Parable

(c) Katherine E. Brown

In July, 2023, I found Jesus on my kitchen floor. Literally. I’d just unpacked the groceries into fridge and cupboards and basement pantry, then bent to gather and stow the reusable bags strewn about the kitchen, and saw him lying there on the green and white tiles. Tiny Jesus. I picked him up. He was made of some sort of laminated cardboard. Posed with arms outstretched, feet in first position, hands and feet inked with red stigmata. Haloed head tilted slightly to the side, dark hair lank on his shoulders, great wide eyes of an Orthodox icon. I looked at Jesus lying there in the palm of my hand and wondered where he’d come from. Fallen out of one of the grocery bags? (Unexpected literature has landed in my grocery bags before.). From a recent wedding attended? (I hadn’t remembered adding any prayer cards to my purse.)

I know exactly when I found Jesus because I was so struck by the unexpected encounter that I texted a photo to husband and daughters, and to my seminary sisters, and wrote about it in my journal. It had been a hectic season, with multiple moving parts meshing imperfectly, and I felt more aware of busyness than blessing. I was a bit weirded out to find Jesus on my kitchen floor — those eyes! those bleeding hands and feet! At the same time, I was a bit delighted to think that I went out for groceries and ended up encountering Jesus in my own kitchen. Little laminated Jesus lying on the floor. But Jesus. I tucked him into the pocket at the back of my journal and every so often took him out to hold and look at. Jesus and I gazing at each other. When that blank book was filled, I moved him to the pocket of the next, and then the next after, until I bought some books without pockets, and then left Jesus on my desk, for his own safety.

Sometime last academic year, I saw that the middle image had dropped out of my key-charm. The cross-shaped charm had been a gift from a colleague. The cross was bigger than any individual key on the ring, and the whole was a difficult fit in the small bag I carry. (The key-ring-and-cross fit more easily before I also carried a cell phone, which gives some indication of how long I’d had the key ring and charm.). That said, I liked the heft of the cross in my hand (if not its fit in my purse), and when I saw its center was missing, I was dismayed. I went back out to the car, looking around the driver’s seat, reaching my hand into the creases, bending low to look on the floor. I checked the other car too, just in case. I did not see the center anywhere. For a few weeks, I left the cross charm on my key ring, then decided that it was silly to spend purse space when its center blank seemed to gape absence whenever I glanced at it. I removed the cross from the ring. It was, I admit, a lot easier to snug the keys into my bag. I appreciated the convenience.

This morning, I again came across the key-charm with its missing center. Why am I keeping this? I wondered. Then I thought Wouldn’t it be funny if the little laminated Jesus could fit in the empty center? Maybe I could trim and fit him in. I looked through my desk and found the Jesus, placed him in the center of the metal cross, and realized Oh … oh … This empty space is the place he’d come from. I set him in the outline, pressed slightly, then ran my thumb over the whole. The surface felt smooth. The fit was precise, even to its depth.

A parable cannot be reduced to any single meaning. Nor can this two year sequence of finding and losing and finding again. I might dwell on the shock of that initial encounter in the midst of everyday, an unexpected, weird, delighting, welcome right there on my kitchen floor. I might be stuck instead in the rueful realization that I hadn’t recognized the kitchen-found Jesus as one I’d carried for years — he looked so unfamiliar there on the floor — nor that I had carried the key-charm for months after without seeing that its center was missing. I might pause on the added thought that without that center, the key-charm didn’t seem worth carrying anymore.

For now I’ll rest in the reunion of the two pieces into a single whole. Find some glue to restore the charm securely, then attach it again to the ring. Yes, the whole will take up more space in my small bag. I’ll have to arrange things carefully each time, if they’re to fit. Do it, that the inconvenience of the matter may become its own parable. Re-enacted every time I take out my keys remembering, now, to look for the center image present.