The unforgiving priest

 The unforgiving priest 

“I don’t think your therapist has many patients, or clients,” Uncle Albert said, “or whatever you’re called: loonies.”

     I had just come out of my appointment with Dr. Feight. Uncle Albert was in the waiting room – waiting. (He goes with me to my appointments; then we go to lunch.) “What makes you say that?” I asked.

     “What’s today?” he said.

     “Tuesday,” I said, “isn’t it?”

     “Right,” he said. “Not Monday.”

     “ . . . ?”

     “You usually see him on Monday, right?”

     “And Thursday, yes. But yesterday was Memorial Day.”

     “Yet he was able to schedule you today at the same time he usually sees you yesterday.”

     “Okay.”

     “And there are never other cars here when we come or when we go. We never run into anyone coming or going.”

     “Well, I’m the last appointment in the morning, I know that.”

     “Going or coming, then: we never run into anyone. Maybe you’re his only patient.”

     “I doubt it, but so?”

     “Would you trust a, let’s say, oncologist – an oncologist that had only one patient?”

We got into the car. I started the engine. “Shall we go to the pupusa place?”

     “Why not?” he said. “Would you trust a restaurant, if you never saw anyone else eating there?”

the little priest

We were waiting for our order. “I was talking to Dr. Feight about church again this morning,” I said, “about how you’d said you had half a mind to walk out.”

     “Did you tell him why, that the little priest skipped the confession of sin?”

     “Why do you call him little?”

     “Little in experience, then, one that knows much more now than he will, one hopes.”

     “I didn’t think about that, that he left it out.”

     “Well, he did. Probably because it’s still Easter. We’re not supposed to be thinking about our sins, still reeling over the fact that ‘Christ is risen!’” He said that loudly. I looked around; there were other people in the restaurant, and they were looking at us. I lowered my voice.

     “I thought it was the gospel lesson, ‘that bullshit from John,’ you called it.”

     “And wasn’t I right? – one of the more bloated ten verses in the” – he made quotation marks with his fingers – “the ‘Final Discourses,’ one of the most bloated three chapters in all of Scripture” that couldn’t possibly have come out of the mouth of Jesus. Imagine anyone standing up in front of a dinner party of twelve, even with, let’s say, a wait-staff of another four and four of the twelve had dates. He's standing there in front of at most twenty people and talking about ‘all those whom thou gavest me from the world.’ John may have wished the final gathering took place in Bryant-Denny Stadium, Tuscaloosa, Alabama in front of a 100,000 people with Billy Graham as the opening act; but it didn’t.”

     “No,” I said.

“What did he say?”

     “Who?”

     “Feight. When you told him about church.”

     “He said, ‘Do you ever think you think too much?’ He was kidding though. It was a way of asking why this came up now, when it did.”

     “What did you say?”

     “I said, ‘Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.’”

Just then our pupusas came.

     “We’re all dangerous,” Uncle Albert said. He looked at the little Salvadoran woman that was serving us. “N’est-ce pas?” he asked her.

     “Sí,” she said, then looked away, then toward me. And softly, smiling: “O no?”

05.31.17