I was catching up with a friend recently who is thinking about moving and finding a new job, which of course necessitates searching for job postings, updating and cleaning up the ol’ resume, and of course, composing the elusive perfect cover letter. For me, there’s definitely some ass-dragging when I come to these tasks, but when I can summon the right will power, I find that crafting a cover letter (and eventually interviewing) is a great method of self-examination.1
Looking at a blank piece of paper, you have to reflect upon who you are, what you’re good at, and what you’re passionate about, and explain, in vivid, dynamic terms, why you are the best fit for the job posting you’ve found. Once I get the ball rolling, I find it’s a great way to take stock of my experience and apply my strengths and expertises to a new opportunity. It helps give me fresh insight into who I am and who I am becoming.
So about four months into The Restless Hearts venture (like us on Facebook), and 7½ years into the blog, I found myself wanting to scrutinize the reasons why I (and we) sustain this blog. In a social environment where everyone is a media personality through their social media output and the image they broadcast in so many ways, I think it’s worth examining the rationale for maintaining this blog and why this particular source is important.
Additionally, it comes down to my gifts. I think one of my core competencies is my ability to find words for thoughts and ideas that are difficult to express, and by extension, to help others express their own complex thoughts and ideas. This started to become clear to me as I gained experience in small-group leadership on retreats as a teenager, came into clearer focus when I served as a Mentor-in-Faith with Notre Dame Vision, and was crystallized and sustained as I took on full-time ministry, first with young people in Ireland and then with to teenagers stateside in California, Indiana, and now Illinois. In both serious programmatic discussions and in more laid back social chats, I’ve found that my strongest form of listening is one which helps others complete thoughts - with leading questions and suggested words and phrases, I find I can help draw complicated ideas from the abstract shadows of the mind out into the clarity of conversation.
As I started to apply this to myself and sought to articulate my own ideas in my own words, friends encouraged me to take the thoughts I shared aloud and write them down. It came to a head in my small faith-sharing group during junior year of college when my friend Michele led the charge in encouraging me to blog.3 There are definitely mixed results: sometimes, I get requests from different media to write for them or I connect with someone to author a post or speak for an engagement; sometimes, the things I write or share get very few interactions or views or the contacts I try to make are dead ends; some weeks, there’s hundreds of views on the blog and new likes showing up on Facebook; other weeks, it’s a bit of a tumbleweedy ghost town.4 Either way, to those who have encouraged, supported, and affirmed me, thank you for fueling this ministry and helping me use my gifts.
Ministerially, this blog is an extension of my pastoral desire to put rich, intriguing, challenging ideas “out there” in a way that will attract curious attention and invite further thought. I want my writing (and the writing of my colleagues) to come from a place of thoughtfulness and reflectiveness that is also theologically and catechetically sound. Then, I want the posts to engage others to think about what these ideas mean, how these ideas affect them, their life, and their faith, and talk about it within themselves, with others, and with God.
The challenge then is constantly toeing the line between vainglory and broadcasting. Fundamentally, in order to share my ideas and the ideas of my colleagues, I have to try to cultivate a buzz, a following, a presence of some magnitude. This requires monitoring pageviews, insights, and impressions to learn the best ways to share our work, which can get me too fixated on edifying my desire for likes, shares, comments, retweets, etc.
So I try to be thoughtful and careful about inviting friends to like/follow our Page, about how/when I share our links, and how I go about creating that presence. I want to create invitation and opportunity for others to engage with our online writing ministry, but I don’t want to make people feel like we’re overwhelming them or create fatigue in those that may consider reading our work. So, spiritually, it’s a constant struggle to check my yearning for quantity and to stay focused on trying to write well, clearly, and effectively in a way that sustains the ministry I desire.5
I gotta weather a murky mix of rejection and reception, of engagement and indifference; I gotta stay grounded in good, thoughtful ideas; I gotta be focused on invitation and not move toward compulsion or reader fatigue. So then, why sustain it? Why soldier on?
I think the climate of technology and social media simultaneously creates myriad avenues to communicate with others with great quantity and even quality at the same time as creating myriad new ways for us to ignore each other. I find that a lot of my activity and that of others is consumption - scrolling feeds, skimming articles, receiving texts and messages - without reciprocation; we’re often receiving content, but not following up with an interpersonal communication back to interact with another person.6
On this blog, my goal is to sustain a witness that is steadfast and committed to thorough, consistent engagement. So much of life, of relationships, of communication, is showing up. It’s having the pride and dedication to always be there, to offer your presence, to say what you need to say. It’s about slowing down to appreciate the person whose content you’ve consumed and consider how it might prompt you to interact with others.
So each Monday, Jenny, Rob, and Dave will show up.
Each Thursday, I will show up.
At points in between, links and quotes and notes I tweet will show up.
Then what you all choose to do with it is up to you. But as a faithful writer and editor, my reason for blogging is to show up in your social media and to show up good.
I want The Restless Hearts to be a consistent source in your media feeds. I want it to break up or complement or juxtapose or antithesize the stream of viral videos, funny memes, goofy GIFs, and friends’ status updates. I want to continue dedicating myself to providing thoughtful, intriguing, reflection-provoking, faith-based content so that your social media feeds cannot be compartmentalized totally away from your faith.
I want to help you fight the borders and boundaries that life tries to invite around your faith and instead suffuse the voice of the Church, of theology, of spirituality, of justice into your daily scroll.
1 I also enjoy essay tests, college applications, organizing bills, budgeting… I could be considered a sort of masochist.↩
2 Let it be noted, I once sat at an IHOP table with my then-girlfriend, Katherine, as well as my dear friend, Stephanie DePrez, and fellow blogger, Dave Gregory. When I made an opinionated statement, Katherine sarcastically chided, “Oh, do you have opinions on things?” To which I responded, “I am the third-most opinionated person at this table.” This explains in part why Steph was our Maid of Honor and will be godmother to our daughter and why Dave and I get along quite well.↩
3 Shout out to the Emmaus program and to my fellow Folkheads for together building a rich place for group reflection.↩
4 Ever wondered about our traffic? I’m proud that we have a strong Facebook following, and I appreciate those who interact with us. Excepting Dave’s post on leaving the Jesuits (which was shared widely and garnered 4000 views to date), our posts have gotten as few as 30 views and as many as 800 views. On average, each post gets around 150 trackable views, and our site gets around 2,000 views each month.↩
5 Even as I write this post, I wonder about how it will be received, whether or not people will read it, and whether or not others will find the rationale compelling. Will it drive readership? Will it create engagement? Will it prompt comments and conversation? Gotta remember that good ministry is about sowing seeds and not needing to count God’s harvest.↩
6 So often, I find myself staying on my laptop or phone too long, searching for something to consume or read. I reach the end of my Twitter scroll and run out of links to click and read and have to be intentional about leaving the screen and moving on. The best solution I’ve found: BOOKS. Books aren’t dependent on a volume of live or recent posts; they’re just big chunks of already polished content that can be picked back up and consumed. This has proved a helpful remedy.↩
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