Advent Calendar 3.

When you do advent calendars, the whole thing is cardboard, you pry open the window, sometimes corners tear.  I wonder if there once were wooden ones, brought back year to year.  Or big ones, with a real candle behind each window.

Today's opens and there is, indeed, a candle.  A strange hybrid of utility and history and art.  We light them now for the table, because of their flattering light.  Once they were lit because they were the only light you could get.   So at night  everyone was candlelit. As in a Kubrick film that most people don't remember, Barry Lyndon.  I have never forgot the candlelit interiors.

Now we are lit by spirally fluorescent doohickies that, if they fall to the floor, make a toxic pile of glass and chemicals.  Drop a candle and your house could burn down.  But probably not. Usually there's just  a beautiful little puddle of wax.

Advent Calendar 2.

Open the window today and there's gravity.  Oh yeah - gravity.   Pulled trillions of pieces of matter together, forming Earth and, eventually, us.

I wonder why gravity was never a god.  Certainly the ancient god-designers knew that something was keeping them stuck to the earth.  Something made dropped things go down and not up.  But I haven't found Gravity, God of the Assembly of the Universe (although, I'll admit, I haven't looked).  Closest I've heard is Hawking's' statement that gravity, not god, made the universe.  Which sounds wrong.  Seems to me that either God made the universe - by definition, really - or no one did.

Gravitas is a Roman virtue, not a god.  It means, uh, gravitas.  Others are pietas and dignitas.  Man, we could use more of all three.

Advent Calendar Blog

Open the first window and there's.... December.   Winter's first chapter.  If the reason why we don't live in California is the change of seasons, here it is, without compromise.

In St. Louis the leaves are there on November first and gone by the end of the month.  We go to standard time, the darkness comes even sooner.  The tropicals and tender plants worth saving are brought inside, the perennials go to ground, the rest are doomed.  The fish in the  pond slow down and I rig a warmer to keep a hole in the ice, or they'd be doomed as well.

Today is sunny, that bright blue sky, bigger because the leaves are down.  Isabel, whose ancestors are from the West Highlands, doesn't want to come inside.

Bede's Sparrow

"The present life of man, O King, seems to be like the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad.

"The sparrow, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged.

"So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are entirely ignorant."

From The Venerable Bede.  Told over a thousand years ago.

Confluence and Heart

We talk a lot about confluence here in St. Louis, because here the country's two mightiest rivers meet and flow together.  The Mississippi flows down from the North, from Minnesota,  and the Missouri flows in from the West, from Montana, and they converge in river bottoms, and as they start their journey to the heart of the South the first high ground, on the west bank, is St. Louis. 

Tonight this town rings with another kind of confluence, and beats with a tremendous heart.  It's a baseball town, likes to think of itself as the baseball town, and it's the capital of a huge region, seven or eight states, surrounding the tradition of its baseball teams.  It used to have two, a National and an American League team, the Cardinals and the Browns.  The Browns have long moved on, but what remains is this fine ball club, the center of what we call, proudly but not too seriously,  Cardinal Nation:  the St. Louis Cardinals.

"Go Cards."  I've heard it ever since I moved here.  At times like this it replaces "good-bye" or "see ya" in our conversations.

Tonight this tradition converged with a team, and the team won the World Series.

This 2011 team is a miracle.  For the last week I, and many others, have said "Cards in Seven", and it's not just municipal pride.  I'd make this prediction - before Game Six - because  this team plays with its back to the wall like no other.  It has come back from the brink literally dozens of times since August.   But I didn't really know how  true and deep their heart was, until Game Six, when the team was down to its last out, last strike, two runs down  - twice - and came back and won.  The gamest, biggest-hearted team ever.

Game Seven, tonight, was kind of a victory lap.  Not the firestorm of Game Six.  Just a steady, confident final act, eliminating any lingering doubt. This is one of the greatest sports teams America has ever seen.

Faith

From someplace on the Internet:

"In the 17th century, the people that we would now call atheists were called nullfidians. The state of insufficient faith was also of common enough interest to be given a name - petty fidianism.

"John Trapp, in his Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, 1647, recorded the term:

" 'O ye of little faith. Ye petty fidians; He calleth them not nullifidians.' "

I'm afraid I'm a petty fidian.  Never knew it before.  Always thought I had doubt, and that was okay because everyone does from time to time. 

At least I'm not a nullifidian.  What faith I have, I keep, and guard carefully.

Jubilee

Just when I was ranting about my inability to find anything insightful, I stumbled onto this in the Guardian.  It's George Monboit discussing a book by  Steve Keen, Debunking Economics:

"President Obama justified the bank bailout on the grounds that "a dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in eight or 10 dollars of loans to families and businesses. So that's a multiplier effect." But the money multiplier didn't happen. The $1.3 trillion that Bernanke injected scarcely raised the amount of money in circulation: the 110% increase in M0 money led not to the 800% or 1,000% increase in M1 money that Obama predicted, but a rise of just 20%. The bail-outs failed because M0 was not the cause of the crisis. The money would have achieved far more had it simply been given to the public. But, as Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy demonstrated over the weekend, governments have learnt nothing from this failure, and seek only to repeat it.

"Instead, Keen says, the key to averting or curtailing a second Great Depression is to reduce the levels of private debt, through a unilateral write-off, or jubilee. The irresponsible loans the banks made should not be honoured. This will mean taking many banks into receivership. Otherwise private debt will sort itself out by traditional means: mass bankruptcy, which will generate an even greater crisis."

Like they say, read the whole thing.  http://bit.ly/na6WnQ

There really is something going on here to which we should pay attention.