A mute witness

During the run up to Lent and the season of Lent itself, I have been doing a fair amount of studying as well as pastoral work. Consequently, I have spent little time online blogging. It has been a bit like hitting the "mute" button for a time. I apologize for the paucity of communication here, but am offering this time consciously as a season of relative silence, in the expectation that following a fallow period, a fruitful harvest will spring up.

This Lent has proven to be a time of much reflection on matters connected to prayer, listening, and encounter. I have been thinking a fair amount about the effect of electronic communication on my life and ministry, especially the continuous nature of our way of living today, and have come to some tentative conclusions. One of these is that, between e-mails, phone messages, blogs, Facebook pages, other internet-based communication, and all of the many ways we are "connected" via electronic means, the level of meaningful study, prayer, and direct personal encounter has suffered in my life.

This is not to make an enemy out of the Internet. It is to say that here, as with all new technologies, one must develop a certain discipline, a way of living creatively and faithfully with a technology so that it serves the Gospel, rather than forcing the Gospel (and its ministers) to serve it.

As we prepare to enter Holy Week, I hope to post some thoughts about this extraordinarily pre- and supra-technological season of deep encounter and personal participation. But above all, I encourage you to make time for worship in your own church community, so that we all might journey together into the Paschal Mystery...the central fact of our Christian life.