Forgive Me My Fish…

Retirement is like looking at life from a balcony.  Below are all the many memories of events, for better or worse, which make us laugh, cry, cringe with regret, or long to repeat.   I look today from my balcony view at my first years in South America as I struggled to learn Spanish.

Do you know how humiliating it is to go into a restaurant and confidently ask the waitress (translating from Spanish here) “Where is the horse’s bathroom?”   Those who know Spanish will recognize the resemblance between the words caballero(gentleman) and caballo (horse).   After a rather puzzling look on the face of the waitress, and recognizing I may have used the wrong word,  I then asked for the directions to the restroom for cabellos (hair).  This, I suppose, is not as blatant an error as complimenting a dear Colombian church member on her newborn’s lovely hair, ie. “your daughter has a beautiful head of dark  horse.”

It should be a sin that some Spanish words are just too similar to each other.   Speaking of sin, pecado (sin) and pescado (fish) sound amazingly similar, especially in Barranquilla, Colombia where I served as a hospital chaplain years ago. Folks on the Coast are notorious for dropping the “s” in words.   How many people  you know have the experience of praying in Spanish and asking God to forgive us our fish as we forgive those who fish against us?  Two other sinfully similar words are vesicula (gall bladder) and versiculo (bible verse).  Can you imagine the confusion of the patient who tried to answer my question, “How are you feeling after your bible verse surgery?”  Or the congregation who faithfully tried to find the text for the sermon that day as I urged them to turn to gall bladder number three of the book of James , chapter two ?

 The view from my present retirement balcony brings other memories not so amusing.  I can choose to dwell on those stories of failure or misfortune or embarrassment, or I can begin to reframe them in light of the unfolding grace being poured out upon me as I age. Part of that grace may be the ability not to remember accurately (my wife calls this “preacher hyperbole”), or even the gained wisdom that no story remembered is absolutely true.  Perhaps part of grace is finding an alternative narrative to the unfortunate, sad, or painful stories of the past.  Maybe, I think, God laughs at some of our learning, growing, and missteps along the way, just as I now laugh at the errors I made in learning another language.  Or perhaps there is the grace of another narrative of past events still waiting to be discovered and claimed.

On those days when I feel too tempted to listen too intently to sad stories of the past, maybe I will merely look from my present balcony to a higher one and ask God to forgive me my fish as I forgive the fishes of others.