Caritas has launched its "Zero Poverty Act Now" campaign. This campaign, among other things, is designed to collect a million signatures on a petition that will, under the new Lisbon Treaty, make it possible to formulate a citizen's initiative inviting the Commission to submit appropriate legislative proposals to the European Parliament. Go democracy! :o)

Act now - go to http://www.zeropoverty.org/en/petition and sign that petition - especially if you are an EU national. While there, you might want to take some time to look at a few other suggested actions you can take to help make poverty history. And always remember: anyone who thinks they're too small to make a difference has never been to bed with a mosquito!

Make a Smilebox greeting

Advent Is...

Finally found a way to log back in to good ol' Eurotrash (it's been a while!), so thought I'd add a short post, to try and get myself kick-started.

Heard this in church today (thank you, Mark Bolton) and found it helpful:

There's a time to get ready by focusing on your own sinfulness and wrongdoing, a time for personal transformation and following Christ to the cross. That's Lent. There's a time to get ready by rejoicing that our God is not far away and unfamiliar with the struggles of human life, that Christ is here right now among His followers, that God has already begun to bring in the Kingdom, and that Christ will come again to make it clear who really runs the place. That's Advent. "Lo, I am with you, even unto the end of the age", says Jesus.

Looking for other texts about the meaning of Advent this evening, I came across another blog entry entitled "Advent is..." I find that it kind of develops the idea a bit further, so I thought I would copy and paste it here.

Advent Is...

Let me set this up for you...

Yesterday (Sunday) was the first Sunday of Advent. Our liturgist had read the first scripture for the day, and about half of the second one. She closed her Bible and then said "oops, I didn't finish that one. Hold on while I get back to it." or something to that effect. Then she said that we could all enjoy that "pregnant pause" while pondering the first part of the scripture lesson.

I love that phrase "pregnant pause"... it's been rolling around in my head all day. I thought about it while my pastor and I, with other friends, talked about the season of Advent and what that means. I am up out of bed at nearly half past twelve because that phrase was chewing at my brain.

Pregnant Pause may be the tidiest summation of advent that we have. It's a little space of time in our lives where we anxiously await the coming of something... a something that is the Best Sort Of Surprise (I feel very A.A. Milne in typing that) because you know that it's coming, and you're excited about it anyway. There are lots of discussions right now, I'm sure, about Advent, and it's meaning. Whether this should be a time of spare, austere, Lenten-style preparation, or a frenetic Black Friday-style preparation. I feel like they're two very different sorts... but maybe neither one is really what Advent is about. When Christ came to us in the simplest, smallest form of hope that we could readily grasp and digest and understand, there was a gift that we didn't anticipate, maybe. A gift of knowing how to prepare for that type of hope. To me, Advent is a lot like waiting for a baby... any baby. It's a time to reflect on all the wonderful things you want the world to be for new little person. A time to take even just a few small steps towards realizing that dream... a little extra kindness. A tiny bit of charity. Some small change, an extra smile. As a mother, I think of the light of Advent the same way I remember the soft, warm light in the delivery room. It's dim, but it's enough to see by. It's not stark, or scary, or threatening. It isn't the blinding light of Easter morning at the tomb... it's the same gentle color as candleglow and rosy sunsets. It's winter firelight, and the welcoming light of home through the window. When a baby is coming, there's lots to do, but it's the kind of work most people seem to enjoy. Dreaming, planning, preparing, hoping. Giving, sharing, opening, making room for someone. You weed out things you don't need cluttering up your space anymore... things you don't use, things that wouldn't be safe or appropriate for a baby, things that are reminders of your life BEFORE you were preparing for a baby. You give it away, recycle it, throw it out. You start to take stock of what you have, and what you'll need, and what you don't want to carry around anymore. And it's a good thing.... because the funny thing about a baby... it's such a tiny package, but as most modern-day parents will tell you, it comes with so much STUFF! Pretty soon, if you let it (or sometimes, in spite of yourself) there's baby-stuff everywhere. And a very little person who isn't ready to take care of themselves not only comes with lots of STUFF... it comes with a whole new set of priorities and responsibilities that you couldn't have imagined in your wildest dreams. They say "a baby changes everything." They are not kidding. Fully grown, 'responsible' adults will allow their entire lives to be reordered by a baby.

Our Awesome God must have known something in offering the world that tiny baby so long ago... what in the world but a baby could embody hope so tidily, awaken our desire to nurture and protect so readily, and cause us to embrace a life-altering course so willingly? Nothing I can think of. A baby is the physical manifestation of every biological and spiritual urge to leave something of ourselves in the world. A baby, even a very important baby, needs to be held, nourished, nurtured and loved or it will not survive, or grow. A baby makes normally rational, orderly, organized people do very irrational, disorganized things. The God who created us and nurtured us; then came to us in the most humble and helpless form we could understand, had hope and faith in us, that we would take that baby into our lives. Every year at Advent, we prepare again to accept that gift. We make a place. In a world of fast-paced and furious events, we can take advantage of that pregnant pause. I believe that if we let it, (or maybe in spite of ourselves) that tiny baby could enter the place we've made, and maybe overtake our priorities and fill our lives with amazing, beautiful baby stuff. Yes, a baby changes everything.

And one last connection, from a more skeptical perspective (sort of) - this one from Thomas Pyncheon's Gravity's Rainbow, describing an Advent evensong service during the War. A short excerpt...

"Near her battery one night, driving somewhere in Kent, Roger and Jessica came upon a church, a hummock in the dark upland, lamplit, growing out of the earth. It was Sunday evening, and shortly before vespers. Men in greatcoats, in oilskins, in dark berets they slipped off at the entrance, American fliers in leather lined with sheep's wool, a few women in clinking boots and wide-shouldered swagger coats, but no children, not a child in sight, just grownups, trudging in from their bomber fields, balloon-bivouacs, pillboxes over the beach, through the Norman doorway shaggy with wintering vines...

...the Empire has no place for dreams and it's Adults Only in here tonight, here in this refuge with the lamps burning deep, in pre-Cambrian exhalation, savory as food cooking, heavy as soot. And 60 miles up the rockets hanging the measureless instant over the black North Sea berfore the fall, ever faster, to orange heat, Christmas star, in helpless plunge to earth. Lower in the sky the flying bombs are out too, roaring like the Adversary, seeking whom they may devour. It's a long walk home tonight. Listen to this mock-angel singing, let your communion be at least in listening, even if they are not spokesmen for your exact hopes, your exact, darkest terror, listen. There must have been evensong here long before the news of Christ. Surely as long as there have been nights bad as this one -- something to raise the possibility of another night that could actually, with love and cockcrows, light the path home, banish the Adversary, destroy the boundaries between our lands, our bodies, our stories, all false, about who we are: for the one night, leaving only the clear way home and the memory of the infant you saw, almost too frail, there's too much shit in these streets, camels and other beasts stir heavily outside, each hoof a chance to wipe him out, make him only another Messiah, and sure somebody's around already taking bets on that one, while here in this town the Jewish collaborators are selling useful gossip to Imperial Intelligence, and the local hookers are keeping the foreskinned invaders happy, charging whatever the traffic will bear, just like the innkeepers who're naturally delighted with this registration thing, and up in the capital they're wondering should they, maybe, give everybody a number, yeah, something to help SPQR Record-keeping...and Herod or Hitler, (the chaplains out in the Bulge are manly, haggard, hard drinkers), what kind of a world is it...for a baby to come in tippin' those Toledos at 7 pounds 8 ounces thinkin' he's going to redeem it, why, he oughta have his head examined....

But on the way home tonight, you wish you'd picked him up, held him a bit. Just held him, very close to your heart, his cheek by the hollow of your shoulder, full of sleep. As if it were you who could, somehow, save him. For the moment not caring who you're supposed to be registered as. For the moment anyway, no longer who the Caesars say you are...

So this pickup group, thexse exiles and horny kids, sullen civilians called up in their middle age, men fattening despite their hunger, flatulent because of it, pre-ulcerous, runny-nosed, red-eyed, sore-throated, piss-swollen men suffering from acuter lower backs and all-day hangovers, wishing death on officers they truly hate, men you have seen on foot and smileless in the cities but forgot, men who don't remember you either, knowing they ought to be grabbing a little sleep, not out here performing for strangters, give you this evensong, climaxing now with its rising fragment of some ancient scale, vices overlapping three- and fourfold, up echoing, filling the entire hollow of the church -- no counterfeit baby, no announcement of the Kingdom, not even a try at lighting or warming this terrible night, only, damn us, our scruffy obligatory little cry, our maximum reach outward -- Praise be to God! -- for you to take back to your war address, your war-identity, across the snow's footprints and tire tracks finally to the path you must create by yourself, alone in the dark. Whether you want it or not, whatever seas you have crossed, the way home..."

This word just in from Chris Bliss:

A quick note, in case you forwarded this link to others: The server shut down the site yesterday due to the traffic, but it will be back up and running within a few hours today. Please pass that word on to anyone you may have sent to view the video, as I've been getting a lot of these emails about viewing problems in the last 24 hours. More info later. I've just been swamped with all kinds of requests.
Thanks,
Chris

So hang in there and try back again later. Believe me, it will be worth the wait!

I had two good cries today. The first was when I happened to catch the last half hour of Mr Smith Goes To Washington on the TV at lunchtime. Gets me every time.

The second was when my friend Arthur sent me a link to - of all things - an amazing juggling performance by a comedian named Chris Bliss. You might not believe that juggling is the type of activity that can be raised to a high art, but I assure you it can. The grace and ease and musicality of this performance just cut me right open and by the end of it the tears were streaming down my cheeks.

I had a friend years ago in Atlanta, a guy who'd had a really rough time of things - particularly where women were concerned. He was about as guarded as it was possible to get. But he told me once he used to love to watch the pairs figure skating championships on TV because the seemingly effortless symbiosis of the male and female skaters in their routines was the perfect embodiment of this dream he still cherished of the possibility of a graceful, effortless and beautiful pairing between himself and a woman. I think it was the fact that the best skaters made it look so easy that brought him to tears every time he watched.

It makes me think, also, of the time I once had the great pleasure of attending a concert of the New York Philharmonic when the soloist was Alicia de la Rocha. I'll never fully understand what happened there, either, but there was something about her touch on the piano - it wasn't even a question of tone, but more the sound produced by how she touched the keys - that was unbearably beautiful; I started to cry literally after the first three notes...

Bliss truly is pure poetry in motion. What he does seems so impossibly complex, you can't believe it's even possible - and yet he makes it look so completely easy and natural that you're simply disarmed as a viewer. The guards drop and you just let it in. You won't be the same after.

If you'd like to see the performance, just click on the link to the right. If you'd like to comment on what you've seen afterwards, please feel free to come back to this blog and let me know what happened to you as you watched it.

Enjoy.

For those of you who know her, here's a story about my daughter, Licia (age 5 1/2) .

Licia has had a bit of a cold lately - nothing too serious, but a good bit of that nasty post-nasal drip, which has meant that she had a few rough nights where her sleep was interrupted by occasional coughing (now thankfully finished).

But the other night, she awoke a few times and called to me (our rooms are across from one another), needing a little bit of attention and reassurance that she would be able to go back to sleep.

The third time she awoke was around 3:15 in the morning. I heard her cough once or twice , but decided to wait and see if she would go back to sleep on her own or call out to me. Instead, she got up out of bed and came creeping into my room.

"Mom!" she whispered.

"Can't sleep?" I asked.

"No! I keep coughin' like a frog!" she answered.

I pulled my sleepy self out of bed and started guiding her gently back toward her room.

"Don't worry," I said. "You'll be able to go back to sleep. You'll see..."

"But, Mom," she insisted. "I just keep coughing like a frog! I'll never get back to sleep."

"Licia-lou," I answered firmly. "You've just been sleeping for five full hours without a single cough. You're gonna be fine. Just get back in bed. You'll be asleep before you know it."

"But, Mom. I keep telling you. I just keep coughing like a frog."

By this time I had gotten her back into her bed and she had pulled her covers up around her little shoulders and settled into the position she always assumes before falling alseep. I could see she wasn't going to be long for this world.

As I gently rubbed her back, I couldn't resist taunting her ever so slightly.

"By the way, Licia,"I said. "Frogs don't cough."

And from just this side of Orpheus' embrace, she nonetheless managed to shoot back,

"This one does."