Cenacle

Religious sisters and literary brothers

Today’s New York Times Spelling Bee letters:

A, C, E, N, O, W, and center L (all words must include L).

Merriam-Webster says…

Silly little dictionary! Don’t you know that cenacle can’t possibly be a word if the New York Times says it ain’t?

For further fascinating facts, check out the Spelling Bee Master.

What’s your favorite dord* from today’s puzzle?

My Two Cents

If the photo above looks vaguely familiar, it may be because it’s a lesser-known version of this more famous one:

The one I chose, according to Wikipedia, is an Orthodox Russian icon. I like it better because it seems to depict Jesus and the apostles as dark-skinned, which makes sense considering they were Middle-Eastern! But I’ll save my rant against how Jews today are considered white (barely two generations my grandparents weren’t white enough, according to most Europeans) for another day.

Today let’s talk about a word that had nothing to do with religion.

The sisterhood of nuns

Ooops. My bad.

Cenacle has a lot to do with religion. Now, the editors of the Spelling Bee may have rejected it because it’s spelled with a capital “C”, but Merriam-Webster has the entry with a lowercase “c” and a generalized definition. I’m gonna trust the dictionary on this one.

Cenacle comes from the Latin word cēnō, which means “I dine”. And there’s the connection to our two pictures. The Cenacle, also called “The Upper Room” refers to an area in the compound known as David’s Tomb, which is located in Jerusalem, Israel. Although there are questions about its authenticity, David’s Tomb is considered to be the site where biblical King David was buried… hopefully after his death.

As a side note, that plastic chair next to the sarcophagus has been carbon-dated to a bar mitzvah circa 1974.

Okay, I said I wasn’t going to get into a rant, but I’ll drop a teaser. In the Bible, 1 Samuel Chapter 16 verse 12 describes David as “ruddy, with bright eyes, and good looking”. Ruddy is usually interpreted as David being light-skinned and redheaded or blondish. And why would he be described at all, as opposed to other characters that the Bible didn’t bother describing physically?

Because he was different. We don’t describe what we’re used to seeing on a daily basis. We go into detail about things that strike us as unusual. David’s physical traits — light-skinned, rosy cheeks, light or red hair — were markedly different from those of the other Jews of his time.

So what does that say about the Jews of his time? They were probably dark-skinned, with dark, curly hair (Jewfro, anyone?), closer in appearance to their African brethren than the European ones.

That’s my theory I’m sticking to it.

Now, according to Catholic tradition, the Upper Room became the first church, although other Christian denominations have a different opinion. In any case, Christians in general seem to agree that the Upper Room was also the place where Jesus made several appearances after his resurrection.

The Congregation of Our Lady of the Retreat in the Cenacle (nicknamed the Sisters of the Cenacle) is a French Roman Catholic retreat ministry by Saint Thérèse Couderc and Father Stephen Terme. According to the congregation’s web site:

Father Terme began his journey of faith in the wake of the French Revolution and its destructive impact upon the faith and the religious formation of the people. As a parish priest and missionary, he helped people rediscover their faith and love of Jesus. On one of his missions, he met a young woman who told him of her desire to enter religious life. She was Marie Victoire Couderc, who would become Mother Thérèse Couderc. Together they founded the Congregation of Our Lady of the Retreat in the Cenacle in the small French village of Lalouvesc in 1826… With the help of God, providing safe accommodations for pilgrims and providing retreats in those accommodations, especially for women, lead to the foundation of dozens of Cenacle Retreat Houses around the world.

Today the Cenacle’s work is based on a trinity of principles:

• Prayer
• Community
• Ministry

The Sisters of the Cenacle are located in countries such as Australia, Brazil, Ireland, Madagascar, Singapore, Togo, and the United States.

The brotherhood of writers

The Cénacle, with both a capital “C” and a fancy accent on the first “e”, was a high-falutin’ literary group that was supposedly started by French writer and librarian Charles Nodier around 1826. This happened after he was appointed librarian of the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in 1824, a position he held until he died twenty years later.

But during that time he collected rare and unusual books and founded his writer’s group, known as Le Cénacle. Since he was a lover of romanticism, he managed to sway writers such as Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, Charles Sainte-Beuve, Alexandre Dumas Alphonse de Lamartine, and Gérard de Nerval to become… Romanticists? Romantics? Romanticizers?

In other words, a bunch of French writers you may have studied in high school or college. Unless you became an expert in French Romanticism, in which case you may still be studying them.

Again the dictionary uses the generalized term, transforming the proper noun into a common one. In other words, into a word. See for yourself:

And yet… the weight and power of both the religious and literary worlds were not enough to convince the editors of the Spelling Bee puzzle that cenacle is not a dord.*

You can check out my previous entry on another dord* here:

*What the heck is a dord, you ask? Here’s the answer: