak­ergray poet to an instant-publication medi­um for estab­lish­ing my pri­or­i­ty in mak­ing his­tor­i­cal discoveries.
    It stretched fur­ther to reflect my advo­ca­cy for Quak­er tes­ti­monies in the ‘real’ (real wicked that is!) world.
    (In fact, I would go so far as to say that once you begin to tan­gle with the world you can get pret­ty busy, because it’s unfath­omably wicked.)
    And then the blog began to sprawl fur­ther into com­men­tary on news and politics.
    Pret­ty soon, it also con­tained well over four hun­dred his­tor­i­cal obser­va­tions, mak­ing it pret­ty unweildy. The chief inter­face for find­ing any­thing was Google, rather than the dis­play struc­ture of the site.
    And, besides, in the end, the location-patterns reg­is­ter­ing on my siteme­ter sug­gest­ed that its biggest fans were far-right Chris­t­ian think tanks.
    So it was time to move on.
    LoG was a web­site before it was blog, and now, it’s chang­ing again with the times. I’m cur­rent­ly begin­ning to use the Dojo Toolk­it to serve up con­tent from a rudi­men­try data­base of his­tor­i­cal facts.
    The user-interface has been recon­fig­ured as a kind of time machine for per­sons, places, and dates that rep­re­sent the chains of cause and effect which run his­to­ry. The UI will sit there sol­id and reli­able in a sta­t­ic shell while the data flows into the “ajax” slots. (Look, Ma, I’m doing client-side Ajax!)
    To return to the issue of com­mu­ni­ty, though, this is all very unset­tled right now. I don’t know whether we shall ever be able to build our new cyberci­ty of Friends, invin­ci­ble to attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth.
    But I’m still out there, sur­round­ed, in mea­sure­less oceans of space, cease­less­ly mus­ing, ven­tur­ing, throwing…
    The con­nec­tions I’ve made, how­ev­er, with the help of the blog, are pre­cious to me.
    Duc­tile anchors, so to speak. Gos­samer threads… I hope they hold.

  4. *Hi Mitch:* Sor­ry it’s not so fun any­more. I first found Leaves of Grass in its pre-blog state and loved fol­low­ing the stream of links and the paths it took me. The sto­ries hung togeth­er in a way the blog posts nev­er did. I’m inter­est­ed to see how the new ver­sion looks!
    In my expe­ri­ence of online com­mu­ni­ties there’s a def­i­nite hon­ey­moon peri­od when some­one first joins – every­thing is pos­si­bil­i­ties and the new medi­um gives us a place to share the pent-up thoughts that have been sit­ting un-vocalized in our heads (after start­ing my blog I found Quak­er­Ran­ter ready mini-essays from late 90s sit­ting on my hard-drive unsent and unpub­lished!). After a while things qui­et down. Maybe the new­com­er has said all they have to say. Maybe they’re tired of hav­ing the same con­ver­sa­tion for the fifth time.
    But here’s the thing: the con­ver­sa­tion is still new to those who haven’t had it. Friends are still dis­cov­er­ing blogs. We still need to have those con­ver­sa­tions. I expect that some of the reg­u­lars will wan­der off (as they have since the begin­ning) and only check in from time to time. Some will take it as a min­istry of sorts to stay involved and help set the tone and give the background.
    I should say too that I’m not look­ing for a cyber-city. The best part of all this blog­ging comes when peo­ple get off the com­put­er and meet face-to-face. It’s espe­cial­ly excit­ing when they’re meet­ing some­one they would­n’t have got­ten to know with­out the blog net­works. We’re mak­ing con­nec­tions here, deep­en­ing our under­stand­ing of Quak­erism and get­ting com­fort­able with spir­i­tu­al talk (at least three blog­gers are being pub­lished for the first time in Quak­er mag­a­zines this summer).

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