Absolution

by Alice McDermott

“The Jews know that everything God has created is in need of repair, flawed and imperfect.” He gestured. “Kind of like this house. Fix one thing, for certain something somewhere else is already broken.”

“But don’t you know, Tricia,” she told me, “the Buddhists say, ‘Mend yourself.’”

“There’s a real danger in the bestowing of gifts upon the hopeless only to inflate the ego of the one who does the bestowing.”

“It encourages self-righteousness in the one even as it destroys self-determination in the other.”

that very little good might be just the thing required to stand against that very little evil—that impulse to turn away.”