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Intermission and Apology

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Jan Hoffman says to give messages without preamble or apology, and that's a good discipline, but I'm finding it impossible here... So please bear with me, ladies and gentlemen, while I ask you to bear with me.

Apologies on the long delay for the next post in my spiritual journey series... (If it's not too much hubris to imagine anyone out there cares about that!) Part IV is definately the toughest part to write about: so many things happened in such a short span of time, and continue to be important to who I have become. It's particularly personal material, and some of it still a tad painful. But mostly, I'm really hoping to bring the series in under the length of St. Augustine's Confessions (helping myself to Marshall's humorous analogy) and this one is tough to edit.

It's also hard to balance self-revelation with privacy, and plain speaking with a desire not to have some of the more difficult aspects of the story used against the Pagan community... I'm just feeling a need to season this one very, very carefully. (Quite a contrast to my usual slap-dash style...)

And thanks to the (to you all) mostly invisible Peter for his assistance as an editor. If I manage to get this installment out in a readable form somewhat shorter than the average Steven King novel, it will be owing to his loving assistance.

Comments

Martin Kelley said…
Hi Cat, I can easily imagine how a spiritual autobiography would get trickier to write the closer to the present you get, especially if there are tender issues involved. Maybe this is why a lot of the Quaker ministers wrote them in old age! If and when you do publish it I'll try to read it in all openness. I certainly appreciate the sense of fairness you try to bring to your deliberation, and if there's something that you don't want to share it's fine to simply state there are more stories and issues that you don't think it appropriate to share.

When I travel among Friends, I often don't blog about it immediately, except maybe to say I traveled, met nice people, etc., and that's because I sometimes see some major issues that I wish they would address (usually around accessibility/friendliness to newcomers). I'll wait a year then mention how in recent travels I saw x-y-z issues. That makes it a more general concern lifted up and not a critique against a particular community.

Good luck!
Your Friend, Martin @ QuakerRanter
12:25 PM
John (@bookdreamer) said…
Hi, I care! And feel that this type of warts and all account of why we are the spirtual beings we are is "theology" of the profoundest type.
1:06 PM
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