Back home in Boston, I was paired with Brian - he of the paella, large, no squid - to give a presentation on the
trip. We linked up a few times to run through
the material, some ninety-six pages of original sixteenth century letters
containing instructions for the global governance of the fledgling Society of
Jesus, of which Brian is now a member. I joked that I shouldn’t have to do any
of the reading since I’m just a biology teacher and my presentation partner is
a professional Jesuit. I kept feeding him biology factoids – the cell membrane is an amphipathic bilayer
with a hydrophobic core – which he shaped into analogies that fit the
reading flawlessly. “So its outer and inner faces have the same integrity, but
to get across the middle, there’s a semi-selective barrier?” It was like watching
him make origami as I passed him fragments of ever more challenging raw
material. A square envelope. The paper ring around a restaurant napkin. A postcard from the Vatican.
title credit Kenny Chesney
title credit Kenny Chesney
