I've been thinking a lot about the Friday traditio this week. After much thought, I decided to reuse REM's song "Hollow Man" off their penultimate album Accelerate. Accelerate is a tremendous album. I rank it right up there with my favorite REM albums: Life's Rich Pageant and Document.
I posted "Hollow Man" before as a Friday traditio back in May 2008 about a month after Acclerate was released. As I was thinking about this song, I recalled a conflict that kicked up nearly six months after I initially posted it. Back in the early years of my blog, I had a persistent antagonist. Like most internet trolls, this person posted anonymously. I am pretty confident I know who this person is. But thinking about this yesterday reminded me of how easily I can let myself be lured into idiotic online conflicts.
Over time, I grew wise to trolling tactics and stopped publishing critical comments posted anonymously. Guess what? Pretty quickly such comments stopped. I slowly learned to stop being lured by this kind of bait. I still invite my readers to hold me accountable. If I am in error, please correct me. If you disagree with me, I don't mind you commenting about what it is you disagree with me about and why you disagree. I do, however, insist that you do so in a charitable way and own your criticism by identifying yourself. These days I don't address the broad range of topics I used to mainly due to the fact that I don't post nearly as often as I did back when blogging was relatively new to me. Of course, this helps keep things calmer in this small patch of cyberspace.
As I mention from time-to-time with regard blogging for as long as I have, I do it primarily because it is a readily accessible means of growth. Hence, I don't worry too much about how many people read what I write. Over the years, the popularity of Καθολικός διάκονος has ebbed and flowed. Nonetheless, from what I can I tell, I have a solid core of readers. Blogging has helped me with my on-going human, spiritual, and pastoral formation. When I look back on my blogging career, it is easy for me to see that it took me five years to really hit anything that can be called a stride. Or, to employ a cliché about writing, it took me five years or so to "find my voice."
I don't claim to be a very good writer. I don't think I am a particularly perceptive, insightful, clever, or creative person. By working at it over time as I journey through life, I can confidently assert that I am better than I was. Maybe this is simply a movement from terrible to bad and from bad to mediocre. Despite earning a doctorate, the older I get the less I know, especially about ultimate things.
As I noted way back when, being able to deal gently with my faults, foibles, and failures is a victory hard-won. I have a penchant for being tremendously hard on myself. But as the suicide of a friend several ago taught me, it is important to be gentle with myself as well as with others. I am tempted to write that you must learn to be gentle with yourself before you can be gentle with others. My experience, however, indicates the opposite: it is by feeling and acting gently towards others than I have learned to be gentler with myself.
It was the same Nietzsche who asserted that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger who also believed thought that during life one must die many times. This implies rising from all those graves.
Oh yeah, did I mention that T.S. Eliot composed a poem entitled The Hollow Men?
Remember us - if at all - not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.