I kept a paper, notebook journal for about 10 years.  When the Internet and computers came along, I was certain that I would just carry that discipline over.  But what I had never really thought about was that the personal journal was not something I could always carry over onto publically read pages.  And so,  I set my mind to dividing my computer generated stuff into private (like password protected,  or in today’s blog-centered parlance,  a Local Draft.  I can also “Post Draft to Blog”,  which puts the post in my WordPress database,  but does not make it public.  One day I was experimenting with Posterous, and I saw the option to import,  and I said “Oh cool”.   So I did an import.  But the problem was,  the import did not distinguish between posts and drafts.  I immediately turned off the posts.  But that realization that I had some things that I had expressed in writing were “out there”,  I suddenly felt overexposed.

But there is something in me that wants to;  that NEEDS to share my more personal struggles.  But then the socially acceptable levels of personal sharing made me hesitant to tell too many tales of personal struggles;  of anxiety about the future,  and the myriad of feelings and demons that invade one when unemployment and its continuance do its damage on confidence and peaceful co-existence with myself (and the fears about the effects times of depression would be or IS having on my family). 

This is where the Internet and the freedom of expression it enables and encourages falls flat.  I need a face to face , dependable,  supportive community of people I feel know me and understand me.  No matter how much of my time is the kind where I feel confident and insightful and articulate,  without some space where I can truly explore how I am feeling about myself and what brings me fear and anxiety,  I find that the time starts to become more occupied with the anxiety than with the strengths and the gifts and the sense that I am truly following my calling. 

This is a place where I find that even when one is involving themselves in the life of the church (which I have not been for quite a while now),  the opportunities or even the mention of the need we have for personal spiritual direction and mutual accountability seems to be becoming increasingly rare.  The lack of this sense of invitation to really reveal who we are and what we are about is what has caused me to grow increasingly empty and therefore avoiding of the church (I find myself going back and looking around for a community,  then end up feeling that it has only gotten worse,  and so take even longer to work up the will to get back in the saddle and continue to seek. )  I guess the expectation that the church should be a place where it is required of me (and therefore expected of me)  that I update people (at the very least,  a small group of people,  even one or two)  regarding my journey is more of a “spoiler” (in other words,  if I had fewer expectations about the nature of the church and the idea that it is called to be THE formative factor for us and that we are to cultivate each other’s gifts,  then I would be more content to “be there” and acquiesce to mill around,  receive the content that is dispensed to us,  and be a “faithful church member”). 

My grounding in this desire to be more embodied in my participation enhances my research (and my personal journey of seeking more in-depth experiences of spiritual c0-habitation of church spaces).  I think it is valuable for a student and researcher of the spirituality of online spaces to have this struggle to insist on embodiment , and let it enable me to not only see the possibilities in online communication that are yet untapped by the church,  or unrealized,  but also to see where embodiment gives us ingredients that we may need to consider how closely rooted they are in embodied , relational experience.