St. Blog’s is a place that brims with a constant variety of joys and sorrows. For some joy, look here. Of course the vicissitudes of life produce an inexorable stream of sorrows, but some sorrows are much more poignant – most of all the bitterness that some bloggers direct toward their fellows.

Today seems to have been a particularly bad day for that sort of thing with one blogger getting his nose quite out of joint over the criticisms that others leveled at him (some of which seem to be reasonable, if overstated, and some of which seem to be mean-spirited carping). Then another critic says some rather uncharitable things about a fellow blogger’s choice to blog about a particular item that the critic believes should not have been made public.

I don’t know whether any of the present controversialists will see this, but on the off chance they do, please remember that what we have in common is so infinitely stronger and more important than that which divides us. Remember that comments that look perfectly reasonable to you with your knowledge of the backstory and your own emotional state can look like a ruthless polemic to someone else. I’d also suggest that, when upset by the writings of another blogger, the better course of action might be to contact that person privately (which is possible to do for just about every member of St. Blog’s but for Nihil Obstat) rather than to escalate the conflict. You could even patiently and silently endure the wrong you perceive, offering it up with a prayer for your counterpart and so heap burning coals on his head. A wise man once said our adversaries help us by pointing out our shortcomings as they give us direction on our improvement that we might not find elsewhere.

This post has better advice yet for all of us. And, to paraphrase something from a completely different context by Athanasius, if you can’t pray about what you say on your blog, perhaps you’re blogging things you oughtn’t be.