Welcome to 7 sins and friends, where I am writing about a feeling for every letter of the alphabet…. including the 7 sins.

I spelled gluttonous “glutinous” first…. a quite different feeling. I had to look up the spelling of gluttonous.

Now I need a definition of glutton:

a :  one given habitually to greedy and voracious eating and drinking
b :  one that has a great capacity for accepting or enduring something <a glutton for punishment>

When I started this topic for the A to Z challenge, I had to look up the 7 sins. I could only name four and I always want to include murder. I get the ten commandments a bit conflated with the 7 sins.

Gluttony is an interesting sin and I did not think of the second definition. I have only seen it used in “glutton for punishment”, but the way the definition is written, I wonder if Nelson Mandala could be seen as a glutton ….. his courage in enduring imprisonment for so long. That meaning would not be a sin, would it?

When my daughter was in grade school, her sitter’s family hosted an exchange student from Uzbekistan. He was a teenager, very thin, and he seemed appalled by the US. He showed us slides from home. They had electric power for an hour or two a day at most. The cooking facilities were out door stone ovens burning wood. I think that he considered us to be gluttons because not only did we demand more than one meal a day and snacks, but also we demanded different food at each meal and always look for something new! And we ate until we are obese and then obsess about losing weight!

I spent a year as an exchange student in Denmark in high school. I continued with the language in college and got a scholarship to translate a book one summer. The book is Livsens Ondskab, by Gustav Wied, written in 1899. It is fascinating and very dark and funny. It is about a small town, fictional, but this town has a “Glutton’s Club” where the richest men get together and have fabulous rich meals. The meal descriptions are glorious. But their goal is to eat as much as possible and more…..

I am in the Rotary and love it. The Rotary helps 9000 exchange students world wide: I think that going to another country, another place, and trying to understand and be understood is one of our biggest hopes for peace.

My daughter made the cake for my birthday last month!!! mmmmmmm