From Chuck’s post:
It isn’t that I’ve turned against “nurturing,” or what the term is supposed to evoke. It’s rather that the word has become like the tires on my car: they’ve gone round and round so many thousands of times the tread is worn off and they won’t hold to the road anymore.
My reply to Chuck:
The vagueness of it all seems usually to be the point. We want to sound deep and spiritual without really laying out what we believe or what spirit we’re actually talking about (I was a bit more rantery about the subject when I wrote that about Sodium Free Friends and followed up that we need a testimony against community). I saw with some amusement when my former employer spent hundreds of people hours to craft the most banal “nurture”-filled mission statement possible–there was a good use of time and funds. It’s not limited to Friends of course. My wife is fighting the good fight against banality in the Catholic Church, where “vibrant” has become the leading cliche among the bureaucrats. The rising tide of mediocrity is everywhere it seems.
Have you ever seen the Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator? It’d be fun to write one of these for Friends. The trouble is, people would probably start using it!
