Here's 1 for Ernie...

The following is the Vatican-provided text of the Holy Father's message for the 49th World Communications Day.

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Communicating the Family: A Privileged Place of Encounter with the Gift of Love

The family is a subject of profound reflection by the Church and of a process involving two Synods: the recent extraordinary assembly and the ordinary assembly scheduled for next October. So I thought it appropriate that the theme for the next World Communications Day should have the family as its point of reference. After all, it is in the context of the family that we first learn how to communicate. Focusing on this context can help to make our communication more authentic and humane, while helping us to view the family in a new perspective.

We can draw inspiration from the Gospel passage which relates the visit of Mary to Elizabeth (Lk 1:39-56). "When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the infant leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit cried out in a loud voice and said, ‘Most blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb’." (vv. 41-42)

This episode first shows us how communication is a dialogue intertwined with the language of the body. The first response to Mary’s greeting is given by the child, who leaps for joy in the womb of Elizabeth. Joy at meeting others, which is something we learn even before being born, is, in one sense, the archetype and symbol of every other form of communication. The womb which hosts us is the first "school" of communication, a place of listening and physical contact where we begin to familiarize ourselves with the outside world within a protected environment, with the reassuring sound of the mother’s heartbeat. This encounter between two persons, so intimately related while still distinct from each other, an encounter so full of promise, is our first experience of communication. It is an experience which we all share, since each of us was born of a mother.

Even after we have come into the world, in some sense we are still in a "womb", which is the family. A womb made up of various interrelated persons: the family is "where we learn to live with others despite our differences" (Evangelii Gaudium, 66). Notwithstanding the differences of gender and age between them, family members accept one another because there is a bond between them. The wider the range of these relationships and the greater the differences of age, the richer will be our living environment. It is this bond which is at the root of language, which in turn strengthens the bond. We do not create our language; we can use it because we have received it. It is in the family that we learn to speak our "mother tongue", the language of those who have gone before us. (cf. 2 Macc 7:25,27). In the family we realize that others have preceded us, they made it possible for us to exist and in our turn to generate life and to do something good and beautiful. We can give because we have received. This virtuous circle is at the heart of the family’s ability to communicate among its members and with others. More generally, it is the model for all communication.

In a world where people often curse, use foul language, speak badly of others, sow discord and poison our human environment by gossip, the family can teach us to understand communication as a blessing. In situations apparently dominated by hatred and violence, where families are separated by stone walls or the no less impenetrable walls of prejudice and resentment, where there seem to be good reasons for saying "enough is enough", it is only by blessing rather than cursing, by visiting rather than repelling, and by accepting rather than fighting, that we can break the spiral of evil, show that goodness is always possible, and educate our children to fellowship.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMX...>

Queens's final album Made In Heaven, 1995

Margaret Atwood, "An Attempted Solution For Chess Problems"

My younger sister at the chessboard
ponders her next move
the arrangement of her empire
(crosslegged on the floor)

while below her in the cellar
the embroidered costumes, taken
from her mother's storage trunks
and lined against the walls
lose their stiff directions in
the instant that she hesitates
above the armies

The shadows of the chessmen
stretch, fall across her: she
is obsessed by history;
each wooden totem rises
like the cairn of an event

(but)

Outside the windows of this room
the land unrolls without landmark
a meshing of green on green, the inner
membrane of the gaping moment
opening around the sun
that is a burnt hole in the sky

The house recoils
from the brightened vacancy
of leaves, into itself: the cellar
darkness looming with archaic
silver clocks, brocaded chairs, the fading echoes
of a hunting horn.

The white king moves,
by memories and procedures
and corners
no final ending but
a stalemate
forcing her universe to his
geographies: the choice imposes
vestiges of black and white
ruled squares on the green landscape

and her failed solution
has planted the straight rows
of an armoured wood patrolled by wooden
kings and queens
hunting the mechanical unicorn
under a coin-round sun

Her step on the stairs
sounds through the concrete mazes