"140 well-chosen characters can be used by the Holy Spirit to tweak a conscience"

The Anchoress is covering the Pope's jump into the twitterverse:

The church has always been quick to identify mission territory and to send forth eager workers. Online outreach is a very different sort of mission; material and corporeal needs are almost besides the point. On the internet the church is missioning in the ether — the exact spot where light and dark are constantly waging the war that so readily spills into our realities. The ether (and the ethernet) is a place of random chaos (consider the fits-and-stops, the dark-and-light at odds within your own soul of a single day, and then magnify it times the square footage of every planet in the universe, and the sun!) and the instantaneous reach of cyberspace contributes to the chaos — so much sound and fury, usually signifying nothing — but it also has the power to penetrate it with a spear-tipped accuracy. Just as one well-timed and pithy blogpost, or one virally-shared chart can often shift a a national conversation and a mood, 140 well-chosen characters can be used by the Holy Spirit to tweak a conscience, pierce a heart and open a mind.

The flip side to that, of course, is that the Evil can use these same tools to anesthetize a conscience, and close a heart– the internet is a place of simultaneously visible and invisible energy, simultaneously positive and negative effect and that is precisely why the Vicar of Christ needs to be engaged within it, particularly this Vicar, who is all-too-familiar with how easily mobs can be swayed to embrace their worst devils instead of their better angels. He knows very well that, ultimately, the mob wants something, but they are not cognizant of what that something is, and that within that dissatisfied, searching state, the Dictatorship of Relativism wields its power. It was around sowing discontent within the mob the desert (“in Egypt we had melons and meat!”) and amid the confused the mob in Jerusalem (“we have no king but Caesar! Give us Barabbas!”)

What does the crowd want? I’ve always wondered about the name of Barabbas. If Bar means “son of” and “Abbas” is translated as “father”, then Pilate was offering the mob a choice between Jesus, the man (ecce homo) and the Son of the Father. He was offering the choice between the flesh and the material over the spiritual and the ethereal; the earth or the ether?

And hey, the people chose the Son of the Father. They chose the ether. Now they need to be helped to find him, there.

So, the Vicar of Christ is coming before the cybermob, where he will be greeted by many who love, and also by many who hate.

She links to some of that hate at her place and let me tell you, much of it is vile.  I suspect Pope Benedict XVIth is fully aware of the vileness that exists in the world.

The Anchoress concludes by asking that we pray for this endeavor and for His Holiness in particular.

May some of those filled with vileness be instead filled by God's Spirit and His goodness and sooner rather than later.

Comments

[Dynan Candon]

Come Holy Spirit!

[Dynan Candon]

The Holy Father is a man of non-violence

with tremendous courage. We must pray for

him. Twitter can be evil!

Dynan