Life on the Vine

When Jesuit priest Gregory Boyle was teaching a short story class to lifers in Folsom Prison in 1993, he asked them if they could describe the difference between sympathy, empathy, and compassion.  He noticed they were using the three terms interchangeably when discussing the grandmother's transformation in Flannery O'Connor's story A Good Man is Hard to Find . As I've been reading and watching the news, and listening to the tone and rhetoric of our national and political debates, I've been thinking a lot lately about empathy.   The first time I thought of empathy as a personal trait was around 2006-7 when I completed a yearlong leadership development program.  We were all required to take the StrengthFinders test and empathy was identified as one of my top five strengths.   It states: "People exceptionally talented in the Empathy theme can sense other people's feelings by imagining themselves in others' lives or situations."  It also states that

My worlds of books and wine converged in a pleasant and unexpected way last October.  A recommended winery in Greve in Chianti turned out to have a historical connection to a book that one of my college professors had used as an example of a strong opener.  This was more than twenty years ago!  The opener, we'll get to shortly.  But first, the wine.      A quick web search reveals there are more than 45-THOUSAND wineries in Italy.  Since 2017, we've visited just over 110.  Even THAT is a lot of wineries. So given the bounty of wineries, what makes a winery stand out?  The wine, of course.  The winemaker.  The family.  The origin story.  The cellar.  The labels.  The view.  The vineyard.  The tour.  The wine-food pairing experience.  All true and all things any winery can potentially offer.  But when a winery has a surprising connection to the discovery of your nation and to a book of personal significance, the winery certainly stands out even more.       Last September I was pu