I want to tell you the story of how poetry subverted a technological hell.
One of the eternal quests of the ministry is finding new poetry to use in worship services and to serve as inspiration for other times as well. Years ago, I found an email list called Panhala. Panhala was a Yahoo Group that was founded by a man named Joe Riley. It's not clear who Joe was or why he started sending out a poem a week, or even when he started it (it looks like it was about 15 years ago). The poems were usually Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver, David Whyte, or Rumi. Beautiful poetry, chestnuts. Some times the poems were occasional to the day or holiday; other times, they weren't. Some times, there would be breaks of a few weeks when things got busy for Mr. Riley. And then posting would start up again.
In the middle of December, Yahoo shut down its Yahoo Groups function or changed something drastically. If they shut it down, it wasn't like a store shutting down, selling the final goods and the furnishings, and locking the doors. It was more like they turned off the lights and left all the doors unlocked. A previous function of this particular group was that only Joe could send poems out. A few days after the shutdown, someone sent an email out, presumably intended just for Joe. It instead went to the whole group — all 14,000 strangers who had come looking for poems over the last decade. Pandemonium ensued. The unsubscribe function seemed to stop working. There was no tech support available. It seemed like there was no way to stop this barrage of emails of being saying "unsubscribe!" or "keep me on your list." There was no way to contact Joe who might be able to stop it, his email wasn't active, and no one it seemed knew him. It was an ouroboros of reply-all. An infinite loop of technology backfiring, filling up email inboxes, and then spam folders, with no end in sight. People didn't understand how the technology worked, and so they kept responding all, ignoring others' pleas to stop.
Someone posited that if people started sharing poetry on the list, in a sense returning it to its original state, it might be able to stem the tide of junk emails. Sending out poetry might be able to reset this little peaceful patch of the internet to its previous state. Use the group's original purpose to fix something. Judging by the state of my spam filter, it seems as though it somewhat succeeded.
In this new year, I wonder what are the places in your life, where it would be tempting to give up on, that could be made just a little bit more beautiful by some creative action?
Peace,
rev. aaron