Greetings. Hope all goes well.
I know we all have favorite sayings that we use in our speech when we are talking with our friends. But have you ever wondered where these sayings come from.
Many of them come from sayings of famous people which have filtered through time down to today. Some may have changed but many have kept their meaning.
One such saying which some thought came from Mark Twain, but In all reality this saying comes from a former student of Sigmund Freud by the name of Theodor Veik (1965) who was a noted Austrian psychoanalyst who wrote, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
But Mark Twain did pen a very similar saying in his work, “THE GOLDEN AGE: A TALE OF TO-DAY.” (1874) Twain’s saying goes “History does not repeat itself.”
Have you ever played that party game Telephone? Someone whispers something into the ear of the person sitting next to them. That person then whispered it the to person next to them and so on. When it gets back to the person who first whispered the saying, then speak it out loud, first what they heard, then the original saying. It is very interesting to hear how different what the last person heard and what the first person actually said.
The history of our Church is very much like this. Down through the ages, we have stories about our “heroes”. And through the ages, much may have been added to the original story to make this person “bigger than life”, as we do with all our heroes.
In the long run, the actual truth of the story is not the point. The point of these stories is to edify and inspire those who are hearing them.
The TRUTH comes to us in many variations of the original story. But remember, the story is only the means of transmitting the truth, even though in itself it is not the truth.
Let us begin to look for the truth which may be in the story and not the just the box it came in.
Peace and All Good,
Fr. Vinnie, osf and the
Bros and Srs of the
Franciscan House of Prayer.