Monday, 10/6/14
For getting the feel of the Parable of the Good Samaritan it
helps if you begin with a picture of the endless twists in that road that falls
3600 feet in its seventeen mile descent from Jerusalem to Jericho. Your stomach
would be in your throat as you made every hidden corner, and all those little
frights would contribute to the final horror of being waylaid.
If you don’t mind, I’d like to bring up two personal
incidents that had faint echos of this story.
One incident from thirty-two years ago took place when I was
driving my friend Sister Larry up to her new assignment in St. Louis. Driving
north through South Carolina we were worried that we had no phone to alert the
people in North Carolina who were expecting us for supper.
Suddenly my Datsun got what sounded like its death rattles.
We struggled up an exit ramp, and managed to get the ailing vehicle into the
lot of an abandoned filling station. We were wondering about what awful things
could happen to a priest and a nun stuck in the Bible Belt.
After a bit a
stranger came over, suggesting that from the sound the Datsun made it had a
broken down something-or-other. After we assented to letting him help, he
pulled out a beautiful mobile phone, using it to make four calls. A foreign car
parts place twenty-miles up the road would be open another half hour. His
daughter, working nearby would get the part before they closed. A garage man
would install it, and a man with a tow truck would get us there. With help from
the Good Baptist it only cost thirty-seven dollars.
The other road story had me headed south on I-95 to a
vacation condo south of Daytona. I pulled over to a man with a stalled U-Hall,
and I took him down to the next exit ramp where he filled a gas can he had with
him.
He was a Cuban refugee who had married another refugee whom
he met in Miami. With him having a job in a furniture manufacturer near Boston, they had
three kids, and then his wife came down with cancer. Their folks in Miami said
they’d take care of her hospitalization if they could make it down there. They
purchased plane tickets with what they got selling most of their stuff, then
with what they couldn’t sell packed in the U-Hall, he tried to make it from
Boston to Miami without spending a night in a motel.
With the gas bought, and our being back to the U-Hall, the
man offered me money. When I refused, he told me he knew who I was. Even when I
am in vacation cloths people often guess that I am a priest. So I asked him,
“Okay, who am I?”
And he said, “Why, you are the Good Samaritan.”
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