I came across the following in quoted in Morgan & Gregory’s book, The God You Already Know, pp.82-84
“On one level blogging is a way of conveying information: items of news, links to other websites. On another level it’s a scrapbook, a means of collecting interesting quotes, pictures, sound and video files. Or it may be an easy way to keep in touch with a scattered …family, distant friends: sharing mundane details that only resonate with people who have a close connection with me. But the daily discipline of blogging is all these things to me. And it serves a deeper spiritual purpose. I would explain this in three ways.
First, blogging is a daily discipline. It is a means by which, at the end of every day, I permit myself time to sit down and reflect back on the time just passed. The events of the day, conversations, things seen, heard, read: at the computer, before my fingers strike the keyboard, all these are given a second thought and—not every time, but quite often—at that point new thoughts emerge, ideas and inspirations arise.
I may not end up posting on the blog my deepest, most poignant or personal thoughts, for reasons of confidentiality (where these involve others) or decency (in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, like everyone else my ‘mind has mountains, cliffs of fall, frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed’ which are best avoided in public). I may instead end up posting a link to an interesting article I’ve read.
But the process is the important thing, and that’s my second point: that adding an entry is a way of celebrating that new things have happened that day. New insights, new encounters have demonstrated the richness in even the most ordinary of times and places. Posting something different each day is a challenge in recognizing these things, of sharing the joys that are there to be discovered in my mundane, everyday life.
The third spiritual aspect of blogging is that I do this on my website. There may be millions of other bloggers on the world wide web, but no one writes like I do, no one else’s website looks like mine. And so this is an extension of me.
Blogs and bloggers, of course, get criticized for being self-obsessed or exhibitionist, and putting yourself ‘out there’ online does carry the potential for such pitfalls. But I’ve always been a writer, always best expressed myself through the written word, and the blog seems an ideal vehicle for me to communicate in a way most ‘me’. I find it a deeply satisfying way to end each day: playing with words, clicking the keys, communicating with friends and strangers some joys, some insights freshly appreciated. The friends and strangers are important to me, but if they weren’t there reading my blog I’d still find the writing fulfilling.
So, is blogging a way of praying? I recoil a little from such a naked suggestion. But if praying is a way of engaging in a spiritual quest, involving listening and creatively attempting to express what is heard and understood, then blogging can be that. It is, for me, some days.”
John Davies (www.johndavies.org)
quoted in Morgan & Gregory, The God You Already Know, pp.82-84