Supererogation
I’m taking these walks. Practically every day. It gets to nine o’clock in the morning, and I don’t know what to do. Even now, it’s often hot already, but if I cleave to the shadows of the buildings - and they are getting longer - I can at least walk downtown and back.
So, today. I walk down to Crowder Street, then down Crowder to Division, down Division to Levy. I am waiting on the corner of Levy to cross Johnson. I’m on the northeast corner at the crosswalk. The light turns green, and I step into the crosswalk. I hesitate to make sure the transit bus is stopping before it turns left. It starts forward, but then it stops. I continue walking. The bus turns and roars away; and a man in a pickup truck behind it, yells at my back: “Asshole!”
I keep walking, but I’m starting to stew. Anger begets anger in my experience. I try not to think about it - being yelled at, called an asshole; at the same time I’m trying to think of all the things I might have yelled back, but I only get to two: I might have flipped him the bird over my shoulder; or I might have shouted: “Takes one to know one.” Or here’s a third: “God bless you, sir.”
Instead, I keep walking though I find myself taking a more roundabout way than normal. I don’t want someone so angry because he had to wait a few seconds for a man in a crosswalk to chase me down to yell some more or challenge me to a duel. Or beat me up, which didn’t sound as if it would be hard for him to do. The voice belonged to a young man; I am not a young man.
At the same time - this is the nature of my stewing - I want to have a rational argument with this irrational jerk. Who has the right of way - the pedestrian in the crosswalk or the driver turning left from Levy onto Johnson? If a car had been coming up Levy from the south, would he have yelled at the driver because he would have had to wait for it to clear the intersection before he turned left? Clearly, he would not have.
On the way home, I circle by Grace, the Lutheran church where Axel is.* The side of the church is bright with the sun but not white with it, and I can see the fluorescent lights on in Axel’s study. I ring the bell and look up. His face is at the window. He extends his palm, “Wait!”
I wait. He opens the door. “Sorry,” he says, “Frampton’s off today.” That’s what he calls his secretary, a thin woman about my age named Lucy Burke, “Frampton” because she looks like Peter Frampton - of the farewell tour. I always wonder then if she was as beautiful as he was when both were young. Usually, if you ring the bell, she just buzzes you in. She’s a trusting sort; no one calls her “asshole.” But Axel someone must have - someones, many times - because he always checks to see who is there. He peers out his window; then, he comes down to let you in.
“What?” he says.
“A theological question,” I say. “Do you have time?”
“Why not ask Miss Virginia?” he asks, turning in a way that invites me to follow him up the stairs to his study. He means the priest at St. Jude’s, where I take Uncle Albert to church. She was Miss Virginia - in 2004, I think.**
“A theological question,” I say.
“And?”
“I want a Lutheran answer.”
He goes behind his desk, sits down. I sit down across from him. He puts his feet up and looks across his knees at me.
“I don’t want to get into a conversation about how I feel about the matter,” I say.
“And centering prayer is not the answer,” he says. “Mindfulness is not the answer.” I can see he’s thinking. “Imagining yourself on the beach in the Caribbean: Feel the prick of the sun on your skin, hear the waves bumping against the shore, smell the salt and sand. Not the answer,” he says.
“Rule of three,” he says. “Spiritual practices division.”
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| Thomas Aquinas by m ball |
“You should ask a priest,” Axel says.
“Why?”
“I don’t think you’re in Luther territory.”
I shrug. I don’t know what he’s talking about.
“More in Aquinas territory,” he says. “But,” he says. “I’ll take a stab at it.”
“Before I get to the Dumb Ox, however . . . I won’t ask you how you felt about it, but I’ll opine that it is best to walk away from people yelling ‘Asshole!’ at you. They’re not inviting you into a conversation.
“But you asked me what you should have done. Point,” he raises his right index finger. “Point: It was not wrong of you to cross the street when the light turned green, but you might have waited for the bus and the pickup to turn before you did.
“Why?” he raises his index and middle finger: point two: “Consider ‘The Good Samaritan.’ The question that prompts Jesus to tell the story is . . . ?”
“Who is my neighbor?”
“But the answer isn’t what most think it is. Look again at the logic of the parable - when you get home,” Axel says. “Your neighbor is the one you go out of your way to help; and if he is your neighbor, then you are also his.
“It is from this parable that the term supererogatory or supererogation comes. From Jerome’s translation of the Greek into Latin. Here it is, just a minute.” He drops his feet off his desk, swivels around in his chair, and returns with a coffee-table-size book, which he puts in front of him and leafs through until he finds the page he wants. “Curam illius habe,” he reads with surprising facility. “et quodcumque supererogaveris, ego cum rediero reddam tibi. ‘Take care of him and whatever you expend beyond’ - meaning the more than enough I estimate I’ve already given you - ‘I will certainly pay you back.’
“So, as you know, . . . Nod your head,” Axel says, and I do. “As you know, both Luther and your Calvin reprehended supererogation because of the use the Roman church put it to, selling the merit accumulated by those that went beyond the call of duty to those that didn’t wish to rise to it, assuming they had the means to pay: The slackers could reimburse the saints by contributions to the pope’s treasury. But that wasn’t the only reason the Reformers thought it, supererogation, was so much pigswill: There was also the matter that not even the most saintly could earn more in good than they spent in evil. All depended on God’s liberal grace. If there could be anything supererogatory it would be that, God’s grace.
“On the other hand, I can’t believe either Calvin or - even - Luther could have objected to Aquinas’ notion that it was good to aim at going beyond the fulfilling - or letter - of the law, assuming our reach could exceed our grasp. Or yours. Your doing that, going beyond the letter of the law, humbly waiting for the bus and truck, might in this case have forestalled the anger of your pickup driver. Certainly, it would have checked his calling you ‘Asshole’; and you would not have stewed the rest of your walk. So your act of, we’ll call it ‘supererogation’ even if supererogation is not really possible, could have had two benefits.
“But,” Axel looks up from the book finally and raises his first, middle, and now ring finger, “you would not have waited for the second purpose of avoiding stewing about being called an asshole because to perform an act for one’s own reward would not be humble or unselfish.” And he closes the book, swivels around in his chair, and puts it back.
* * * * *
I am always amazed at the shit that Axel knows. When he turned around again, I said so: “It’s amazing the shit you know,” I said. He shrugged as if (unfortunately) he couldn’t help it. Likely he can’t.
10.10.19
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* Axel’s story is here.
** More on Miss Virginia here.
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