Thursday, December 26, 2019

Hermitage Notes - Altering Climates

It has been on my mind for a while.

What? 

This social media thing. 

Mine has been a love/hate relationship with it from the start in March of 2008 when I published the first Oblate Offerings blog. [O.O. has been privatized and is no longer visible to the public.] Then came FB, Twitter, and MeWe … platforms that more often than not resemble political and religious war zones with disgruntled’s on both sides of every issue banging away at each other with hostile words. 

It is easy to get sucked in. 

It is easy to take sides. 

It is easy to become part of the problem. 

I have to keep reminding myself that my way of acting should be different from the world’s way; that the love of Christ must come before all else. [Rule of Saint Benedict 4:20-21] 

I remind myself that nowhere in the Gospel [or in the New Testament] am I taught to aggressively attack everything that I see wrong in the world. What I am taught is to live in a way that reflects the light and love of Christ in a world that is dark, dismal, and doomed; a world that I have grown terribly weary of. 

There is a definite side of me that wants to pull the plug on these socially connected devices, renounce the world altogether, and live in strict seclusion. I have been in touch with this side of me for a long time now.

I, however, cannot. At least not strictly. At least not yet. 

I am yet constrained by the love of Christ to do what I can do to reflect the light and love of Christ. Not just here in the climate of our little hermitage; also in the climate of our small and needful parish, and here, too, in the climate where you find these keystroked words.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Saint Benedict: Still Bringing Order to a Disordered World

There are no words that I can type with these fingers, or words that I can speak with my tongue and lips, that can remotely express the deep...