It has been said, probably far too often, that the medium is the message - whether that is true or what it actually means I am less sure.  Yesterday my "bestest minister friend in the world ever" sent me her comments from reading my draft conference paper.  She is incredibly clever, creative and kind, so what she said was extremely encouraging.  It got me thiking about this whole meidium and message thing, and how best to do the necessary edittig  or pruning to get my paper (or a version of it) down to a length that will fit the allotted time.

My title/theme is 'public faith and private pain'.  The way I have written my paper intersperses anecdote and reflection - recollections of actual experiences and thoughts thereon, thus, stylisitcally there is a clear  private/public or at least personal/public element to it.  My friend pointed out to me that in the very delivery of the paper the same private/personal and public tension is worked out (see, she is way cleverer than me!)

So somehow this particular-general, private-public, personal-reflective message is mediated in what I write, how I write it, that I share it and how/where I share it... somehow that makes my hard work justified and the oft-times clumsy prose more precious.

I suppose this should not really surprise me, it has the vaguest echoes of incarnational theology and/or Barth's word/Word/WORD schema (vary vaguest echoes!).  But perhaps I also need to keep it in my mind when my knees are (memtaphorically at least) knocking as I stand up before an audience of biblcal scholars, theologians and medical professionals.