A Carpe Diem Snapshot:
One benefit of experiencing a northern winter is discovering the value of sunshine through its lack. When the sun emerged today, then, we headed for the lovely riverside walk in Big Rapids, where I discovered this sign. "The Four Way Test" of the Rotary Club is shared here by the local club that helped build this public recreation space. It reads:
Of the things we think, say or do
Is it the TRUTH?
Is it FAIR to all concerned?
Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS?
Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?
It's a timely prompt on the eve of New Year's Eve, when we will create our resolutions for 2025.
Liturgical: The Sixth Day in the Octave of Christmas
Do not love the world or the things of the world.
If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
For all that is in the world,
sensual lust, enticement for the eyes, and a pretentious life,
is not from the Father but is from the world.
Yet the world and its enticement are passing away.
But whoever does the will of God remains forever.
Bishop Barron's Gospel reflections today.
Sanctoral: St. Felix, Rome +274
Human: It's the birthday of the man who said, "I always prefer to believe the best of everybody, it saves so much trouble." That's (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling, born in Bombay, India (1865), best known for his books Kim (1901) and The Jungle Book (1894). Kipling's father was a British artist who got an appointment to run an art school in Bombay, India, and it was there in Bombay that Kipling grew up surrounded by Hindu servants. He loved his home with its huge garden full of flowering trees. Since he was below the age of caste, he was allowed to explore the city freely and meet all kinds of people who told him ghost stories and taught him songs that would have shocked his parents had they understood the language as well as he did.
Kipling was mainly considered a poet in his own lifetime, and he was offered both a knighthood and the post of British poet laureate. He turned both offers down. In 1907, he became the first British writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The Writer's Almanac edition today.
Natural: It was on this date in 1924 that astronomer Edwin Hubble announced the discovery of other galaxies. At the time, it was thought that our Milky Way galaxy represented the entirety of the universe. Hubble was studying the Andromeda Nebula using the 100-inch Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson observatory in California. With a weaker telescope, nebulae just looked like clouds of glowing gas, but with the Hooker telescope — the most powerful telescope in the world at that time — Hubble was able to distinguish individual stars within the nebula. One of the stars in the Andromeda Nebula turned out to be a Cepheid variable: a particular type of star that pulsates and is very bright. Astronomers had figured out a decade earlier that, by observing a Cepheid variable and measuring its brightness and the length of time it takes to go from bright to dim and back again, they could calculate the star's distance from the Earth. Hubble crunched the numbers and realized that the star he was observing was 800,000 light-years away, more than eight times the distance of the farthest star in the Milky Way. It was then that he realized that the "cloud of gas" he'd been observing was really another vast galaxy that was very far away. He renamed the Andromeda Nebula the "Andromeda Galaxy," and went on to discover 23 more separate galaxies. His findings proved that, unimaginably vast though it seemed to us, our Milky Way was just one of many little islands of stars.
Italian: Dolcevita (turtleneck)
Quote: In his poem, "The Appeal," Kipling wrote:
It I have given you delight
By aught that I have done,
Let me lie quiet in that night
Which shall be yours anon:
And for the little, little, span
The dead are born in mind,
Seek not to question other than
The books I leave behind.
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