Every time I think of packing in my blog (which is frequently) I remind myself that I’m not writing a book. I think a blog only works if any post is seen as the first word and not the last word on any matter. It allows for thinking aloud – something most leaders are not encouraged to do as changing your mind, learning or growing up are seen as weaknesses rather than strengths.
Anyway, this blog runs the risk that I will write ‘first word’ stuff that gets quoted back later as if it were ‘last word’ conclusions. Quotable lines from one context get held up as heresy in another. I guess it’s just part of the game, but it’s also a massive pain.
This isn’t post-Easter misery on my part. I just started thinking about it on holiday while reading William Boyd‘s Any Human Heart. In the preamble Boyd’s main character explains why he kept a journal (which forms the text of the book). He writes:
We keep a journal to entrap that collection of selves that forms us, the individual human being… a true journal presents us with the more riotous and disorganised reality… The true journal intime… doesn’t try to posit any order or hierarchy, doesn’t try to judge or analyse: I am all these different people – all these different people are me.
A blog is not a journal intime. But it should allow the writer the freedom to be honest, to listen to response and reaction, to venture an idea or analysis, to express a view or present an interest, to try out a perspective – perhaps then to reject it and move on. The problem is, of course, that the text stands there to be lifted and used in evidence against you. Yet, unless the blogger strives only to convey a single persona – a particular image – or create a selective persona, the whole person will always run the risk of being undermined by the partial representation of a particular instant or period. Oh well…
William Boyd’s character, Logan Mountstuart, seems pretty selfish and narcissistic so far (I have only read the first had of the book and I haven’t seen the film version). I guess I’d better reserve any further judgement until I get to the end.
The end of any book always shines new light on all that has gone before. A bit like resurrection at the end of a gospel…
April 10, 2012 at 4:47 pm
I wonder… As one much newer to blogging I am still puzzled about why I do it. Partly it is the challenge to see what i think and to learn, through stats and comments, whether it helps anyone else think.
What I like is the promptness. Blogs are v much of the moment, and bloggers are, among other things, trying to contribute to the richness of the moment.
This suggests to me that a blogs should have a built in ‘read-by’ date and that the good people at WordPress or wherever should offer a facility whereby we can set blogs to self delete after, say, 28 days.
What I have found is that blogging has not only enriched my intellectual life by making me think a bit more, it has also enriched my ministerial and social lives.. so many great conversations beginning where a blog left off.
Stephen
April 10, 2012 at 5:02 pm
Stephen Cherry, I wouldn’t want the 28 day cut off! After having done this for over two years (I think), I now have a fantastic online library of links, writings and memories to call on. It’s a funny business, though.
April 10, 2012 at 5:13 pm
You are on holiday bishop. I rather envy you being able to blog when you are having a break. My wife always finds me out when I do such things and says something like, “Michael do you really think you should be working – or something not quite so gentle. We enjoy reading your blogs but please make sure you have a good break. God bless and encourage you. Michael, a very young Anglican aged 76.
April 10, 2012 at 5:21 pm
[...] SOURCE – Blogging Bishop Nick Baines [...]
April 10, 2012 at 7:20 pm
I love your blogs Bishop Nick DON”T STOP
April 10, 2012 at 9:26 pm
What I like about your blogs +Nick is the way you manage to talk about everything under the sun (even though you recently reminded there is nothing new under it, it doesn’t always seem that way!). Happy hols, you certainly earned it!
April 11, 2012 at 1:10 am
Well probably Michael one reason about the blogging on holiday thing is that nick doesn’t consider it ‘work’ in the normal sense but relaxation as well.music can be the same for me though my wife bans it if she can from the suitcase! That being Said I might well be accused of talking out of my rear end in a future blog so enough….let him defend his own practices !
April 11, 2012 at 8:23 am
By co-incidence I am also reading Any Human Heart at the moment (I could say struggling to read it) on my daughter’s recommendation. I was much struck by the same passage and sat thinking about the historical meaning of journals v present day blogs.
Journals, generally, were not be be read publically, or at least not until after the writer’s death, after which point I think most journal writers had expected that their rich thoughts and observations would be released upon a wondering public. . . they were seen to be an acceptable post-death form of what we now call social media.
Blogs are different in that they are meant to be read now, with immediacy; the here and now juxtaposed against yesterday or a year ago etc, warts and all. Stephen (Cherry), the edit facility gives ALL bloggers the opportunity to delete after 28 days, but how many of them do? It would destroy the very meaning of a blog/journal-keeping and turn them into monthly post-it notes. (And who anyway, amongst the world of bloggers, would REALLY want to lose those rich thoughts?)
I have young relations who “blog” their lives, not in the traditional sense but on F Book and Twitter etc; daily and even hourly events are logged, photos posted, their lives displayed proudly for all to see and with whatever subscript the viewer chooses – social and personal comment by image and throwaway sentence. The panic that happens if the server is down, or the greater thought of “losing” these posts and photos by some accident of technology – the ultimate delete key – can leave these young people almost traumatised. In anticipation of this we now have the Cloud to “back-up” our potentially lost lives!
Every young man or woman who displays their lives on social media is no different from (the admirable) Nick and his wonderful blog – we all want our world to be viewed through our OWN eyes, self-edited and with the sweepings from the cutting-room floor neatly swept away from prying eyes.
We are all the same, I concluded, although our methods, media and cultural slant may differ.
April 11, 2012 at 8:44 am
Doesn’t the problem lie partly with the opening statement that a blog should always be a first word not a last?
The most fascinating blogs are those where it becomes clear over time that through interaction with the comments as well as in the real world the blogger shifts his or her views, sometimes tending towards this way sometimes towards that, but slowly coming to a firmer conclusion.
It’s the “realness” of the journey that’s engaging.
And it’s the realness of the journey that also helps the readers to shape their thinking and too accept that their own views are possibly only mid points on a journey.
And then it doesn’t matter if people lift old quotes to shore up their current position. There will be enough other posts to point them to to put them right.
April 11, 2012 at 11:09 am
Please don’t give up – I’ve only just found you!!! You have spoken at YMC twice in the past year (last weekend being the last time which lead me to the blog) and I was an immediate fan!! – reading the blog has just confirmed it. Great to hear enthusiasm, wrestling and pure immediacy of thought from a Bishop – a breath of fresh air! Thank you,
Pauline
April 11, 2012 at 9:22 pm
……and just like our underdstanding of any life once it is over- we can only understand it whe nwe know th eend of thestory. Not that it is the end.
April 12, 2012 at 3:54 pm
A Bishop who is engaged with all and sundry on the web, gives the lie to the old notion that the Church preaches “at” people rather than meeting them where they are and pointing them towards other ways to look at things. If people are to ” find that they have been found by God” they need every possible entry point to engagement with the Church.
Hang on in there!
Across the social media, good work is being done engaging with the unchurched. Cranmer and yourself on blogs, Rick Warren, Richard Coles Nicky Gumbel and the Digital Nun on twitter; so many people would never think of themselves as religious yet are engaged with people of faith on a daily basis.
Of course informal dialogue is a hostage to fortune for a bishop of the Established Church, but didn’t Jesus encourage us to spread the seed indescriminately, with profligacy and faith( not caution)?
April 12, 2012 at 3:58 pm
Nick, your blog would be missed by many and a lot of interesting and thoughtful insights into the affairs of the day, the state of the world and life in general would never see the light of day. Please continue
April 14, 2012 at 9:47 am
I agree with Martin Sewell’s comment above. Blogs such as yours allow people to see the Church in a different light, beyond the negative headlines. They’ve helped me move back toward Christianity having left it behind 30 years ago. Keep it up.