Recovering

I am not Homo Postmodernis. [I don't think anyone is, yet.] But with a growing sense of familiarity over recent months, from reading blogs and McLaren books, I am willing to stand up, grasp my 12-step plan, and say, “My name's duncan, and I'm a recovering modern..."

Last night, bronwyn and I went to ⁄forward slash, the tallskinnykiwi's latest offering being toured this year. For some of the people at my discussion table, it seemed they were really relating to the fact that andrew jones was describing the “kids” that they work with. For me, he was just describing me.

The thing itself was good. Just as interesting though was to talk for a short time to fellow kiwi andrew jones, as well as to jonny baker... With the obvious antipodean connection, andrew introduced us to a couple of friends of his who recently got married, (australian) maggie and (her husband) phouc-tan. There was a slightly surreal perspective shift about 20 seconds into the conversation as I realised I knew a little about their wedding previously—from andrew's blog. Blog people become real people. Distributed community becomes relationship. People (who are not bloggers) have said to me they worry that online communication is substituting for “real” face-to-face community. I think cyberspace warps real space to actually bring people together.

What did I graft into my thinking then?

• co-authorship is where it is at. A recent comment on this blog questioned, how many people read this blog? [Not many. Do I care? Well, probably a small slice of me does. May that slice shrink.] The thing is to write, and to have others engage. So I wish every single person who read things here would post meaningful thoughts in response... [and you define meaningful, not me.]
• layers. the emerging person doesn't say who they are now, they describe the layers of their history that build up who they are today. [Inscrutable ancient saying: your denominational history is like a layered Photoshop document with alpha channels.]
• rest is maybe now more attractive than activity. “Maybe instead of running programmes we just get together and do nothing?” That is so what I need...

At home in bed last night bronwyn reflected, “No one prayed... no one talked to the God we were all talking about...” Huh. I wonder why?