To the Editor:
There is an Over The Top Christmas lights display at the corner of Edgewood St and Wildwood Ln. You need to see this in person after dark. Plan to park your car and watch the changing display for a while. You have probably never seen a show like this one. Enjoy.
Larry Jennings
Fillmore, Ca
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To the Editor:
Martin, I appreciate your emphasis on discernment, humility, and the pairing of urgency with hope. Those are not small matters, and they are especially fitting in this Christmas season.
If this moment is indeed the beginning of a new era, then the question before us is not only what is changing, but who we are becoming as it does.
Christianity offers a remarkably simple guide for moments like this, one that precedes doctrine and argument. In the Beatitudes, Jesus does not lay out a program or a prediction. He offers a vision of the kind of people through whom renewal takes root.
Blessed are the poor in spirit—those who know the limits of power and certainty.
Blessed are the meek—those who choose restraint over dominance.
Blessed are the merciful—those who refuse to let hardness have the final word.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice—not vengeance, but right relationship.
Blessed are the peacemakers—those willing to do the patient work of repair.
These are not passive virtues. They require courage, humility, and sustained attention. They ask us to measure success not by spectacle or triumph, but by whether human dignity is protected and the vulnerable are seen.
Christmas reminds us that what is most transformative enters the world quietly. The future arrives not armored, but fragile—shaped by the care, values, and imagination that surround it. Hope, then, is not denial of difficulty. It is a responsibility: to place around what is being born the qualities we most want to see endure.
If a spectacular new era is beginning, I hope it is one guided less by force and fear, and more by mercy, humility, and the hard, faithful work of peacemaking. Those are the measures that have endured across centuries, and they remain worthy guides.
Pat Collins,
Fillmore, Ca