The crows sure loved to talk and gossip. One day they swarmed a hog over and hover. “It must be because he is silent so much,” a bystander observed. “Oh, no,” said a crow taking a momentary break from the harassment. “Its because when he talks he doesn’t always say what we want.”

I recommend the Planetary Anthology: Neptune. It was better quality and more even quality than I remember recent anthologies being. One story was literally gay, but other than that . . .

The story Sea Change was good. It pulled off the trick of making you think there was a deep, rich world behind the story while only showing you the few glimpses necessary for the story. In particular, the actual world-feature that provides the narrative drive is only briefly mentioned in a couple of scattered sentences. Good story with real moral weight, one I would recommend even if it didn’t have the word ‘sennight.’ One cannot trust pseudonyms these days, but on internal evidence I would think it was written by a woman.

We are on a high mountain, or so it seemed to my little girl who hiked to the top of it with me. “Do you see the trucks on the freeway? From here they look like toys.”

“No!” she says, “they are toys. I am going to pretend they are all toys.”

“OK, knock yourself out.”

“Look at the toy trucks and the toy houses all over and its all toys, they are so cute!”

Silence.

“Dad . . .”

“Yes, sweety?”

“There is a giant and we are his toys.”

Ross Douthat.

to argue that the American future depends on pushing our birthrate back above replacement level . . . remains an eccentric argument to many people: an interesting idea, maybe, but not a particularly urgent one, and certainly not the sort of issue that would make the cut of questions for a presidential debate.

Which is a bit crazy, when you stop to think about it. Whether a society is reproducing itself isn’t an eccentric question; it’s a fundamental one. The birthrate isn’t just an indicator of some nebulous national greatness; it’s entangled with any social or economic challenge that you care to name.

Why the dearth?
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Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid

Peace, but not as the world understands peace. His peace is different. The world sees peace as the absence of violence. They make a desert, and call it peace. The Savior makes the desert blossom like a rose, and calls it peace. His peace is a synonym for victory.

But not victory as the world understands it either.

The victory that is won by God as a newborn babe.

Peace on earth, good will to men.

There is a paradise place where the grass is lush and soft; the dew sparkles; the trees whisper in the wind.  There is a farm there.  The farmer and his family have a routine.  Every morning, for example, he or one of his children go to see the ducks to make sure the fencing for their run is still well, to check for predators, and to collect eggs.  The land is beautiful and so is the routine.  But to make sure they avoid stagnation of the mind, each time they go to the ducks they recite a poem or a passage.  They do this for all their many ordered activities.

It is not necessarily a poem about the activity.  It is often just a poem they like.  But it is the same one for each activity.  They find it more beautiful that way.  At the ducks, Dover Beach.  Cutting cabbage for sauerkraut, Out Out Brief Candle.  There are a thousand or more that they recite.

At nights, they play together doing geometry proofs.

If you go past the influence of the farm and its people, past the woods they log, past the hills where they pursue game, past the event horizon of their lives, you find a wasteland.  It is dark and roiling with chaotic forces, with an anarchy of brutal energies.

The farm family doesn’t know it, but that roiling darkness is what underlies their farm also.  Only it is guided and tamed and brought into order by their poetry and their passages and the harmony of their lives.  It is what makes everything so lush and green.  The lush farm is the natural end those forces were meant for.

Here is  a story in which you are the hero.  Well, the sidekick.

There is a hero and his group and the villain and his group.  But you must not imagine that you are in a superhero story.  The hero is a suburban dad.  You are, well, you.  The rest of the hero’s crew are neighborhood people.  The villain is a rangy, rawboned young man in a wifebeater who operates out of a collection of trailers out in the sagebrush.  His crew are trailer park people.  One of his sidekicks is a woman in her 30s who looks like a cafe-waitress: a bit the worse for wear, stringy mouse brown hair, prettyish if not so unkempt, face a bit lined, a little too thin.  There are no superpowers.  Maybe minor powers, the woman can possibly do a few spells or something.  There are devices that work better than they should.  You are definitely a sidekick in a pulpish or cinematic story.  But no superpowers.

There is a backstory by the way.  Act 1, before the story starts, you and the hero tangled with the witchy woman.  You of course prevailed.  Now, in Act 2, she found this villain and helped him put together a group. (more…)

I want to be direct about something suggested poetically before.

In Matthew 25 Christ tells us how the Judgment will go.

He will put his sheep on his right hand.  Because they fed him when he was hungry. Dressed him when he was naked. Gave him a place to sleep when he had no home of his own.

The goats he will drive out into the darkness at his left hand.

Both groups, he tells us, will be surprised.  The sheep will not think of themselves as having done something particularly virtuous.

“When did we feed you? Clothe you? Takes you in?”

Christ will reply, “Inasmuch as you have done it into the least of these my brethren, you have done it into me.”

Which we take to be a lot of rhetorical flourishes saying, “be charitable to the poor ” Except those times we help the poor are the times we feel ourselves particularly virtuous. None of us would be surprised the Lord gave us credit for our soup kitchen service.

So no. It is not rhetoric. This is literally what will happen.  We will get credit for literally clothing naked people.

In other words, for the children we raised.  We clothe them in flesh and then in clothing for decades. We feed them for decades. We house them for decades. An infant is the least of us.

Christ is literally saying, “if you raise a child, I will treat you as if you were my own father and mother. What I would do for Mary and Joseph, I will do for you.”

On the sweetness.

Our ward sang beautifully but absurdly today.  We still cannot sing together.  So we had some families record songs in advance.  Others had stations in rooms around the church building where they could sing to have it piped into the chapel.  It was beautiful but also absurd.  Much like, I suppose, God in a manger.

This is the right stuff.

Christmas starts next week. Merry Christmas, friends. I haven’t met you all, but all of you make me laugh and feel tender at the same time, which is what being merry means.

Enjoy the season, enjoy your families, enjoy celebrating his birth. One day we will all meet with Him together beyond the North Pole.

For those who like that sort of thing, we have some excellent Christmas writing from over the years. We’ve made it into a page that you can get to from the top of the blog.

We’ve had a lot of errands to run at night, around town and out into the empty.  We’ve been looking at the Christmas lights.  We have decided we have a lot of respect for the single strand of lights.  It usually runs along a fence or sometimes an eave or around a window.  It often looks a little tire.

But a street with single strands on nearly every house has more cheer about it than a street with one house lit to the nines.

I like a house lit to the nines.  My own house is an elegant and tasteful blaze.   Yet there is something affecting about that little strand of lights.

It is someone showing their devotion to a celebration and a standard even if that standard doesn’t make them look good.

It is the equivalent of what some sociologists call the decent poor.  It is the nameless virtue (#namelessvirtue)

It is the Christ deciding to become a mortal, starting out as a baby.

A long time ago, I dreamed about a sword. The dream was strange. It was told by the sword.

There was an Arthurian, elven style court. Noble knights and fair ladies who went forth from their shining walls into the happy green land to the sound of music. The king had a magic sword which narrated (?) the dream. They jousted, they chased the deer among the huge boles of the stout old trees. They may have had some foes scattered around that they could fight. (I have it all written down somewhere, but at this time do not recall.)

At one point there was a crack. A kind of restlessness set in. I think it was adultery but it may have been a personal affront. A quarrel. It made people angry. It didn’t really get patched up. The anger and bitterness widened. The knights and ladies started in on each other. There were killings. They fought little wars. The land was ravaged. Eventually the king turned into an orgy of destruction as did everyone who still left alive, destroying just to destroy. The magic sword could unmake things and raging the king unmade. It was the Jaredite end of the Arthurian legend. (more…)