Sunday, July 07, 2013

Back online!

Nearly five years after having suspended the blog ...

Things have changed!

I was ordained a Deacon in May of 2012. I was ordained a priest just about a month ago, in June. Five very intense and amazing years at seminary at the Mount are behind me, in the most intentionally Christian community I have experienced. Parish ministry is still ahead, as I enjoy some extended down time to visit family in India.

The Catholic blogging world has changed. Twitter has exploded. Facebook too.  Google+ didn't exist in 2008. Blogger's template is so much slicker and sleeker. I don't even recall all the hacks and modifications to the template code I had to do in order to get a 3 column layout, back in the day! I miss the sort of frontier, pioneer, amateur feel that Catholic blogging had then ... :) Everything's on Patheos now, it seems.

Frankly, I'm not entirely sure if I really want to resume blogging. Under the Mount's blogging ban (which, I recall the Rector telling me not too long ago, he was going to revisit), my energies focused on Facebook. Sharing links, articles, photos, comments, with Twitter generally for retweets and occasional event updates. I kept a private, unlisted, password protected, limited readership seminary blog. Its archives show my diminishing attention: 270 posts in 2009. 61 in 2012. 128 in the four and a half months of 2008 that it was up. Only 5 in the 5 months of 2013 that I was in seminary.

There's also the pseudonym. Gashwin served his purpose in my pre-seminary days, when I was a lowly lay minister, and wanted to avoid having my real name splashed across the interwebs. Well, as a parish priest (and even as a seminarian), that's unavoidable. Do I keep Gashwin? Retire him? Link him up to the "real" virtual me on FB and G+?

In 2008, I thought I would resume blogging the very day after graduation ("Deacon Night" as we call it at the Mount). The day after graduation, I was actually winging my way to the Twin Cities for one of my best friends' ordination to the diaconate. After that there was Ordination prep. And travel.

So. Let's see what happens now. And, after work actually starts in a few weeks.

But, for now, with a quickly updated look, the blog's back.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Welcome back!