Hello. Well here we are at the end of another week. “Time flies when you are having fun.” Oh are we having fun????
We all have grown up on stories. As I have said before, stories were the way people learned from the earliest of times. Stories are so much easier to remember than pure facts. Most of the early stories we have heard do have a moral to it to teach the hearer.
We have a great number of stories by the German Brothers Grimm. Somewhere in this mess of books I have a copy of their stories. They are much different from the ones we read to our children.
Take for example the story of Cinderella. Her real name was Ella, but because she was made to sleep by the fireplace, she was called “Cinder” Ella because of the cinders that found themselves on her hands, face and clothes.
Her stepmother and her stepsisters always seemed to take place before her. But as we read the story we encounter her Godmother, and the magic that was worked. In the end Ella did win the prince’s heart. The story does not end there. The prince had iron shoes made and returned to the Stepmother’s house, and made the stepmother and her and daughters ware them after they were heated red hot and were made to dance until they dropped dead. Not exactly a story we would want to read to our children at bedtime.
But as I said, many stories were told to teach, not to fall asleep to.
C. S. Lewis tells us today about our stories. He says, “You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” So, dear sisters and brothers, what will our ending be? Are we able to learn from the our story which had been “written “ up until now? And are we willing to change something in our lives that will affect the end of our story? Hopefully it will have a better outcome than the stepmother and her daughters in the story of Cinderella.
And so “May we lived happily ever after.”
Peace and All Good,
Fr. Vinnie, osf and the
Bros and Srs of the
Franciscan House of Prayer.