It is dangerous for me, as a spiritual director to write things (better said to publish things?) while I'm in the midst of leading a retreat.
There are some practical reasons for that, of course. If I publish things during a retreat, there is the possibility that the retreatants will think that I am writing about them. That alone could be crushing to the tender souls that I am journeying with. It is bad enough when you suspect that a friend is talking about you behind your back. It is horrifying to think that person might be your spiritual director.
The other danger to writing or publishing things while in the midst of a retreat is that I myself am in process. Any retreat has a movement to it (John Veltri called this the conversion cycle, and I have seen it play out time and again), and this movement occurs in both the retreatant and the director. Writing something in the middle of that process and sending it out to the world as a fait accompli is necessarily static. And the temptation is to name that thing as an accurate picture of where I am, rather than simply an image of me in motion.
I know that blogging carries with it an implicit understanding that the ideas expressed in the blog are fluid, apt to change or movement over time. Although this is not exclusively true of blogging about belief, it is particularly so in this context. What once was lost, now is found, and all that. And yet, there is enough rigidity to the medium (note how quickly Twitter and Facebook promulgate a pithy sentiment or quote taken out of context as the complete picture of what a person thinks on a subject) that saying something too soon, or in the midst of a shift of perspective can do much more damage than the good of offering it can offset.
As one of my favorite prayers states, "And so I think it is with you. Your ideas mature gradually—let them grown. Let them shape themselves without undue haste. Don't try to force them on…"
All of which is to say, if I'm quiet over the next week, you now know why.