He would never forget that late evening when those five foolish maidens came jabbering down his darkened street, their girlsong interspersed and echoing in the quiet of the lane below his rooftop patio. In the few seconds this parade would be in earshot, he would only make out two things distinctly. One was something or other about them searching for an open market at which to buy oil at this late hour. And the other was some nonsensical one-liner about God that he knew could not be right, for he remembered otherwise from the scriptures, he was pretty sure. And then they were gone, their shuffling and cackling fading into the city night.
And while he might have quickly forgotten a thousand such passings by, this one was different, for it kept picking at him even to the wee hours—that stupid giggling and especially, the idiotic thing the one had said about God. And when his arrogant disdain for their sloppy selves had tortured him long enough, he lit an extra lamp and opened the dusty books to prove that stupid girl wrong.
And that’s when it started, he will tell you, for the pages he would open that night in irritation and with the drive to prove himself right, would pull him in and reveal to him a philosophy so compelling that it would at length supplant his hubris with something better—something that was not really about self at its core, nor about what’s wrong with others, but about what’s right with God—the great precepts and stories of whom would shine their light onto the sloppy state of his own soul, and of this darkened world alike, calling him to a philosophy far greater than that poor girl had understood it to be.
And yes, he had been right about the thing the girl had said, even while being wrong about so much else and ignorant about more still. And years hence, he would think on the irony that she might be saying that same thing still—wherever she was, dear thing—it being the very bait by which his pride—of all things!—had led him to where he would find humility and so much more besides.
