You Can't Repeat It Too Often - Howard Thurman's The Work of Christmas

When the song of the angels is stilled,

When the star in the sky is gone,

When the kings and princes are home,

When the shepherds are back with their flock,

The work of Christmas begins:

To find the lost,

To heal the broken,

To feed the hungry,

To release the prisoner,

To rebuild the nations,

To bring peace among all,

To make music in the heart.

I'd emphasize different things on different days, it's too big an agenda to take on, we're not all Dorothy Day or some other living saint.   

Right now, as things are turning ever darker, I'd encourage everyone to try to make music in the heart, we're going to need that.  I'm seeing more reminders that the Christmas season lasts till February 2nd.  I'd include MLK's Birthday in that, not the official day that's been cheapened in the way that all American holidays get cheapened and co-opted.   Since so many of his most valuable words are still under embargo, not by white supremacists as during his lifetime but by his own family, maybe emphasizing the words of others in that movement here and around the world can make that music, instead.   It's the tragedy of MLK that the false image of him erected in the absence of his real words is a tool of Republican-fascists.

I'm reading Masha Gessen, right now.  Prophesy in our time.  And I'm on about my fourth reading of Jeremiah, prophesy for all time. 

I Doubt Trump Had Anything To Do With Trudeau's Expected Resignation

A NUMBER OF years ago, Margaret Atwood wrote an amusing essay for The Nation in which she said Canadian's looked like Porky Pig with their noses pressed against the glass watching things in their bad neighbor to their South but at least they're looking,  Americans, especially those in states that don't share a border with Canada hardly know it's there. 

I've been seeing online chatter speculating on how Trump made Trudeau resign when it's certain that Trump had nothing to do with it.   If anything Trump attacking Trudeau and Canadian independence would have forestalled the inevitable.   Trudeau has been the leader of the Liberals for more than a decade and the Prime Minister of Canada for nine years,  what's surprising is that he has lasted as long as he has, especially as he is PM through a coalition with parties with importantly different agendas than the Liberals in general - the diversity within the Liberal Party being plenty significant to lead to trouble.   As an American Democrat, I'm certainly used to that dynamic,  conservatives, both American Republican-fascists and the various conservatives elsewhere have the overriding value of greed to unify them.  

The various ministers in his own government who left over corruption (the Lavalin affair, for example) and the recent forcing out of Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland last month have entirely more to do with why he needs to step down now to give Liberals any hope in the upcoming election.   

I've never been all that wowed by Justin Trudeau though I acknowledged he was better than the conservative alternatives.  One thing I learned from both the Kennedy and Clinton and other would be dynasties of Democrats and the most corrupt one in modern American history, the Bush crime family,  is that political families should always engender skepticism.   I read that Justin Trudeau says that his failure to institute what would have been a truly great political reform,  ranked-choice-voting, which means that a majority would almost never get their last choice governing them.   That he didn't give such an important democracy enhancing and People empowering provision made law has to mean he was never all that strong on it.   It should have been among the first things he did, not the thing he didn't do.    

I hope that the next chance Canadians get to institute that kind of democracy enhancing reform, they go for it.   Without it, I don't see much hope for the upcoming government which will probably be a particularly corrupt Conservative one.   I don't think Canadians have been as corrupted as Americans have in a majority of the states but there's plenty corruption to be getting on with everywhere.  

In The Mire - Bessie Jones

 

I've been thinking a lot about the radicalism of the Incarnation this Advent and Christmas, how outrageously ennobling it is of our most basic life experience no matter how humble and humiliating   I think we're about to experience lots of that humiliation and I don't think secularism in the context of our experience is going to provide us what we need to deal with that.   I'm taking this kind of human experience ever more seriously as we face ever worse in the future. 

This Spiritual is about how the enslaved and those under the de facto slavery of white supremacy found their connection with the Holy Spirit to continue on, that continuing itself resistance to the attempt to destroy them.  Having the meet in the mire, far into the swampy wilderness to avoid detection and to have their meeting destroyed by their enemies, those who enslaved them and sought to destroy their aspirations.    

The ending in which Bessie Jones described how such spirituals would be repeated (meditated on) is, in fact, an effective method of meditation, one that will leave you with more than the "mindfulness" that is so notably consonant with billionaire-millionaire amorality.   "Spirituality" that is about everything ends up being about nothing.   Though it's far easier if you want to do whatever you want to whoever you want to and take no moral responsiblity.  

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Peter Tinniswood - The Wireless Lady

 The Wireless Lady 

Winifred Leslie, the Grande Dame of radio drama, lives alone and thinks she’s been forgotten.  But when she’s offered a part by a young producer at the age of 80, her memories come flooding back:.

She recalls her three marriages, appearing on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs – and being Samuel Beckett's muse.   Her companion in life is an old Bakelite wireless, which answers her back.

Starring Billie Whitelaw and Christian Rodska.

Peter Tinniswood’s sad, funny and joyous celebration of the great days of radio.

Winifred Leslie …… Billie Whitelaw

The Wireless …… Christian Rodska

Enforced Resolution?

I DON'T KNOW if it's just my old junker that I generally use for general computing but my ad-block for Youtube doesn't seem to be functioning,  if that's true it's  no more Youtube for me. 

I'd thought that I was watching too much Youtube before and the idea of trying to go YT free for at least a while wouldn't be a good idea,  forcing me to go back to the world of text which I'd grown up in.  Maybe technology is intervening where a guardian angel might to encourage more integrity.   

If it's just something I need to tweak,  right now I'm not up for doing that.  

2024 Mike's Merry Mix

I'VE HAD a really difficult month so I didn't give a link to one of the really great Christmas institutions,  Mike Wilkins' annual collection of wacky Christmas songs that you've certainly never heard before.  And one of the best ways to get the flavor of it is Callie Crossley's annual show about it.   So, before it's almost too late. 

HERE IT IS 

The Georgia Sea Island Singers - Yonder Come Day