Pilgrim's Ponderings

  As a teenager I watched the movie Braveheart (yes I know it is not historically accurate) and have ever since been enthralled by the idea of visiting Scotland sometime. Since then I have visited the UK a few times but have never really mad it up to Scotland. This year we finally made concrete plans. Besides just visiting Scotland we would be visiting friends who we have been waiting to meet for some time now. You can only imagine the excitement that had been built up to the day. Then the day came! We were all packed and ready to go, when we got told that a friend my daughter had met a few days earlier had tested positive for Covid. Twenty four hours later we got the test results that my daughter had tested positive for Covid as well. It was much more than just inconvenient news. It was annoying and very disheartening. But here’s the thing – we did not have any major discussions or any back and forth debates. As soon as the message said “Covid positive” the decision to cancel wa...

  “And he left there and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan, and crowds gathered to him again. And again, as was his custom, he taught them. ” Mark 10:1   The word translated “custom” in most translations tries hard to capture the original intention but it doesn’t really do justice to this tiny phrase. The Greek word that Mark used here is the word “etho”.  You must have guessed by now that this is the root word for the one we know and use today – ethos. The Oxford dictionary gives this definition for Ethos – “The characteristic spirit of a culture, era, or community as manifested in its attitudes and aspirations.” When studying the etymology of the word it takes us back to the original and we find there that its usage was not limited to a community context but even to the individual. In its Latin usage it moved more towards a community context. But in the original Greek it would be used to mean a person’s disposition or nature.   So when w...