I chose the name Chaplain’s Blog instinctively, and at first it seemed merely functional. That, after all, is what it is: I’m a chaplain, and I’m writing a blog.
Why, one might wonder, am I chaplain, and not a vicar? The answer is because I am in Europe, and the Diocese in Europe is outside the parish system: priests appointed to parishes are either vicars or rectors; priests who are appointed to something other than a parish – to schools, hospitals, or in the armed forces – are all known, rather generically, as chaplains.

But there’s another side to Chaplain’s Blog which I stumbled across later, and which explains why, for all its seeming flat-footedness, it fits; there are echoes of, and an assonance with, a Captain’s Log. A captain’s log is the sea-bound memory of a voyage, that conjures up images of winds that whisper through the rigging, stars that steer the night, and the moods of the restless ocean. It is both compass and confession, where the voyage outside is traced alongside the voyage within, and where each entry becomes a small lantern hung against the vast dark of the sea.

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

When I was training for the priesthood—a course I began ten years ago—a statistic was thrown around concerning how little time the contemporary Church of England priest spends in prayer: 18 minutes a day was the figure given, although I have no record of where that number came from.
So I can, thankfully, claim to be a little above average in my devotions, though not by much; admittedly 18 minutes sound like a very low bar. However, I don’t pray more than an hour a day: I spend a rather dreamy 10 minutes in prayer with a cup of tea when I get out of bed in the morning, attend shared morning prayer online at 9 o’clock (except on Sundays), which lasts a little less than half an hour, and then I make an attempt at something more contemplative in the early evening (along the lines of Centering Prayer); however, this is often more of an aspiration than a practice. So not very impressive.
But then St Augustine came to the rescue! I came across a passage* where he describes reading Scripture as inseparable from prayer itself: to truly read the Word is already to be speaking with God. Eureka! So even spiritual reading counts as prayer – and a bookworm like me can chalk up hours a day with my nose in the right kind of book as prayer time. My average shot up!
Then last week, I came across an article that discusses blogging as a form of prayer (I’ll share that in a separate post). What? So even writing can count as prayer time?
That takes me back to one of my breakthrough moments as a teenager. I had been reading Edward de Bono’s Po: beyond yes or no (back in the late 70s every school boy was reading Edward de Bono: it’s a book that argues that our usual yes/no, logical thinking is too limited for creativity and problem‑solving, and proposes the use of “po” as a deliberate, provocative tool to generate new ideas – an exercise in ‘thinking outside the box’ ante litteram). It was during my first unaccompanied trip to London and I was travelling on the tube: looking around I saw all these people hiding themselves behind newspapers or in books and asked myself – wait for it, here comes my first conscious Po thought – ‘look at all these people reading – why aren’t any of them writing?’. And that’s how I began a life-long practice of journalling. To quote Lermentov’s advice to budding writers, Ни дня без строчки, ‘never a day without a line’
None of this is very clear nor very logical, I know, but it helps to explain why, when I came across the article on blogging as a form of prayer, I was hooked. For more on that, see the next post.
*See Augustine Confessions, esp. Books 9–10, and Letter 130 to Proba