I SAW this comment after a recording of this beautiful carol:

I grew up in California, pretty much an atheist. I lived in England for two years, and while singing in a choir in Sussex I had a kind of spiritual awakening while contemplating a chord progression of Bach from the Christmas Oratorio. I love Christmas in England.

And another commenter wrote back:

God is calling us all upward to dignity and rightness in Him.We feel this in music, we suspect it in darkness, but when we really see Him in the light and love that He is, we see how mistaken we have been. As it is written, the sun is always shining, but it is us who allow sin to cause a tiny moon to eclipse the enormous star. God be praised. God above all with Jesus Christ His only begotten son, who lives and reigns in the Holy Spirit. One God forever and ever, Amen.

Once in Royal David’s City

Once in royal David’s city,
Stood a lowly cattle shed,
Where a mother laid her baby
In a manger for His bed:
Mary was that mother mild,
Jesus Christ her little child. (more…)

GOV. Tom Wolfe and his henchman, Health Secretary Dr. Richard Levine (aka "Rachel"), have apparently pushed their luck. Forcing many businesses to shut down just days before Christmas, when they were already crippled by months of closure, is not being accepted with the same passivity as their previous unconstitutional actions. Dozens of restaurants and gyms, more joining every day, are defying their latest orders to close down to all indoor business. A Facebook group Pennsylvania Opening Businesses/Defying Governor's Orders has 50,000 members. As Natalie Wilhelm, owner of Jean Louis Bistro in Lebanon, wrote: We shut down the first time but we simply cannot shut down a second time due to the huge hit it’s taken on our restaurant and staff who need to provide for their families as well. So happy to see so many others standing up and fighting back as well. Wolf's orders came months after a federal court declared his previous restrictions unconstitutional. Judge William Stickman IV's decision is currently being appealed, but it was emphatic in its denunciation of the government's actions. Stickman wrote: [G]ood intentions toward a laudable end are not alone enough to uphold governmental action against a constitutional challenge. Indeed, the greatest threats to our system of constitutional liberties may arise when the ends are laudable, and the intent is good—especially in a time of emergency. In an emergency, even a vigilant public may let down its guard over its constitutional liberties only to…

I PREVIOUSLY wrote of a bird who knocked insistently at our front door just when we happened to be talking about him. We see birds fly by our windows all the time. They live their busy lives parallel to ours. They peck and forage at the ground outside. But they occasionally appear -- perhaps this is just projection -- to tire of the great outdoors. They want in. Is it possible that just as we wish we could fly, they wish they could sit in a chair? You know, the grass is always greener ... In fact, a little, chirping wren walked right in our back door a few months ago. After flying through the living room and up the stairs, into the bathroom and around the bed where my husband was peacefully snoring, he clearly had had enough and wanted to leave. The indoors might look intriguing from the other side of the window, but perhaps aren't that interesting, from an avian perspective. Maybe the same thing would happen if we could soar through the sky. I don't know, but I would like to try. Here is the touching story of a cardinal who knocked at someone's window. Robert Barrow writes: As we removed the final assortment of clutter, preparing to lock the door for the last time and depart, I walked into the living room where my sister had died with the assistance of Hospice months ago -- checking one…

  OUR governments aren't legitimate anymore. They have proclaimed war on humanity.  

IN PENNSYLVANIA, you can't have dinner in a restaurant. But you can participate in an orgy ---- as long as you follow protocols supplied by Dr. Richard (aka "Rachel") Levine, the state's "health" commissar. It's amazing what a little hand sanitizer can do.

THE brutalist, post-modern Nativity scene erected in front of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome this year has created quite a stir. The outcry is the only good thing about it. At least, ugliness still causes pain. This is a scene of such grotesqueries that some are calling it an “anti-nativity.”

The most noticeable thing about this freakish display is that the figures don’t look human. They are monsters, robots, and depersonalized, vacant-eyed matryoshka dolls. It’s a fitting tribute then not to the sublime mysteries of Bethlehem, where human nature was elevated, but to the ugly, dehumanizing effects of totalitarianism, 2020-style.

Judge for yourself. Here’s a video of the unveiling of the scene and  photos, as well as a news round-up. Italian art historian Andrea Cionci wrote in an Italian daily (translation here):

“Forget the sweet face of the Madonna, the tender, luminous incarnation of the Child Jesus, the paternal sweetness of St. Joseph and the devout wonder of the shepherds. For the first time in the middle of Bernini’s colonnade, the Vatican has erected a brutally postmodern work dating back to the sixties.” It includes “a Muslim imam, a Jewish rabbi, an astronaut and even an executioner (as a symbol of protest against the death penalty) but only some of them have been exhibited.” (more…)

"O KING, whom our hearts desire, Lord Jesus Christ, come, we beseech thee, cleanse us as a furnace of fire from the dross of our sins, and make us like gold that is pure, and like silver that is without alloy. Inflame our hearts, by thy inspiration, that they seek thee unceasingly: so may our desires long with all ardour after thee,  and pant with all eagerness to be united with thee. Amen." -- The Mozarabic Breviary, Friday of the second week of Advent, Capitula  

"COMMUNISM is both a system of governance designed for micromanaging every aspect of society via massive centralization and police state, and a political scam designed to bamboozle plebs into killing who[m]ever their current elites are and putting the globalist kabbal in power." -- SP Fan Account  

"SUPPOSE that you are worried that you might have a rare disease. You decide to get tested, and suppose that the testing methods for this disease are correct 99 percent of the time. "Suppose this disease is actually quite rare, occurring randomly in the general population in only one of every 10,000 people. If your test results come back POSITIVE, what are your chances that you actually have the disease? LESS THAN 1% chance that you have the disease! "The basic reason we get such a surprising result is because the disease is so rare that the number of false positives greatly outnumbers the people who truly have the disease. "Say mass testing of the contagious virus was done to 1 million people. In that million, 100 will really have the disease, 99 will be correctly diagnosed as having it. 999,900 of the million will not have the disease, but of those about 9,999 will be false positives!" Read more about the mathematical theorem of Thomas Bayes @RobinMonotti.  

  MANY recent protests in Europe have not been covered in the American mainstream news. Here residents of Venice take off their masks and chant, "Libertà! Libertà! Libertà!" This is extremely naughty. They will be much healthier --- without their bacteria-collecting masks --  but that's beside the point.