Parabolic curve ball

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 Parabolic curve ball 

“The Good Samaritan” by Paula Modersohn-Becker
oil, tempera on canvas. 37 x 31.3 cm. 1907

Apropos of nothing – his usual modus operandi – Uncle Albert says, “I’ve been thinking about ‘The Parable of the Good Samaritan,’ which should be rather ‘The Parable of the Priest and the Levite,’ because the story is really about them, their envy.”

     We are sitting across the kitchen table from one another. Once again I’ve fallen asleep right after lunch as soon as I lay down on the couch to read; but I’ve awakened in time for my second cup of coffee. I am allowed two cups of coffee a day, one at breakfast and one at two o’clock in the afternoon. I’m drinking my second cup; Uncle Albert is drinking tea. I look up from my cup at him and back down into it.

     “Look,” he says, “at the way it ends. ‘Go and do likewise,’ Jesus says, meaning like the Samaritan.”

     He pauses. I look up again, nod.

     “So the priest and the Levite, if they’re listening, they’re thinking, ‘Yeah, we’d have done that, we could as well have, but . . . .’”

      “But they didn’t know?”

      “More that they had other things to do. But now they’re thinking all of a sudden, desperately, how they could have done both. That’s the essence of envy; we want both what we have and what the other guy has, too; and we want the credit that our good intentions (now we know them) deserve. The priest and the Levite want to hold onto their important duties in the temple, and their clean hands and pure hearts, and they want to be thought of as good as well. They want to be both pure and good.

     “Ideally, they would have already made a contribution to the Jerusalem-Jericho Road Travelers Aid Society – this is the way they’re thinking; they would have made a substantial donation; they would have been invited to sit on the board; they see themselves at a banquet honoring them for their service. In their acceptance speech, they are saying, ‘This organization with your gifts and [pause] mine [pause] was able to reimburse Samaritan, regrettably not able to be with us today, reimburse him for his time as well as his costs in the ugly but happily resolved Unfortunate Traveler case. (We regret he could not be with us today either.)’

     “The regrets are, of course,empty, pro forma, as no one regrets not having to share the stage.”

The coffee helps a little: my body feels a little more alive; my mind works a little more quickly; my spirit almost moves.

“Pure and good,” Uncle Albert is saying. “Have your cake and eat it, too.

01.24.17