ken wilson online

So it’s been a couple of weeks blogging. A few impressions. I’m more hopeful that this is valuable (to me) than I first thought. It does have the effect of keeping a journal, though I can’t say that it’s nearly as candid as a journal. But it does help me to be a little more attentive or mindful of my own life, and it has the effect helping me to focus on things I want to focus on. The categories feature, for example: I have to really think twice before committing to a category and ask whether it’s a passing enthusiasm or something I want to pay attention to over the next year, say.

Still finding my way on blog entries having to do with prayer, however. I really don’t think a blog, at least for me, can function as a journal would. There’s a little too much awareness that others are reading the blog or might. There may be some benefit to a selective kind of blogging regarding prayer. Especially when I was a newer pray-er I was very dissatisfied with the prayer talk I heard from other pray-ers. Most of it just focused on whether prayer was happening and it reduced prayer to a kind of check list mentality, like reporting to your dental hygienist once a year how you’re doing with daily flossing. So there would be admonitions to pray, and simple methods of prayer advocated, and for the really dedicated, reporting of daily prayer frequency–none of it very satisfying and some of it downright distorting.

For now, I’m thinking to occasionally include some reflections on prayer born in prayer to see if that hits the spot. In the meantime, it’s been helpful to maintain focus for my own sake on my decision to attempt lectio divina (I may give up and just call it that–meditating on Scripture being the alternative) on a more or less daily basis.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 10:19 am and is filed under the praying brain. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.