The word has multiple meanings—in anatomy, geophysics—as well as figurative and literal meanings in literature. One meaning is speech—a “golden tongue,” a “diabolical tongue.” And it means language identity, as in the Greek tongue, the English tongue. And in The Acts of the Apostles: Tongues as of fire, “as of” signifying like, what we call a simile, a comparison—tongues (languages) like fire. Today [...]
Earlier this week I was in a small group from my church in a discussion of the Ascension. The focus of the meeting was a podcast in which someone said that the meaning of this great event was that for the first time humanity had “access” to God; also for the first time humanity and divinity [...]
Parable: There was a dining table where two men sat facing each other. One of them was eating his dinner. The other man watched with hunger in his eyes. The first man finished his dinner and looked at the second man’s hunger and said, “I don’t understand your problem—I’m not hungry.” Paradigms: The first man [...]
Most apparently non-addicted people define addiction in some way they can intellectually handle, and then file and dismiss it, bringing it out only to express pity or contempt for some apparently addicted person. Disgust covers the faces of those who must drive through homeless encampments, where sidewalks are littered by hypodermic needles. Shock or sorrow covers [...]
I am in a text group (if there’s such a term) with some distant relatives. There are five of us, none of us is younger than 74 or 75, and the eldest is 85. At 80, I think I’m in the middle. We are scattered from Florida to Georgia to Tennessee to Pennsylvania—and sometimes South Carolina [...]
On some Sundays, I sit at Mass and look around at all the people whom I’ve seen for years, most of whom I know only by sight and not by name. I’ve watched them grow up. Some of them were once children here, annoying people by making noise or by running up and down the side [...]
Back in the 1980s, I was living in New Orleans in one side of a double shotgun on Dante Street. The other side was occupied by Don, a psychiatrist who played lovely classical piano when he was depressed. Don and I went out a few times, but nothing serious ever happened between us, not even a [...]
Yesterday I was in the checkout line at Publix behind an elderly lady in a scooter. An employee was helping her out by placing her groceries on the counter, but the process was very slow, and made even slower by the chatty exchanges between the lady and the checker or the helping employee. She looked behind [...]
I remember Herman Wouk’s This is My God, a marvelous testimonial work on his Jewish faith, written sometime in the fifties. Describing a young girl’s protest against conformity, he says he had to smile as he listened and observed the slight folds in her sweater placed so correctly, the sleeves pushed up so correctly just below her elbows, [...]
A friend’s husband is being fitted with a prosthetic leg, his natural one lost to a lifelong scourge of Diabetes. Another is being fitted for a denture for all her upper teeth, scheduled for extraction when the denture is ready. It will be put in place while she is under anesthetic for the multiple extractions. It’s [...]
