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When his father grew old it became very difficult for him to swallow -- this was the result of many strokes piled onto each other like waves. The strokes crashed upon the bewildered family and made a piece of God's mercy from one point of view.
The son had also begun to experience some minor problems swallowing. Looking at his father, he was able to see his own future, in a way. Only his father was an infinitely more worthy person than himself.
One evening at a restaurant his father -- all right, my father -- began to disgorge the food he had been eating. He couldn't control the process. The family was embarrassed but cleaned up with the help of the server, who was a French woman with problems of her own.
It didn't leave any permanent damage -- not to the other customers, not to the family, not to the victim, whose body had begun to fold itself back into God's hands and was losing any control over itself. It was no longer the victim's body, not fully. It seems to me that a body as a body doesn't sin, and there was no wrongdoing in throwing up some lettuce with an overly exotic dressing. The fault, if you want to call something a fault, was in the embarrassment and shame that the others felt. But why feel ashamed when a body does what it is called by God to do, namely to decay and grow mellow, ripe for falling? Isn't the harvest day coming? Does one really want to approach that day with shame and non-acceptance?
So it was the haughty soul, the one that favors fancy restaurants, that was at fault. If anyone was truly at fault. But maybe it is time to cut even the soul some slack. It behaves as though it knows everything but really knows nothing.
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