Silence, Reverence, Obedience, Poverty, Simplicity, Hospitality, Humility..
Making room for something infinitely bigger entails sacrifice, and enshrines Beauty..An etherchapel musing
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...(I know that intro' sounds awfully pretentious, especially that last bit about humility.
In my defense, I started out writing about what this site (E') was not. That didn't go anywhere. So I switched tacks and decided to write about what it did (or atleast attempted) that makes it different. Out spilled the list of monastic qualities, I know they look ridiculous applied to my site. Or rather, my site looks ridiculous alongside them. But it's true. Those qualities do best summarize lots of the things I've been trying to do there.. Trying..
And anyways not enough webwriters put H3 tags on these concepts nowadays, nor the equivalent real-world priority.. )
Silence -
I've written (rather, I've tried to write elsewhere) about some mysterious quality I want E' to have: stillness, quiet, the quality without a name, visual oasis, no ads, no flashiness, no graspy proselytizing, no apologetics and arguing, no overly-lengthy train of words going nowhere and doing nothing and eventually derailing and ..
Each time I've failed, or felt like I've failed. No matter what I pithily called it by, and no matter how many words I hurled (and here continue to hurl) It remained itself, and not to be described, or even praised by the likes of me. But the concept that kept returning to the forefront was one of quiet, of a hush that is like a balm for our overwrought minds. In this flashing, shrieking, crisis-filled, commercial-powered world there seems no place to turn to even , sometimes, within the church militant.
There's a verse about folk crying out "Peace! Peace!" when there is none, and I don't want to do that. However, there's no end to the new's agencies, homilies, blogs, and good folk pointing out the various manifestations of hellfire in this crowded theatre. Enough already. Don't despair nor promote it neither. The enemy is not only a liar but the first and worst loser. Phantasm, bedlam, and despair are his. Victory, or rather the victor Himself, is ours. Be still.
Reverence -
The root of Devotion: being alive enough to even care
Boredom with life is epidemic. Distractions and anesthetics of all kinds multiply, but eventually only worsen the fever. This web is one of those distractions, or rather, it's the perfect medium for them. But it too, whithers, rots and has begun to spread despair, immense catalyst that it is.
This whole project, on the surface, looks like its just about particular individual devotions plopped into that dynamic but dying area. But it's not.
Etherchapel is much more fundamentally about a very general kind of religious devotion way upstream, and a mysterious stillness there who is full of Life. Yes, it's about teachings, and Traditions aided and more fully incarnated by technology... but it's more about being devoted enough in the first place to even try to incarnate them, by knowing that they incarnate Him.
The internetworked computer may turn out to be several orders of magnitude more powerful than the printing press. It will either rot and degrade us with a thralldom for the glossy and novel, or be polished by the Church into something humble and eternal.