Not a screen in sight.
This parlor cries out that it was made for writing notes.
Who am I to ignore that?
This weekly letter lacks a manuscript made with my hands that involves ink and paper and handwriting purposely put together to reveal thoughts become a new thing. I confess I type on a keyboard connected only by ether to a screen on which said thoughts take shape in light and dark but without substance. This accomplishes a great deal in efficiency and legibility but leaves tangibility and durability wanting. Bright shiny and ephemeral is rather less that I would hope to have to offer you, but there it is.
You are good to bear with this underachievement, having been conditioned to it by almost all the communications offered to participants in modern life. Every institution that sends me bills is constantly banging away at me to “go paperless” if I have not been forced already to submit to that disappointing regime by the terms of our original contract. I assume your lot is the same.
Being freshly returned from a trip abroad, I have taken advantage of the speed and convenience of direct digital communications to share information and images, often as quickly as I experienced them myself. Each day I conveyed a passel of pictures and explanatory notes of What I Did TODAY For My Summer Vacation with a small group of volunteers who asked for such harassment. The digital version of ooohs and aahs followed quickly by return mail, that is, text message.
However satisfying this semblance of direct connection, I wanted more and better, so I sent three hand-written cards by post. They required five, seven, and ten days, respectively, to arrive in the hands of their intended recipients, which seems an awfully long time compared to the agonizing seconds we wait for a return text message, but once the time had elapsed, these people actually held something in their hands that had come from mine.
Some years ago, my younger sister took up once again the lost practice of sending postcards from her travels, most often to our parents but also occasionally to others of us whom she likes. Her handwriting (printing actually) is charming and legible, and she has a knack for a cheery and informative message in a line or two. How much more engaging it is to find that on the refrigerator door and examine it than to look at phone or screen held out to see. Not a facsimile but a genuine thing to hold and turn.
At various and unexpected times over the past decade mom or dad handed me a stack of cards that I myself had sent them, a good example being the ones I wrote near daily during my first ever trip abroad, the eight weeks’ adventure that was my spring semester in Germany junior year - that would be 1985 for you history buffs. Postcards of cathedrals, castles, and train museums with a line or two about fellow students, host families, and culinary adventures were almost all my parents had to go by to guess that I was alive and thriving. It seems so little compared to the flood of conversation for today’s connected generation, but forty years later they endure to provide me with evidence and experiences I had long ago laid aside. Try THAT with a text chain!
Because of these recent reminders of the superiority of material messaging, I am trying to make more of these missives, however brief, to draw together physical and personal realties for my far-flung friends and family who are like me awash in electronic stimulation and information. Here is a thing for you, it says; I made it.
Quickly and quietly this letter has coalesced wysiwyg before me, and with a flick and a wish it will go to Carol at the reception desk, who will send it along with similar speed but no more weight to the publishers of the bulletin, who will then make it appear on paper. Hundreds of copies will then be boxed and delivered (UPS) to our doorstep, and artfully arranged by the doors of the church for all and sundry to take as they arrive and leave for Mass. It will be posted online as well, ethereal and ephemeral but accessible, including on the “blog” that is my Pastor’s Corner of the parish web site, where it will be joined by a photograph of some or little pertinence and be viewed by people near and far some of whom I am convinced are what they call “bots.” But there are regular bulletin readers who prefer the paper to have and to hold. I only wish I could offer a manuscript.
Monsignor Smith
