Bournagain

I have got so much out of reading other people’s blogs over the years (see my list of bloggy heroes in the sidebar), but my own has suffered from a bout of indentity crisis to the point where it went into hibernation.

It was partly due to the challenge of living as a person of faith in a culture where everybody assumes that faith is to be completely restricted to the private sphere of life. This creates somewhat of a dilemma if your life’s goal is to follow Jesus who said not to hide your light under a bowl, but to put it on a stand so everyone in the house can see it – how can you reconcile keeping faith private with letting the world know what makes you tick?

For my work I spend a lot of time on the Internet, and it has become increasingly obvious to me that the only way to completely protect your privacy on the Internet is not to use it at all. Anything you put up there is available for the whole world to see. This was brought home to me when I was kicked out of a local community centre where I was running an activity. The director had been alerted to the fact that a dangerous cult leader had infiltrated their centre and was trying to brainwash their members. Some well-intentioned officer of the French religious police (the anti-sect brigade) had followed a rabbit trail from a press article about me, to my blog (via Google), to the mission organisation I am part of, and discovered that I was a threat to the well-being of all the patrons of the community centre. The humour of the fact that it was the yoga instructor that showed me the door was definitely not lost on me. Yoga, sophrology, tarot reading, doing spooky things with magnets were all kosher, but faith in Jesus of Nazareth was definitely not – not that I had even mentioned anything about my faith by that point.

This experience was partly what lead to my bloggy identity crisis – I wasn’t sure how much I should be putting out there for general consumption, and it was easier just to give up writing altogether. The kind of behaviour I witnessed at this community centre might seem extreme – and I hasten to add that many of my non-believing friends also found it very peculiar. However, it is a completely logical application of the assumption that faith should be private – which incidentally was never the intention of the separation of church and state. La laïcité – that untranslatable concept which is a foundational value of the French Republic – should be about protecting French citizens who adhere to a minority faith from being disadvantaged, protecting us from having religious beliefs imposed upon us, and allowing free exchange and debate on the subject of religion. Instead it has become an innoculation against any faith other than the majority faith of the culture, which is difficult to name, but can be expressed in a series of -isms (individualism, materialism, existentialism, evolutionism, republicanism à la française, laïcisme etc.)

But why should that stop me from blogging about things that are important to me? If somebody reads something on my blog that s/he finds offensive, the little red circle (for Mac users) or the little red ‘x’ (for the unconverted) is only one click away. I now see blogging as one way of being a whole person – not talking psycho-babble here – I mean that there is a huge temptation to modify your words and actions to suit the circles you are moving in. I have a tendency to be much more open about my experiences in God with those who share the same faith as me, than with those who don’t. This is normal, but that doesn’t necessarily mean its good. I use religious jargon when speaking with other Christians, which I would not use when talking with work colleagues, for example. This is part of “hiding my light under a bowl” because the language we use can exclude people. Being whole is about being the same person whoever you are with, which is why blogging is such a good discipline, because it makes you think about how you communicate. Everything I put up here I have to be willing for people from all the different spheres of my life to read (well, theoretically at least – the odds of people finding my blog amongst the 36 squillion blogs out there are almost as great as the odds that the universe evolved from nothing).

All that to say to anyone who stumbles onto my blog that I’m back (Hi Mum), with a spruced-up blog theme, and occasional postings where I will think out loud about living in France, faith, family and mission, not necessarily in that order, with lots of unfinished thoughts, digressions, and useful links to people I admire.

Well, I did it!   I finally took the plunge, held my breath, and upgraded to the WordPress 2.5.  If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you’re really not missing anything.  It’s just that if you open up the bonnet of this blog you find that the motor running this thing is an application called WordPress.  I have been reading some very scary things about what can go wrong when you upgrade, and all in all I haven’t lost too much hair so far.

However, you will notice that some of the doodackies (thingumibobs) in the sidebars to the right are missing, and depending on how the next couple of days go it may be a while before I get them back again.

You know those “dummies” books?  When it comes to web design I’m definitely one of the target readers.

Two months of silence in the world of blogs is an eternity. This will be an interesting experiment to see if the small number of people who read this blog have completely given it up for lost, or whether I may be able to attract them back again. During these two months I must admit to have pondered on the potential and purpose of a blog, wavered backwards and forwards about the wisdom of divulging certain things over the Internet, and questioned some of the fairly self-centered and even narcissistic elements that one finds in the blogosphere.

But I’ve come back to the fact that I get a lot out of reading other people’s blogs, and I enjoy writing so why not carry on? It’s a good discipline, and who knows, there’s always the chance that from time to time I might contribute something useful to some online discussion. Is this a new year’s resolution? I’ve always been really good at keeping those …for the first week of January. So I’ll commit myself to writing this week, and next we’ll see what next week will bring.

Have been thinking a lot lately about the purpose of this blog.  I’m aware that there are a number of things that we are involved with that aren’t really appropriate for posting on the Internet.  But on the other hand I have benefitted so much in recent months reading various blogs of people, around Europe especially, who have been going through a similar transition to us.  Especially in the area of seeking a simpler and more authentic experience of what it means to live out Christian community.

I’m also aware that there’s a lot of pontificating out there on the blogosphere which isn’t necessarily that helpful.  It’s a great way of “living transparently” before people, but sometimes it’s hard to know just how transparent to be.   I like that fact that it forces me to think about writing things that I would be happy for anybody in our various circles of acquaintance to read.  It’s a good exercise in “being real”.  I think the current buzzword for that is being “holistic”.

So I’d like to keep this going, but I think the blog is going through a bit of an identity crisis at the moment.

Some blog housekeeping: if you are a past commenter on this blog you may have noticed that your comments are now missing your name and link.

It’s not that we don’t love you! I installed an update for WordPress (my favourite blog software), and unfortunately it has a few issues with my blog. This has affected the comments, and I have no idea how to fix it.

So don’t stop commenting! I think that all new comments should appear correctly.

A practical point about blogging: do you know about feeds? Feeds are an easy way of keeping track of what people are writing in your favourite blogs, without actually having to visit their site. Blog posts are “syndicated” in rather the same way as international press agencies like Reuters syndicate their reports to newspapers all over the world.

To read feeds, you need a “feed reader” (you see, it’s not rocket science). They are also called rss readers or aggregators (don’t worry about what rss stands for). There are two kinds. An Internet based rss reader is a website where you set up an account for free, which enables you to group the feeds of all your favourite blogs together, and it updates automatically every time you open your account page. A good example of this is Bloglines which is one that I use and am quite happy with.

The other option is to install a feed reader as a plugin on your Internet browser. Firefox even has its own feed reading feature with “Live bookmarks” (I wouldn’t now about Internet Explorer – I have evolved The one I use is an open source thing called Sage – it’s very easy to install and read. Every now and then when I’m working at the computer, I just click on “update feeds”, and can instantly see who has written new material.