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Letters
from 6 to 12 December 2010
Like all letters to the editor everywhere,
these letters express the opinions of the writers and not Anglicans Online. We publish letters
that we think will be of interest to our readers, whether we agree with them or not. If you'd
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Sit on your hands
What wikileaks certainly demonstrates to the common person is that anything one posts or writes in cyberspace may be eventually accessed by someone else. Such information may be revealed in or out of context and definitely come back to haunt us.
Sacred text states that a word rightly spoken is like an apple of gold placed in a frame. The reverse may be that words misspoken will and do come back to bother us at inopportune times in our life. Questioning our motives and casting doubt on even the good we may have done up until that point.
How many of us have sent an email only to have dreaded what we have just sent? Similar questions can be asked about YouTube or Facebook or Twitter, all of which leave cyber trails in the virtual universe.
There is a Mali proverb which states, "Words have no legs, yet they walk." In the cyber universe they run. Dorothy Nevill is correct when she says, “The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.”
Whether the actions of Wikileaks and Julian Assange are ethical or not will be determined in the court of public opinion, the learning for us all – if it shouldn’t be said - then don’t say it, especially in the realm of cyberspace.
The Rev. Donald Shields
Grace Church Markham, Chaplain: Markham Stouffville Hospital
Greater Toronto Area of Ontario, CANADA
planet.shields@gmail.com
6 December 2010
Will 140 characters fit on a pair of stone tablets?
I attended a meeting yesterday of the Diocesan Postulancy Committee, wherein the postulants for ordination for the Diocese of Toronto were asked to reflect on the church and social media. As one of the group’s leaders put it, after we watched a short video introducing the topic, the question is no longer if we use it but how, and how well.
An interesting conversation followed. Because in that context I am there primarily to hear from the postulants, I didn’t say very much; that, and I suspected that once I got started it would be hard to shut up again. But this is some of what I might have said, and have been thinking about since.
First, the question is wrong. The title of this little reflection is wrong. This isn’t (or, imho, shouldn’t be) about the Church and social media. This is about GOD and social media.
For surely there is no one who wants to say that God is absent from social media. Unless one is a fanatic who condemns the entire enterprise as the work of Satan (and I am sure there are a few such out there), one needs to begin from this starting point. God is on facebook. God tweets. God posts videos on YouTube. And God most surely uses whatever tools human beings come up with to reach out to this world with love and compassion, with a prophetic call to justice, with gospel.
Can we begin there? Can we agree that God is present in social media?
Heather McCance
Incumbent, Church of St. Andrew, Scarborough
Toronto, Ontario, CANADA
9 December 2010
(Editor: Ms McCance had more to say, but we enforce a limit on the length of letters to the editor. At the top of this page it says that We usually
do not publish letters written in response to other letters. In this case we make an exception. If you have something to say about God and social media, why don't you say it? That invitation includes, of course, the Revd McCance.)
Earlier letters
We launched our 'Letters to AO' section on 11
May 2003. All published letters are in our archives.
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