• Got my Moderna booster shot today yesterday. That’s also when I started writing this post before I promptly fell asleep until — yikes — an hour ago.
So here’s my advice: 1) Get your booster shot. And, 2) Allow some time afterward before you plan to think coherently/stay awake long enough to write anything.
Oh, and happy day after the winter solstice.
• I’m wrapping up my first Christmas at the Big Box in my new department(s), during which I learned about a recurring question one gets a lot over in electrical in the weeks following Thanksgiving. A customer, looking a bit distressed, approaches carrying one of those little gray three-prong to two-prong outlet adapters. “I need this,” they say, “but with prongs on both sides.”
Ah. They’ve just finished hanging their Christmas lights. Backwards. And they only realized their mistake after hours of work when they went to plug those lights in and, instead of oohing and ahhhing at twinkling lights, they find the female end of the string nearest the outlet.
That’s hugely frustrating. No one wants to have to take down all the lights they just put up, turn them around, and then put them back up all over again. And the other solution at this point — buying a 100-foot extension cord to connect the far end all the way back to the outlet — doesn’t seem much better.
So I usually start by saying, “I’m so sorry. That’s frustrating. Happens to the best of us” etc. And I’ll admit that a double-male adapter can seem like it would offer an elegant and simple solution to their problem before gently helping them realize why the existence or use of such a device would also be a Very Bad Idea. Nine times out of 10, you can watch it dawn on them without having to explain it in detail before sympathetically helping them find an extension cord of the appropriate length.
But that 10th customer just gets angry. “Fine, then!” they say, “I’ll just get it on Amazon!” Or, “I’ll just go to [the other large chain of Big Box home improvement stores]!” And then they storm out.
In nine years at the Big Box, I’ve heard dozens of customers angrily say “I’ll just go to [the other large chain of Big Box home improvement stores]!” and have yet to hear this as bad news. Happily, in this case, I can be sure that none of our competitors will be able to supply them with the means to burn their house down and/or electrocute themselves either.
• Rmj of Adventus is appropriately unimpressed with Andy Stanley’s feckless listicle on “Five Reasons People Leave the Church.”
I’ll just point out that Stanley is the mega-church pastor who baptized and discipled raving Neo-Confederate loon Marjorie Taylor Greene. And that maybe one very large Reasons People Leave the Church is because the church, as Stanley imagines it, is the tree that bears such rotten fruit and proudly boasts of having done so.
• Daniel N. Gullotta and Thomas Lecaque discuss “The Great QAnon Disappointment” in the context of the many failed prophecies and great disappointments of earlier apocalyptic religious movements. Good stuff, although it’s a minor disappointment at this time of year to read about when prophecies fail without any mention of When Prophecy Fails, the landmark study of Great Disappointments centered on the Christmas, 1955, non-appearance of our extraterrestrial saviors.
• Chris Gehrz writes about my favorite Christmas movie, It’s a Wonderful Life. Gehrz makes a case that it’s not really so much a Christmas movie as an Advent movie. That’s a good point, even if it’s a bit high-church for our neighbors over on Patheos’ evangelical channel.
Gehrz also argues that IAWL is a celebration of American civil religion. I’d put that differently. I think it’s Capra’s attempt at the Great American Novel. Set aside the holiday trappings and the folk religion and what we have here is the story of Bedford Falls vs. Potterville. We recognize that story. We know it well. That’s why we take such partial satisfaction from the partial victory Bedford Falls manages at the end of the story, when every last person in town comes together and, therefore, just barely manages to stave off Old Man Potter’s utter triumph. For now.
This is also why I have to agree with something else Gehrz (gently) argues: We need a bit more Magnificat in our Advent.
• Speaking of holiday favorites, here’s Dar Williams’ “The Christians and the Pagans.” This song is 25 years old now, and it doesn’t seem like we’re getting a whole lot closer to the hope for a love-based pluralism it describes. So I’ll probably keep posting this song here around Solstice every year until this lovely little story seems less exceptional.
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