Words

Tonight The Carvinator and I were at a meeting talking about this book. There is a line in the second chapter that says something about (majorly paraphrasing here) a word being the same word but having a different meaning depending on your total life experiences. Often I have given thought to literary connotations, but not in the context of a person's total life expereince coloring his/her view of a word.

The Carvinator gave an example of the word death: Death has considerably different connotations between a person of faith (any faith, really) and a secularist. He was visiting with his cousin's grandmother, who was dying of a horrible cancerous ordeal, and asked her how she could deal with it, with the impending sureity of her death. She said that she was actually closer to God at this time in her life than she ever had been, and at her funeral, instead of feeling sad, The Carvinator was actually relieved because she could finally rest in her eternal peace. Death, to her, had a completely different meaning from what anyone else has in mind who has not gone through that experience.

That's all I really want to say about that, though there's a lot more I might come up with--I love thinking about words!

However, Giussani is worth taking a look at if you're interested in that sort of thing. His books and life have really made an impact here at the N. O. household. As a young priest, Luigi Giussani was troubled by Catholicism's inability to effectively deal with secularism or laicism. In 1954 he began to develop a vision of faith rooted in experience. His ideas resonated with students and led to the birth of the Gioventù Studentesca (Student Youth) movement. Known today as Communion and Liberation, the movement is flourishing in Italy and around the world, including Canada, the United States, Brazil, Uganda, and Britain. The Journey to Truth Is an Experience is the first English translation of Il Cammino al vero è un'esperienza, Giussani's early works on the Christian experience, written from 1959-64. It begins with a guide on how to live the Christian life within the Student Youth community, followed by a call to base one's relationship with Christ on the example set by the apostles and other figures in the New Testament. Giussani concludes by outlining the movement's mission and the possibility for community, charity, and communion in the Christian life.