After a church fire last week, the Spring of Light community will be spending lent on pilgrimage. We’re a small family of friends who are learning to enter into relationship with one another and with whoever comes across our path. Following the simple rule of St. Francis, we seek to bless those who cross our path with the peace of God. We eat together, sing together, watch movies together, and are gradually learning what it looks like to spend our lives together. Along the way, we’ve met many friends who join us for various parts of the journey. After mourning the loss of our building, we’ve chosen to mark the time there with a slideshow celebrating the seasons of life that we have shared.
Pilgrim Notes
Reflections along the way.
Category: Community (page 2 of 5)
MSNBC takes a step closer to real interactive news by purchasing Newsvine. This is an interesting news site because it was originally an invite only community. Community members can post, vote and comment on news story. While I mostly lurked through the discussion threads, I always enjoyed the hearty and sometimes volatile discussions.
Read the community’s response to today’s announcement in the Newsvine community.
I heard an ad on Ancient Faith Radio for an Orthodox MySpace. Interesting. If you’re Orthodox and want to enter into an online community of Eastern Orthodox Christian visit the Orthodox Circle.
Reading through the Rule of St. Benedict with thoughts from Joan Chittister. She challenges that spiritual life is not only inner but outer. We live out love in the midst of others. Here’s a few excerpts from yesterday:
Spiritual life “is not a set of daily exercises; it’s a way of life, an attitude of mind, an orientation of soul. And it is gotten by being schooled until no rules are necessary.”
Among the the anceints there is a story told that confrims this insight to this day:
“What action shall I perform to attain God?” the disciple asked the elder.
“If you wish to attain God, the elder said, there are two things you must know. The first is that all efforts to attain God are of no avail.”
“And the second?” the disciple insisted.
“The second is that you must act as if you did not know the first,” the elder said.
Clearly, great pursuers of the spiritual life know that the secret of the spiritual life is to live it until it becomes real.
….
It is much easier to go to daily Mass and feel good about it than it is to serve soup at a soup kitchen. It is so much more comfortable to say bedtime prayers than it is to speak peace in a warring world. It is so much more satisfying to contribute to the building of a new church than it is to advocate welfare legislation. It is so much more heroic to fast than to be patient with a noisy neighbor. It is so much easier to give the handshake of peace in church than to speak gently in the family. And yet one without the other is surely fraud if life with God in community is truly the essence of real spiritual growth.
I can’t remember how I landed on scribd but somehow I ran across the other day. It’s a basic site to post writings that may or may not have images and other formatting possibilities. Instead of blog, it makes room for any type of entry, and some people are posting research papers.
The community is relatively small right now (a little over 6,000), but the interface is cool and offers a variety of fascinating “real time” analytics. Like the map below of the viewer locations.
What a treasure from Henri Nouwen’s Daily Meditation:
The marvelous vision of the peaceable Kingdom, in which all violence has been overcome and all men, women, and children live in loving unity with nature, calls for its realisation in our day-to-day lives. Instead of being an escapist dream, it challenges us to anticipate what it promises. Every time we forgive our neighbor, every time we make a child smile, every time we show compassion to a suffering person, every time we arrange a bouquet of flowers, offer care to tame or wild animals, prevent pollution, create beauty in our homes and gardens, and work for peace and justice among peoples and nations we are making the vision come true.
We must remind one another constantly of the vision. Whenever it comes alive in us we will find new energy to live it out, right where we are. Instead of making us escape real life, this beautiful vision gets us involved.
I know all the talk over the last year has been about YouTube, and I’ve spent my fair share of time browsing and uploading. But today I tested blip.tv, and I must say: it rocks!
This video sharing service offers RSS feeds for your videos, automatic blogging and cross-posting options, multiple formats and even multiple uploading options. And this is just the start. If you are serious about videos or setting up an online channel. Use blip.tv!! I love it!!
I wrote about the idea of integrity and integration earlier in the month. The divisions between our personal and public lives do not appeal to me. I want to live as a whole person whether in the workplace, the ministry, the home or even online. When working at Philips, I had the opportunity to use my interest in creativity and play to lead workshops among co-workers. This excited me because within the workforce, I found a way to integrate personal interests with work in a way the I believe benefited the company.
Another key interest in my life has been community/relationship building. That’s why I track social networks and trends in culture. I am interested in how these trends online and offline will impact the formation of relationships. I’ve had the privilege of bringing this interest in community building into several companies, but the focus has primarily been within a company not between the company and their outside stakeholders (customers, vendors, et al).
So I’ve tried to find connecting points between this interest and the company I’ve been working with most recently: Jewelry Television. We’re making some baby steps toward community/social networking. They recently gave approval for me to start a Jewelry Television blog. It’s very low radar right now. We’ve not promoted or mentioned it much at all.
This is still an ongoing experiment. While I want the blog to direct people to our site (so I post ads and videos from the site), I also want to blog to reveal the human side of the company and open the door for conversation with customers. Eventually, it is a step toward building a more socialnet based dialogue between JTV and customers as well as other folks online.
Take a look at it, if you have chance and give me any feedback. I’d appreciate it.
Here’s a good quote to keep in mind when you’re mixing with way too many folks during the holidays:
“If you put up with yourself, why not put up with everybody else?”
Guigi I, Meditations
For multiple world, our modern/postmodern world has forced many of us to split our lives and now even our identities into multiple slots such as work and home, public and private, inner and outer. Now many thinkers even suggest there is no real person behind the roles we play. I don’t have time to respond to that here, but I disagree.
The nature of personhood is more complex and interconnected than modernism may have realized and the Church Fathers offered a far more nuanced view of the person than the modern idea of the individual. This tendency to create separate identities between home, office, house of faith, hobbies, friends, and the multivarious online social computing personas is dis-integrating. It does tend to make us think there is really no me to me: just another face, another mask. This potentially could lead to many negative and even dangerous manifestations.
Since I believe the person is real, I believe that integration of these various worlds and identities are important. Thus my values at home are the same at work are the same among my friends are the same in the online world. I try to be the same person everywhere (inner and outer).
Thus this blog does not section off technology away from faith away from art or other interests, and that’s why I put the Pope Benedict XVI quote earlier. It captures some of the essence I think the word
Now enough from me. I’ll have to spend more time on this on my Floydville blog sometime. If anyone disagrees, feel free to let me know. 🙂
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