Update on My Fascination with Foreign Languages

In parallel with Pimsleur German, I had been doing Rosetta Stone German through a work program. I completed the 16 Pimsleur lessons and lost my motivation due to the fact that there are no German communities around but also because my pipe dream was to read Steppenwolf in German, and I thought it would be a really long, tiresome haul to get there. The other thing is, after doing the 16 lessons of German, I realized that my 40+ years old high school Spanish was still way better than my German. My overall sense of the Spanish language is still there, and I suspect that the specifics of what I learned in high school are buried in the archives of my brain somewhere. So at work, I got them to switch my German license to a Spanish license. And when they made the switch, I felt like a child opening up a new present on Christmas morning. I'm breezing through the Spanish--it's still just a refresh of high school Spanish so far. My high school teachers were expatriate Cubans, with wildly entertaining, stereotypical Latin tempers by the way. I'll have to settle for eventually reading Lorca, Neruda, and Marquez. Pimsleur emphasizes speaking/listening--which is the correct way to begin learning a new language-- and Rosetta stone seems slow in getting into reading sentences and paragraphs--but to be fair, I haven't gotten far enough into Rosetta Stone. But at a garage sale yesterday, I found a college textbook called Elementary German that looks to be just perfect for me. And they gave me the book for free--actually begged me to take it! So I may be studying German and Spanish. And by the way--I noticed a great deal of similarity between some of the Spanish and German verbs.

Internal Dialogue

You look back upon long email threads of long emails you sent to friends. You read stark, blunt, provocative things. Who wrote that? You look at the top. You wrote it. Who do you think wrote it, stupid? Does anyone else besides you write things like that? Do I really know this guy?

To Help Uganda

A priest from Uganda spoke at Mass this past Sunday--Fr. Vincent. We know him originally because our parish had paid for him to go to the seminary in Uganda years ago. This was his 2nd trip to our parish here in the U.S.A. The conditions are Uganda are such that he is astonished at how we have running water and electricity. He was with two women from a non-profit organization in Toms River that support his community in Uganda. After Mass, I had coffee and bagels with Fr. Vincent and the women from the non-profit. The casual talk and Q&A over coffee and bagels was a virtual seminar on how to help the poorest of the poor. You can help to save the world, but you have to plan it and do it the right way. In Uganda, most people live in villages. Most children do not go to school. Most children are underweight due to insufficient food. Sanitary water is uncommon. Health care is abysmal, with the biggest problem being the lack of medicine. Malaria is rampant. The single best thing you can do is to educate the girls--it has an immediate positive impact that cascades through her family and village. Besides the education itself, educated girls become resources to their families and villages, plus the education of the girls has the effect of postponing the age at which they have children, and when they do have children, they have the benefit of a mother who is educated.

Coincidentally, today Catholics commemorate the Ugandan martyrs.

The Ugandan Martyrs, by James Martin SJ, America Magazine 6/3/2014
http://www.americamagazine.org/content/all-things/ugandan-martyrs

The Blood of the Martyrs, by Robert Barron. Word on Fire. 6/3/2014
The Feast of Charles Lwanga
http://wordonfire.org/WoF-Blog/WoF-Blog/June-2014/The-Blood-of-the-Martyrs.aspx

The Incarnation

 It is precisely that God took on human form which sanctifies human life in the flesh.  More so, who are we to degrade women then--precisely their bodies--when God took the form of an embryo in a woman's body and passed through all the phases of fetal development, birth, and breast feeding?

Back When Life Was Nasty, Brutish and Short--the Old Testament

On the whole, I used to find the Old Testament dull, more difficult to understand than the New Testament, and of lesser importance, since Jesus established a new covenant between God and humankind. But in my Communion and Liberation group, one of our leaders, who happens to be a film maker, made an off-hand comment once which was that he loves reading the O.T. because, "Where else can you find such dramatic material?" That piqued my interest.

A year or two later, a woman in our group loaned me a recording of the Bible on CD, read by Hollywood actors. I listened to in my car, through the first 5 books, by which time, I had had enough. What stood out in my mind quite vividly, was the story of a women who had crept up on a man who was sleeping and hammered a tent peg through his head.  I guess that was Women's Liberation, circa 5,000 BC!

A friend is currently reading the famous volumes of, The Story of Civilization, by Will Durant, and I am trying to read along. We are currently reading the section titled, "Judea," about the ancient Hebrews. It is in the first volume, Our Oriental Heritage, published in 1935. I appreciate it because, to me, the experience of reading the O.T. has always been a long series of dense, convoluted details that are hard to follow. And I never understood the historical context. Durant gives a compact history of the Israelites in the same way that a secular historian would of any other ancient group, and the perspective is helpful. Moreover, the quality and old fashioned style Durant's writing is a breath of fresh air.

Will Durant was an atheist. He was raised Catholic, had a Jesuit education, and had studied to become a priest. With his departure from the seminary, he went on to become a philosopher and advocate of radical social change. With his writings, he became an important disseminater of culture to the masses during a time in America when it was greatly needed. I respect his independence of mind.

When people criticize the O.T., they often fail to appreciate that the oldest books were written as early as 1,000 BC events and cite events that took place as far back as five thousand BC--very primitive times indeed.

Coincidentally, I just discovered a series of twenty-four 50 minute videos on Youtube, from Open Yale Courses, called, Introduction to the Old Testament. The lectures show the ancient nature of the Hebrews and the influence of the surrounding peoples. The videos are very consistent with and a good complement to Will Durant's text.

The professor stressed that in its time, the Bible was a very progressive, counter-cultural document. In my listening to the Bible on CD, I was impressed that under the law, women were allowed to inherit property for example. In our own lifetimes, many societies, including in the very same Middle East have not allowed women to inherit property.

In light of Will Durant and the above Yale lectures, the Ten Commandments were a major advance for civilization. In its time, it was every bit as bleeding-edge, fantastic and wildly radical as the Sermon on the Mount today.

I have always appreciated that the seeds of social justice were contained in the Old Testament. The idea that each person has the same human dignity as anyone else and each is of infinite worth comes from Genesis 1:27--from the first chapter of the first book of the Bible. And later on, prophets castigated the people for, among other things, failing to take care of the orphans, the widows, and the foreigners among them. Come to think of it, even in America today, we still don't fully heed this admonition as well as we could. Perhaps humanity has not progressed as much as we like to think.

Something The Germans Would Have A Word For

The realization that you forgot what you were looking for, but you keep looking with the assumption that when you find it, you will remember what it was.

Good Friday

Today is Good Friday--the day we commemorate the death of Jesus. Would that his suffering and death propel all of us to work to alleviate the sufferings of others in the world.