I have a secret blog which has been a help with my prayer over the last year or so, and it's been different from a diary because, being a blog, it tends not to get bogged down in irrelevant stuff and also I like to be able to edit posts because they didnt express simply enough what I think I meant at the time which you cannot do with a diary. it's also important for me because it is not addressed to any particular 'group' and means I can say things exactly the way I feel them in my prayer, with all its eccentricity and limitation.
today I wrote a post which links into what I've been praying about a lot of late and I've been wondering about asking the bishop if he might help me over my vocation (as I've been refused permission to join a monastic order because of my conviction).
I'm not sure why I decided to put it up here as I certainly didnt want it to be an apologia for the roman church. My reservations about the roman church per se would certainly not impress the bishop if I did actually write to him.
I have this vision of the entire church of God as a kind of complex (but very beautiful) tapestry of all of the churches that now thrive all around the world, but its actually broader than that because I believe that God's kingdom must include all peoples and all faiths and I don't mean this in a sort of ultra-liberal let's-get-along-with-one-another kind of way which is how it will tend to be interpreted here. The spirit of God does not recognise our own limitations of thought and heart and its my belief that we are called to see things from God's point of view rather than our own.
I've been thinking a lot about Wittgenstein in this regard and I do wish that his (albeit rather complex) philosophy of linguistics was included in all theological courses because he really has a place there. He illustrates with startling clarity the fundamental limits of language. I think that he can teach us that essential humility of view which is surely our only way forward in a world which gets smaller and more potentially claustrophobic by the day.
I have this vision of an eccentric professor with fuzzy hair heading off to share his thoughts on Wittgenstein with members of the taliban and various would-be terrorists and lots of eureka moments, but that just goes to show that I've seen too many 'nice' films.
anyway, here is my blog for today verbatim. be merciful o people. I post in trepidation.

"in my mind, I was preparing a letter to my bishop.
this will probably never get written, but it did make me consider more objectively my feeling about the role of the roman church and my place in it:
its fundamental inadequacy to the task allotted to it and the ways in which it fails on a daily basis; the way in which God cannot be restricted by church etiquette and law; the way in which the spirit of God has exploded beyond the 'boundaries' of the church in ways that it can still scarcely bear to recognise; the way in which it's own attempts at integrity are gradually destroying it because it fails to grasp the one essential:
the need to let go (?)
having said all that I know that the roman church has an essential part to play and does act in good faith because of all those good people in it who give themselves to God on a daily basis and I will always be, myself, a member of this roman church because it is the closest that I can get to the 'original' one, although I also know that its own ever-lengthening history tends to carry it further and further away from that 'original' understanding of itself.
all around it churches spring up in attempts to mirror back at the roman church its own fatal flaws and sometimes it listens and mostly it doesnt.
the one essential gift of the roman church to the world, I believe, is its simplicity, which even centuries of encyclicals, theology and deeply flawed leaders have not erased: the mass. this is the great gift of the roman church to the world and it is one that has become my treasure.
to me, all the talk about the 'real presence' is irrelevant because I know what it means anyway. jeshua (I know this sounds eccentric, but it's somehow important*) said take and eat and that's what we do.

*it just seems more and more important for us in the west to recognise the jewishness of jesus."