Yesterday, on the first day of class for Intro to Biblical Studies, I taught like Jesus. But before elaborating on my Christ-like pedagogy, some background information is necessary:
In this class we always start with the topic of 586 BCE, the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, and exile and fighting assimilation in Babylon. We listen to both Don McLean and Bony M sing "By the Rivers of Babylon" and we read Lamentations. In Lamentations 4:6 the text reads "The punishment of my people is greater than that of Sodom, which was overthrown in a moment without a hand turned to help her." That notion of sudden death preferable to a long drawn out agonizing one got me thinking about my father's favorite short story, "Lost Face" by Jack London, and then that got me thinking about mice.
I've had some pretty epic battles against rodents in my office before. First they chewed off the face of my Moses action figurine, and then they attacked a nice Bedouin family. But recently when we were moving furniture to our restored home, we noticed that mice had recently infiltrated our old laundry room. And thus, the following parable was born, linking me forever with Jesus:
There was a fat man from Nebraska who noticed mice poop on his laundry room floor. He bought two types of traps. The standard spring loaded bar mouse trap, and these new fangled sticky pads. The next day, there was one dead mouse, nearly decapitated, in the spring loaded trap, and there were two mice, still alive, suffering on the sticky pads, who were thrown into the trash can where they died a slow tortuous death and their corpses smelled like spoiled crawfish. The fat man with the bad karma was reborn as a three legged mouse, and one day he tried to help his mouse friend on a sticky pad and he got caught too. Now I ask you, which of these mice had the better fate?
the last time i caught a mouse in a sticky trap was xmas eve.
ReplyDeletei took him out in the driveway to dump him in the trashcan listening to his squeaking the whole time.
it was than and there that i gave the trap one very hard and one very skull smashing blow to the driveway. there was no way i was gonna go thru that move twice.
while i couldnt bear to throw he guy in the trash alive i still view this event as a deduction from the karma account either way.
strange how mr mouse was hated while in my house but once he got outside i was wishing i could give him a reprieve from the sticky trap with out making him an amputee.
My mother did a mouse trap comparison by putting a wire trap next to a sticky trap to see which would get the mice. She ended up with a mouse sandwich: the post-mortem determined that the mouse went to the wire trap first, got caught in it and, while struggling to get out, flipped itself over into the sticky trap with the wire trap still on.
ReplyDeleteUgh.