Hyperlinks: My Inspiration for Theopoetic Experiments in Community
I can't remember the date. I'm guessing somewhere between 1995 and 2008.
I had a blog.
(Woo!)
And as much as I enjoyed responding to those reading my blogs, I recognised that I was even more interested in the meta of it.
The architecture.
For example, when writing for the church magazine, I was writing serious but humorous articles about the real reasons people chose the seminars in the sixth-form common room rather than the gym.
(The church met in a school at the time. Woo!)
I said the quiet part out loud.
If you're given a choice of wooden chairs in an echoey room, it doesn't matter how good the speaker is, how urgent the topic is, or who you're trying to impress.
You're probably going to opt instead for the seminar in the Sixth Form Common room, with its cushions, large windows, coffee on tap and aesthetic that, even if not aspirational was at least aiming in that direction.
I likened it to a morning at a spa.
By comparison.
In the church magazine.
(I know.)
But I felt it was relevant.
Not just ….
Atmospheric, environmental, hospitable theology. Geographical semantics. Somatic literacy. I don't know the real terminology, but do you get where I'm heading?
So then, the blog got a readership.
(As did my musician's newsletter — the alternative news that got a readership across the world, until one leader let me know my humour would no longer be required.)
And the blog was one thing.
But then I discovered hyperlinks!
(!)
So — six blogs.
Altogether it became a virtual community called Faith Safari.
There was a Teaching page, with visiting speakers.
A Thinking Room, where difficult questions were encouraged.
A humour page, with video reels and links to the Winebibber, and a chat forum.
A worship room, with audio, candles streaming, and artwork uploaded.
A social space, where people could talk — including, perhaps, explain how much they liked the Sixth Form Common Room and hadn't noticed before.
And a children's one too.
That was a starting place. But — intriguingly — I also wanted a separate blog.
Meet Ed.
The point was to meet the Editor of Faith Safari.
But it was more than that.
It was to think aloud and with others about this thing I was noticing about atmosphere and environment, presence and attention, and moving between.
Someone left a comment:
"Why do we care what you think?!"
That's the one I remember. But then, they were on my blog.
I made mistakes in other experiments. Bad ones.
You're meant to though, right?
(That's why so much of my previous trail of examples got 'disappeared'.)
And then, a virtual community innovation from 2016 to 2020 or so had me doing something similar, following my own physical journey from crisis through faith, and encountering truth where it mattered as life and death — not just as a fun way to add tech to Sunday afternoon musing.
All that to say, when I think aloud about Chapter Seventeen, it's not because I just came up with a new thought. There's history here. Not just chronology, but a building sense of — sensing something — building.
Atmosphere.
What's unsaid.
The distances between "humour no longer required", "why do we care what you think?" and 'soft blue cushions in the window seat with a hot mug in hand, whatever the speaker is talking about.
Those distances as focal lengths, or something.
In other news, further back in early childhood even my imaginary friends were a whole village…
