Word: ordeal
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...played Christ will be tried by a denazification court. But whether or not he is cleared, the little Bavarian town of Oberammergau (pop. 3,944) will probably need a new Jesus. By 1950, greying Alois Lang will be 59 and too old for his Passion Play ordeal of carrying a 100-lb. cross and hanging from it in make-believe crucifixion for 22 muscle-tearing minutes...
...hilt a role in another solemn custom of Budget Week. By British tradition a Chancellor of the Exchequer about to produce a budget is treated like a pregnant woman. He relaxes in the peaceful countryside, awaiting the great moment. The press lavishes solicitude, photographs him smiling bravely through his ordeal. Editorialists who have lambasted him unmercifully for months before the Great Event (and will flay him even more heartily after it) permit him this week of peaceful gestation; only a bounder or a cad would kick a Chancellor of the Exchequer in this condition...
...Dostoevsky and St. Teresa bear witness to identical ecstasies. The visions of many a saint are echoed in these words by the late flyer Saint-Exupéry, who alone above the clouds found himself "enclosed as in the precincts of a temple," where, "by the grace of an ordeal ... which stripped you of all that was not intrinsic, you discovered a mysterious creature born of yourself. . . . Man does not die. . . . What man fears is himself, not death. When the body sinks into death, the essence of man is revealed...
...Ordeal of Anger. Janet Lewis' setting is Denmark in the middle 17th Century and her writing, as clean as a peeled twig, traces a clear outline of a dark Scandinavian story. The fearless Pastor of Vejlby, Soren Qvist, prayed God to relieve him of the passion of anger. But when the insolent Morten Bruus asked for his only daughter in marriage, Soren hurled him to the ground. The title of the novel refers not only to the actual trial of the Pastor for murder, with which he was eventually charged, but to the spiritual ordeal that preceded...
...force. If the response to the initial challenge is successful, the success involves new challenges, new responses. If the new responses are not successful, the community breaks down, thereby liberating new creative forces-but on a higher plane, which has been reached by the society during the long developmental ordeal of responding to its challenges...