Our First Woman Pope by Victor Villasenor

This book is enthralling to read, funny, insightful, deep, but the frequent mention of alcohol irritates me. I don’t want to know about that kind of spirits. And yet the relationship between culture and language is fascinating. Watching formerly celibate clergy open to romantic love and marriage is heart warming. Learning about Oceanside’s first mango tree is enlightening. The anecdote about the author telling a group of children that they are angels would be wonderful if it didn’t take place right after the partying with tequila and beer. I wondered, was he staggering and slurring his speech during the charming encounter with the children? Mystical experiences were described during the book. The description of alcohol consumed makes real mysticism dubious to me. How much is holy spirit and how much is alcohol? Yet I loved the book, and sent links for the free version to 4 adult children and 3 adult grandchildren. But I’m fed up with the drinking.

Of course sobriety is important to me, and it is rare to find a book or a movie that meets my criteria.

I dreamed I was in the room studying Latin. After pondering the dream for awhile I realized that that room, the master bedroom of the house I grew up in, was the room I had studied Esperanto in, and that the dream message is that Esperanto is a Latin-derived language.

Latin may have been the first language to have a word for “the”,  a European construct, according to Victor Villasenor in Our First Woman Pope. Indigenous languages don’t have it, he asserts, and neither did Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke. Although he is translated in Greek gospels saying, “I am the way, the truth and the life,” in the Aramaic spoken by Jesus, this statement may have been rendered closer to, “I am way, truth and life.” It is a little harder to justify killing for Jesus when you don’t chop experience into discrete lingual boxes using nouns and defining articles. Indigenous languages rely more on verbs. Latin, English and related European languages are languages of empire. Europe (and now America also) has lost most of its indigenous language and thought.