Father O’Hara is going into parable mode with Elizabeth, an economics student.
...
Father O’Hara: Do you know the starfish story, then?
Elizabeth: Aah… it’s got to be one with a metaphor or a moral to it, it’s probably a PARABLE, or you wouldn’t be setting out to tell me, right?
Father O’Hara: Just listen. There’s a boy walking along the beach and he sees thousands of starfish washed up by the tide. They’re stranded, see, and then the boy sees this man who’s throwing the starfish one by one back into the sea. And the boy asks, why you doing that, it won’t help, there are thousands of them stranded here. And the man picks up another starfish and throws it into the water, and says, “Well, it helped THAT one.”
Elizabeth: Something like what Zig Ziglar meant when he said, “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.”
Elizabeth: Possibly, possibly.
____________
Voice-over
There are more than 50 parables in the New Testament alone. That probably means there are thousands of parables from other reefs scattered along the Beach of Theology.
Parable: a story whose sum is greater than that of its parts?
...
2 comments:
I think a famous Japanese saying "nasake ha hito no tame narazu" shows the same story.
But, unfortunately, this is a typical example of Japanese "easily-misunderstood" expressions.
In a wrong meaning, it is better not to help others because they must do that themselves, or something like that, which is opposite to the real meaning...
Hello N_O (!) Nice to see you here. Welcome and thank you for your cross cultural observation.
Interpreting or translating stories across cultures can be even more difficult than translating technological documents.
Technology is fairly constant across cultures (although Japanese keitais have many differences compared with European ones!).
Beliefs and behaviors are not so constant across cultures. Try putting a story into an Internet translation engine and see what comes out!
Post a Comment