Word Puzzles

Do you ever try to decipher those personalized licenses plates? I do! We even have one, 'ACE IV', our car.It stands for the first initials of my husband's name, and the Roman numeral four because he is the fourth generation where the eldest son of the eldest son has had the same name! For us, it is obvious, for others not so much. I remember one day having a stranger in a parking lot ask my husband if he player poker. Apparently he thought that the licence plate was memorializing an exceptional poker hand of 4 aces!

The other day as I was driving through the parking lot at the mall, I saw this licence plate: CLNGRL. It stumped me until I remembered that one of the common ways to come up with these plates is just to remove the vowels. So I guessed ‘CaRoLiNa GiRL’ was the message it was imparting.

It was an ‘AHA‘ moment when I learned that Hebrew does not have any letters that are designated as vowels. “When necessary, vowels are indicated by diacritic marks above or below the letter representing the syllabic onset, or by use of matres lectionis, which are consonantal letters used as vowels.” [from Wikipedia]

Can you even begin to imagine the difficulty of translating from such a language? Never mind that the writings you are try to translate are centuries old, incomplete, with parts of the sentences missing. As more and more work is done by translators, we become more familiar with the meaning of the words used at the time the Biblical stories were written down. It only stands to reason that the newer translations of the Bible using that knowledge will be closer to the original meaning.

Earlier this winter, while having a coffee, my husband and I got into a conversation with a stranger. One thing led to another as they so often do and before long she was saying, “These new bibles change the words that are in the King James Bible and they shouldn’t be allowed to do it. IT IS JUST WRONG!” Deciding that it was neither the time or the place to embark on some basic biblical literacy education, we said good-bye and left. However I was left wondering if she had ever tried to translate middle English from the 1300’s into today’s English or even to decipher licence plates.

What difference is there is saying, as my mother used to, that someone is "the be all and the end all' or the writer of Revelation saying Jesus is 'the Alpha and the Omega'? They're both saying essentially the same thing in the vernacular, 2000+ years apart. While the old translation of the King James bible is familiar, comforting and yes, poetic, the newer translations offer us a closer understanding of what the original writers were saying to their audience.

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"The Sadness of Geography"

“Do you understand the sadness of geography?” I have to admit that when I first read this quote by Michael Ondaatje, a Sri Lankan-born Canadian writer, my immediate response was ‘What sadness?’ Geography is all about climate, geology, topography, the names of lakes, rivers, mountains and seas, isn’t it? It is about things, about memory work. It is not about emotions! At least no geography course I ever took was. But then I started to think….. What are those things that divide us? What are the causes of people being unhappy, persecuted, denied their basic human rights and freedoms, being ostracized in society? Those causes are the things that make people different; things like the colour of their skin, their customs and religion, how they dress, the language they speak. These things for the most part are decided not by who they really are, but by the geography of where they are born. And they persist ‘unto the fourth and fifth generations’ no ...

Ash Wednesday Musings, 2018

‘By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.’ Genesis 3:19 Most scholars agree that the texts found in Genesis began to be written down sometime in the 10th century BCE and were based on oral and written traditions. It is this verse that is referenced in the Book of Alternative Services during the Ash Wednesday service, ‘Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return’. A few years ago now we attended an Ash Wednesday Service where the words had morphed to ‘Remember that you are stardust and to stardust you shall return’ moving into the cosmology of the 21st century, connecting our bodies with the whole universe. These express the beliefs of a different world view. They both call us to remember that life on this earth is impermanent and fleeting. They call us to pause and to ponder our lives. Which one resonates with you doesn’t matter. What does matter is that...

"Nudgement"

As we progress through the season of Lent, we are urged by the lectionary aa well as by the words spoken from the front of the churches to consider how we live and what we do with our lives. Many of us take up a new spiritual practise perhaps denying ourselves something we enjoy or adding something to our daily routine that we think will benefit our spiritual growth in the long run. What we can seen to be doing is in fact judging our lives and then trying to make them better by doing ‘A’, ‘B’, or ‘C’. Quite a while ago I received a note from one of the readers of this blog and it has stayed with me over the time since it landed in my inbox. ‘I just coined the term "nudgement" for myself this morning. I was thinking of how EFM interprets "judgement" as something that surprises you or that you weren't expecting, which is a gentler notion of "judgement" than some of us grew up with, something that is enough out of the ordinary to urge us ou...

There's Nothing New Under the Sun

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Moments of Happiness

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An apple a day...

I’m sure we all have heard the old adage “An apple a day keeps the doctor away”. The original phrase ‘‘Eat an apple on going to bed, and you’ll keep the doctor from earning his bread” had its first recorded use in the 1860, but the concept is quite old going back to Roman and Anglo-Saxon times. I know I heard it many times during my growing up years. And I must admit that in late years I have tended to relegate apples to an occasional rather than a daily fruit. That, however, is about to change! The following landed in my inbox not long ago and made me rethink my relationship to the lowly apple. Any one of these claims is certainly a reason to add apples back into my daily diet. “Did you know that –according to Medical News Today, which ranks apples as the Number One healthiest food based on research studies– apples can potentially: * Have the same effect as statins in preventing vascular deaths… * Improve neurological health… * Prevent dementia… * Reduce risk of st...

Great Joy

“Repeat the sounding joy, repeat the spending joy Repeat, repeat, the sounding joy” I was thinking this week of that well-loved carol, “Joy to the World” and in particular the refrain at the end of the verse 2 where nature is called upon to ‘repeat the sounding joy’. I think that joy is missing in a large part from my Christmas preparations. As Christas Day draws ever nearer, the list of things that ‘need’ to be done grows longer instead of shorter. Tempers are short as we try to fit too many things into too short a time, worried that we won’t get it all done. The Christmas cards might not be delivered by the post office in a timely manner, especially with the rotating postal strikes that have been ongoing all fall! Did I choose the right Christmas gift for everyone? Did I spend too much on that gift … or maybe not enough? Will everything be perfect on Christmas Day? Then I have the memory of my childhood when my mother would wash the kitchen floor on Chris...

Look After Yourself!

“Look after yourself!” Oh those words, so well meant and heard so often this past summer! Words that I have used often in the past myself. They are well meant words, said by those who are concerned and want to show that concern. I know that! But after hearing them said so often, in so many difference voices over the last 8 months, I find myself reacting differently on hearing them. At first I was stunned, then dismayed by my reaction. I felt ungrateful. What was wrong with me? Why was I beginning to resent hearing these words? But then I took some time to think about just why I was feeling the way I did, and also why, if this was such good advice, why did no one ever take it - or so it seemed. To me, these words “Look after yourself’ deny the basic principle not only in Christianity but all the major world religions. Christians call it the Golden Rule - to do unto others what you would have them do to you, or ‘To love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all y...

A Choice...

I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth. - Genesis 9:11 If you were in church on the first Sunday of Lent this year, you probably heard this read from the lectern and maybe even preached on. This covenant between God and God’s people was so important to the writers of the Old Testament that there are actually two stories of the flood both intertwined in Genesis 9. Martin Luther King Jr. took this story and updated it to his time, the 1960s, a time of racial unrest in America. “ It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence” He saw that the threat of violence had become overwhelming. If anyone tried to meet violence with more violence, they would in all likelihood be killed. And so the choice for violence would lead to nonexistence while the choice of nonviolence had a greater cha...

Dark with Mystery

‘There is no science in this world like physics. Nothing comes close to the precision with which physics enables you to understand the world around you. It's the laws of physics that allow us to say exactly what time the sun is going to rise. What time the eclipse is going to begin. What time the eclipse is going to end.’ Neil deGrasse Tyson - an American astrophysicist , author, and science communicator I drove out of the parking lot in the mysteriously reduced sunlight during the recent solar eclipse. I knew why everything was looking different, why the light was muted, having that eerie glow. Yet still it bothered me. When we reached home and turned on the television to watch what was happening elsewhere, the full majesty and mystery of this natural phenomenon became clear. I can well understand why there are people who travel great distances each time a total eclipse cones around, just to experience it again and again. The pictures of this ev...

NUDGINGS: a journey into the unknown

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