News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
Merry Christmas!
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Russell Arben Fox takes stock of the legacy of Occupy Wall Street 10 years on: “holding up a sign, sitting at a lunch counter, sticking a flower in a gun, setting up a tent, and occupying a space in the face of state and corporate power is an act of utopian belief and faith. A belief, to go back to Berry’s insight above, that something may not be–and should not be accepted as being–an economic, and therefore social, inevitability.”
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Elizabeth Stice reflects on Kenneth Branagh’s new movie Belfast. As she concludes, “Belfast is a lovely movie for remembering the power that places have in defining who we are and the beauty of belonging well, even to a broken place.”
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Doug Sikkema interviewed author John Van Rys about his aims as a storyteller. Van Rys hopes readers are shaped by his tales of domestic comedy to see that love for the long haul, difficult as it is, is not only possible but greatly to be desired; to see that through our weakness and brokenness a certain glory shines.
I leave you with one of my favorite Wendell Berry poems, Sabbath XXI, 2012, followed by Albrecht Dürer’s The Nativity.
As a child, the Mad Farmer saw easily
the vision of Heaven’s Christ born in a stable,
the brilliant star stopped in the high dark,
the sheltered beasts standing silently by.
He knows the beasts, he is himself a shepherd,
and still, more clearly, by the gift of a moment,
he sees the shepherds on their cold hill by night,
the sky flying suddenly open over their heads,
the light of very Heaven falling upon them,
the angels descending, slowly as snow, their singing
filling far and wide the dark: “On earth
peace, good will.” The vision, the gift
only of moments, he has kept in his eyes, in his heart.
He knows how it passes, how it fades,
how it stays, how far we have drawn away.
He thinks of distance, the hard hungry journey
of foolish man, a pilgrim in the foreshadow
of apocalypse toward the almost forgotten
light far beyond the polluted river,
the blasted mountains, the killed children, the bombed
villages haunted already by the hurting bodies
of their dead. Some of the past he dreads as if
it has not yet happened. From present portent
he fears the time to come. Beyond and beyond
is the shepherd-startling, ever-staying light.
No creature of his slow-minded kind may ever
stand in that light again. He sets out.
