January’s kitchen table clutter • Part of an attempt to read fewer things online. I’ve been receiving Comment in the mail for years, but I rarely read from the print copies, which just get stashed in a closet with all my other good intentions 🤓
Life is complicated. It is simplifying but dangerous to have one overriding concern that makes others unimportant—rage or passion or the kind of religious exultation that seeks or inflicts martyrdom. . . . Warfare comes as a great relief to those who prefer thinking about one thing at a time.
~ Mary Catherine Bateson ~
Oh Stink/Screw the Dealer — some close scores this year!
The time for excuses is over • Gearing up for a very new year. There are a lot of dumb phone options out there — sorry: “dumb phone” options 🤓. Rather than getting stuck in the land of indecision, I pulled the trigger on the simplest option.
Signs and symptoms of a Euchre deck
Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church, Bethlehem, West Bank (Source)
Frederick Buechner:
As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me. Just as Jesus appeared at his birth as a helpless child that the world was free to care for or destroy, so now he appears in his resurrection as the pauper, the prisoner, the stranger: appears in every form of human need that the world is free to serve or to ignore.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer:
If only during this time bitterness and envy have not corroded the heart; that we come to see matters great and small, happiness and misfortune, strength and weakness with new eyes; that our sense for greatness, humanness, justice, and mercy has grown clearer, freer, more incorruptible; that we learn, indeed, that personal suffering is a more useful key, a more fruitful principle than personal happiness for exploring the meaning of the world in contemplation and action. But this perspective from below must not lead us to become advocates for those who are perpetually dissatisfied. Rather, out of a higher satisfaction, which in its essence is grounded beyond what is below and above, we do justice to life in all its dimensions and in this way affirm it.
Shear coastal madness
Bacon-wrapped dates — also known as, just another excuse to eat bacon
But should you be tempted to purchase in advance a ticket-to-ride on Musk’s escapist enterprise, you might want to consider these facts first. Mars’s atmosphere has next to no oxygen, the planet’s average temperature is -81 degrees Fahrenheit, and its distance from Earth is 133 million miles. Best not to get locked out of your doomsday bunker there, nor expect a frontier scout or an underpaid but dedicated EMT to arrive from afar to save your day.