Parable

PARABLE

AT THE SAME TIME that Jesus of Nazareth was being potty-trained, Mary noticed that his language was developing by leaps and bounds. Every day almost, she would add the new words of his growing lexicon to the list she kept by the changing table. Even more than the vocabulary itself, however, she was astonished by her little boy's early command of the syntax.
"Good Jesus. Big Jesus!" he would say after having made it successfully to the toilet before soiling his pants. And Mary would repeat, "That's right; good Jesus."
Mary thought it only proper that she should be the one teaching the future Savior of the World not only the essence of virtue, but the nature of language itself. Even before she had begun potty-training him--before the initial pieces of language had begun to verbally come his way--she would say, soothingly, over and over, while wiping the mess from his bottom, or cleaning around the circumcision, "Good Jesus. Sweet Jesus." And he would smile back up into the face of the Madonna as if he already knew.
Once, staring out the window to the hills outside the city as Mary was finishing changing him after an "accident," he called out, "Mountain--Jesus--Climb." Mary nodded and said--not in a correcting manner, but rather just as a reinforcement of the structure of the language: "Yes, Jesus will climb the mountain."
Soon he was phrasing it himself: "Jesus climb mountain." And then later still, more completely: "I will climb the mountain."
Mary had mixed feelings about this shift to the personal pronoun--much like what she felt each time she watched him at the toilet, either urinating all by himself or wiping his own bottom. Something about the passage of time and the loss of innocence.
When the weather turned nice--with spring and the Easter season approaching--Jesus began to spend more and more time out-of-doors and away from home. Mary enjoyed--at first, anyway--listening in on the conversations he kept with his small friends and playmates, but felt somewhat uncomfortable with his drift toward abstraction and the passive voice: too heavy a reliance on metaphor and the copula.
And so, Mary sat on the front steps by the opened doorway wondering if perhaps a second child would help both her and her first born through some of the more difficult times. But then the thought of the absentee father brought her back to reality, and she gave up the idea.
Years later, when the Easter season was over, it came to her suddenly--in a flash--that although Jesus had never in his life changed a diaper, many of his followers, as well as his detractors, had and still do.