Tonight I googled my name (why is a long story, perhaps a future blog entry) and was surprised and gratified by the number of blogs that carried announcements of Isabella’s birth. Many of them blogs by people I’ve never met face to face. Some by bloggers I’d never even heard of.
Most of them offered congratulations and many also offered prayers.
Which brings me to the subject of this musing. It is quite amazing to me how many strangers were praying for us during my pregnancy and delivery. (And to go back even further how many people were praying for us at the time of our wedding.) Strangers. People I’ve never met. Including a group of Dominican nuns. Mostly thanks to Dom’s blog—though I don’t mean to discount the prayers offered because of our large network of friends and family, case in point my dad’s community of secular Carmelites in Austin.
But it made me think of an article I read and Dom blogged on a while back called God and the Internet. Which had a rather cynical take on the way in which Catholics interact and form communities online. It completely discounted this phenomenon: the extension into the virtual world of the very Catholic doctrine of the communion of saints. We are all members of the Body of Christ and are thus called to pray for each other and to support each other. And now the internet has given this communion a new manifestation.
How many times in the past couple of years since I discovered the blogosphere have I paused to pray for intentions people post, for individuals I meet, for angry posters in comboxes, for victims of far away disasters? I am so much more aware of so many of my brothers and sisters out there in the far corners of the globe. And through God’s grace and the power of prayer this connection is not an illusion but a real communion.
Thanks to all the people who have prayed for me and for my family in our many hours of need. May God bless you and keep you and make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you.
