A special “reflection” by my pal, Omar F. A. Gutierrez. be sure to visit his blog at Regnum Novum

So I’m awoken on Friday morning of February 11th with a voice resembling that belonging to my friend Kris on the other end of the phone asking, “Did I wake you?” “No, no,” I answer while thinking to myself that I’d like to be the sort of person who should be up at this hour anyway.

My friend continues, “What did you do to your website?” The question befuddles me. I’ve been fretting over the thing lately. I haven’t done anything I think to myself, but get off my back, and why are you calling me at this hour? She goes on to tell me that my counter, the thingy at the bottom of my site that counts the number of visits or hits I’ve received anywhere on my website, has shot through the roof. I had remembered checking it a couple days before. It was around 53,000. Kris, for it is Kris McGregor, tells me it is now at around 129,000. Something’s up. People from all over the world are downloading the series Kris and I are doing on the social doctrine of the Church: the Netherlands, Poland, Australia. “The Netherlands!” she says. I’m out of bed.

When I get downstairs to my computer to check the stats on my page, I find that, indeed thousands of people have visited my website in just the last few hours. Most of them spend only fleeting seconds on it. But some stay. Some read. Some move onto Kris’s website Discerning Hearts and download the series and then stay to download other things, devotionals and interviews. Who are these people from Italy, Spain, Venezuela, France, Germany? Why are they coming to my website? What is going on?

This whole technology thing is still pretty new to me. I was just thinking the other day how adamant I was at the ripe old age of twelve not to convert my extensive audio tape collection to CD. Those new-fangled CD’s were just a fad, I told myself. It’ll pass. Staunchly through high school I developed my tape collection. It was an impressive heap of blues and classic rock with smatterings of grunge and the entirety of the U2 oeuvre including some bootlegged concert audio.

Eventually I did break down and buy CD’s but I didn’t like it. In this new post-CD age, where everything is on the computer and downloadable onto iPods and the like, I am happy to say that I am without a gigantic CD collection, nothing like those grad-school friends of mine who’s collections could cover the entire wall of a oppressively undersized apartment. And my tapes? I like to believe that they are collector’s-item-cool now, just waiting to be taken onto the Antique Road Show in 2041 where I’ll be told I have the only existing audio cassette with U2′s 1987 Miami show. A guy can dream.

Blogging is a new thing to me as well, and I’ve eased into it with much help from Kris who seems to have her pulse on everything chic and contemporary. She’s the lady in the know. Me, I’m just the guy with glasses who in high school liked to sit over a copy of St. Augustine’s De Trinitate. It was my own little rebellion against the world of MTV, Beavis, and Butthead.

I am even more clueless about how to track down the people who come to my website. But there are programs for this, programs Kris tells me to get, and which I get, and which do blow me away in their specificity.

Thomas the grump engine.

Hitsniffer, for instance, can tell you who is on your website, what city they live in, what they are looking at right now, how long they’ve been on your website, etc. Have you ever wondered how it is that a website can target advertisements to you and use your city’s name in it? We have the technology, and the technology as at our fingertips.

Now, granted, there is a bit of ick-factor in all of this. How much information is too much? Can I pinpoint an address? Can religious affiliation be determined by IP addresses? Well no. Don’t worry. There is no way I could track down any such information. And anyway, I wouldn’t know how to use the technology even if there were a way. What I did glean from the programs was that people were flocking to my website from all over the world to the tune of 600 to 800 people at a time. I mean that that many people were on my site at the same time. They were all new visitors and not repeats. Furthermore, there was no referring site from which they came except that they were all looking for information on Thomas Edison.

Thomas Edison? I had included a picture of old Tom on a post I had some months ago. “The Myth of the Self-Made Man” it was titled. I thought it was a rather uniquely catchy title myself. If you Google the phrase, however, you won’t find my post anywhere near the top. Anyway, for some time now, I had been getting hits on my website from people doing a search for Thomas Edison, probably for a picture of him, and finding my website as a source for just such a picture. There were a couple every day, but not huge numbers. The most visits I had ever gotten in a single day was something like 70. On this day I had 800 visitors in two minutes… all of them looking for Thomas Edison.

I wracked my brain to come up with some explanation of this. Perhaps someone famous had read one of my posts or heard the social doctrine series with Kris and linked it. Maybe, this was not about Edison at all. Maybe some wise figurehead of a faraway Catholic empire had read my post and was passing it around as mandatory reading for those who wanted to be in the know…like Kris. Or perhaps an e-mail was sent around to influential people, and I had “gone viral.” (I’m still not sure what this means or why it’s good, but I’m told that is the appropriately technical language to use in these cases.) .

By mid-day, and without much headway in solving the mystery, I finally just had it. I changed the post with the picture of Thomas Edison to read at the top, “If this is your first visit to Regnum Novum, welcome! Please let me know how you heard of this site as I am getting a lot of traffic. Please send me an e-mail or leave a comment.” When in doubt, ask. So I did.

The answer was pretty astonishing to me, and was proffered by two visitors.

Apparently, February 11th, 2011 was the 164th birthday of Thomas Edison. Google, which on holidays or memorable days sometimes puts up a special picture to spell out Google, put up a “doodle” to mark this fact of Edison’s birthday. If you clicked on the “doodle,” you were sent to a listing of all sorts of sources on Thomas Edison and a bar of pictures of the man. The most prominent of these pictures, a dashing photo of the man’s head and upper chest (seen to the left here), was the fourth one from the left, and was indeed the picture I had used on my site. If you clicked on it, the picture would come up on the screen and behind it, translucent and ethereal, was my website.

So of the global millions that day who used Google, millions clicked on the “doodle.” Of those, some fewer factor of millions looked at the pictures. Of those, perhaps hundreds of thousands liked the picture I used and clicked on it. Of those, some saw the title of the post partially obscured so that it read, “The Myth of the Self-Mad.” They would have also seen “Theology on Tap,” and “New Evangelization through Social Doctrine.” Thus, with interest and curiosity peaked, tens of thousands saw the picture and noticed the website and about 150,000 clicked on it… clicked on my website… behind the photo. Of those, several thousand explored the site and hundreds moved on to Kris McGregor’s site to – among other things – download the series on social doctrine…

…and all of it because of a picture of Thomas Edison.

Since then I cannot help but wonder in amazement for the great and glorious God that we have. Through happenstance? Through kismet? Through serendipity? No through the ever-loving guiding hand of the Almighty, thousands were exposed to my writings and to the work that I am doing with Kris to explain the social doctrine of the Church.Yes the lilies of the field are dressed in splendid robes. Me? I should trust, for He is always looking out for my good.

This mystery and miracle have certainly taught me a great deal about the power of technology as well, and this has given me greater appreciation for the words of the Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI in April of last year:

Without fear we want to set out upon the digital sea embracing the unrestricted navigation with the same passion that for 2,000 years has steered the barque of the Church. More than with technical resources, although necessary, we want to qualify ourselves dwelling in this universe too with a believing heart, that contributes to giving a soul to the uninterrupted communicational flow of the Internet.

May we all be so bold as to put out into the digital sea, all the while knowing that it is not we who man the barque of the Church but Peter and the Spirit of God.