Читать книгу Hope’s Daughters - R. Wayne Willis - Страница 24

I was having breakfast with a relative who recently had to move into a nursing home. As we ate, he eagerly gave me, in hushed tones, the lowdown on some of the other residents.

“See that woman in the black dress at the next table? I think she’s German, and she finds something critical to say about the food or the service at every meal.”

“Hear that man talking real loud? I think he was a preacher, and he loves to hear the sound of his own voice.”

“That short woman at the table behind you—she’s losing her mind, and at every meal she tells the ladies at her table that her daughter is rummaging through all her papers and that her son dug up her husband and moved him to another place.”

For some strange reason, as I scanned the sample of humanity in that dining room, my mind flashed back to a retaining wall I once saw in Delphi, Greece, on the approach to the Temple of Apollo. Every single stone in the fifteen-feet-tall wall that Delphic masons built to support the temple’s terrace is a different shape and size. Yet all the stones fit together perfectly, like the pieces of a picture puzzle. You could not insert a piece of paper into any seam. For twenty-five hundred years, earthquakes have not been able to bring down this wall of irregular stones surrounded by regular foundations that have all crumbled.

There is something to be said for being mixed up with irregular stones—people not like us. We learn more from people unlike us, people who don’t ditto what we say. Rubber stampers do not enlarge or enrich us; they only reinforce our prejudices.

And sometimes the irregulars among us can help us grow in gratitude, in the awareness that there but for the grace of God go the rest of us.