October 30

The SAN Script Thursday, October 30

Feast of All Saints

Our spiritual heroes

“Saints”—spiritual heroes of character and courage—are very elusive figures and not always all too comfortable ones either. They carry with them the ideals of ages often quite remote from our own, even, in some cases, psychologically suspect now. They seem to uphold a standard of perfection either unattainable to most or, at least in this day and age, undesirable to many. Their lives are often overwritten, their struggles underestimated, and their natural impulses underrated. They have become a rather quaint anachronism of an earlier church full of simpler people far more unsophisticated, we think, than ourselves and whom we think ought to be quietly ignored in these more enlightened times. I disagree.

We could use a saint or two, perhaps, to raise our sights again to the heights of human possibility and the depths of human soul. It might not even hurt to pass one or two of them on to children who are otherwise left with little to choose from as personal idols than what Hollywood, TV, and the music industry have already given them, of course.

I knew a saint once: He was a young man with an old grandmother, a sick mother and two brothers in wheelchairs as a result of a genetically inherited illness. He stayed home, unmarried and unpromoted all his life, to care for each of them, all the way to the grave. His inspiration didn’t come from rock stars of American glitterati. It came from saints, the heroes of the daily.

—from Seeing with Our Souls
by Joan Chittister (Sheed & Ward)

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St. Anthony Today

Fun2Run today! Juniors running 3 Km today starting with a bus ride to Lisgar ay 9:15 am today return after 12:30

Progress reports go home today

Green Club meeting in Geraldine’s room – 3:00PM

For a Better Brain, Learn Another Language

From Atlantic Mobile

lead

 

There’s a certain sinking feeling one gets when thinking of the perfect thing to say just a moment too late. Perhaps a witty parting word could have made all the difference. There is no English word to express this feeling, but the French have the term l’esprit de l’escalier—translated, “stairwell wit”—for this very phenomenon.

Nor is there an English word to describe the binge eating that follows an emotional blow, but the Germans have kummerspeck—“grief-bacon”—to do just that. If we had the Swedish word lagom—which means something is just right—the English explanation of Goldilocks’ perfectly temperate soup could have been a lot more succinct. Or the term koi no yokan, a poetic Japanese turn of phrase that expresses the feeling of knowing that you will soon fall in love with the person you have just met. It’s not love at first sight so much as an understanding that love is inevitable. Keats and Byron could have really used a word like that.

There are many words that English speakers don’t have. Sometimes Anglophones take from other languages, but often, we have to explain our way around a specific feeling or emotion that doesn’t have its own word, never quite touching on it exactly.

“The reason why we borrow words like savoir faire from French is because it’s not part of the culture [in the United States] and therefore that word did not evolve as part of our language,” says George Lakoff, a professor of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley.

“Speaking different languages means you get different frames, different metaphors, and also you’re learning the culture of the language so you get not only different words, but different types of words,” Lakoff told me.

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Posted October 30, 2014 by mcguirp in category SAN Today

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