News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
I trust that many of you have been blessed to celebrate the Christmas holidays with family, friends, good food, and, perhaps, a candlelight Christmas Eve service. As my email inbox is filling up with year-end appeals from many worthy publications and non-profits, I'm reminded that FPR's ambitions are both more modest and more radical than most ventures of this type. We have no plans to launch grand new programs, to add to our "staff" or "campus," or to change the world. We simply want to be a voice of sanity in an insane time and to seed such amateur virtues as friendship, integrity, temperance, gratitude, and humility in the places and communities where we live. So thanks for joining us in this Quixotic endeavor!
- Christopher Myers leads readers through the experience of Job 28: "Poetry must be experienced, and the experience of poetry is itself a means of searching, a kind of hunting, for wisdom."
- Matt Waldron shares his appreciation for local college radio stations: "We can gain something from the Ike Carters and the student DJs of our communities: a human connection, a community connection—not to mention great music."
- David Bannon considers how the rituals of the season, like trimming a Christmas tree, might help us navigate the sorrows that grow acute during the holidays: "Rituals are our allies in sorrow. They help us appreciate what brief time we had with our loved ones while acknowledging the years we will face without them."
- Sarah Reardon describes how welcoming her first baby before Advent deepened her appreciation for the season: "Like Mary and all Israel waiting for the Messiah, like a mother welcoming a child, we are to 'wait for it with patience.'"
- Adam Smith wades into the debates around health insurance sparked by Luigi Mangioni's murder of Brian Thompson. As someone who's had to declare medical bankruptcy, Adam's worth listening to here: "I believe in personal responsibility; insurance companies believe in impersonal responsibility."
This week, I'll simply share a Christmas poem by R.S. Thomas, "The Coming."
And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, A river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. many People
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro