The one lost sheep, the righteous one, who goes astray non-iniquitously

I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek thy servant, | for I do not forget thy commandments.

Ps 119:176 RSV, italics mine.

All we like sheep have gone astray; | we have turned every one to his own way; | and the Lord has laid on him | the iniquity of us all.

Is 53:6 RSV.

     Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him. And the Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying, 'This man receives sinners and eats with them.'
     So he told them this parable: 'What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one which is lost, until he finds it? And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, "Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost." Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.'

Lk 15:1-7 RSV.

     Image:  Habib Mhenni (photographer), "The Good Shepherd" (23 September 2013), from the Catacomb of the Good Shepherd, Hadrumetum (modern Sousse, Tunisia), but housed now in the Bardo National Museum in Tunis.  On the original excavation, see, for starters, A. F. Leynaud, Les catacombes africaines: Sousse-Hadrumtète, 2. éd. rev., et augmentée (Alger: Jules Carbonel, 1922).

I eat and drink the price of my redemption

"Your only Son 'in whom are hid all treasures of wisdom and knowledge' (Col. 2:3) had 'redeemed me by his blood' (Rev. 5:9). . . .  I think upon the price of my redemption, and I eat and drink it, and distribute it.  In my poverty I desire to be satisfied from it together with those who 'eat and are satisfied' (Ps. 61:5)."

ille tuus unicus, «in quo sunt omnes thesauri sapientiae et scientiae absconditi », redemit me sanguine suo. . . . cogito pretium meum et manduco et bibo et erogo et pauper cupio saturari ex eo inter illos, qui edunt et saturantur. . . .

     St. Augustine, Confessiones X.xliii (70), trans. Chadwick.  Latin from CCSL 27, 193 ll. 34-38 (cf. CSEL 33, 279 l. 21-280 l. 2).

"when man and woman possess their home, two minds, | two hearts that work as one"

"'may the good gods give you all your heart desires: | husband, and house, and lasting harmony too. | No finer, greater gift in the world than that . . . | when man and woman possess their home, two minds, | two hearts that work as one.  Despair to their enemies, | a joy to all their friends.  Their own best claim to glory.'"

     Odysseus to Nausicaa; Odyssey 6, c. 200, trans. Fagles (New York:  Penguin, 1996), 174. 

"That distant land"

      Andy Catlett's "remembering and his thoughts have carried him by now far outside of the matter of fact of this world's present age.  He stands now with his father [Wheeler] and his father's father [Marce], and with others dear to them, in the presence of a longed-for beautiful land that they have desired as if seen afar, that yet is the same, the very land that they have known and that they know, a love-made land, dark to them until by their own love they came to see it."

     Wendell Berry, Marce Catlett:  the force of a story (Los Angeles & San Francisco, CA:  Counterpoint, 2025), 144 (The future, 14).  Concluding lines, p. 151 (The future, 15):

     As they have carried the story, the dead and the living have been carried by it through the breakages of broken times, circling generation by generation back to that distant land, which they have never reached except by trial and in spells, never yet placing two generations securely in succession, the land where more than a century ago Marce Catlett departed with cautious hope in the dark past midnight, came home broke, and in the dark before daylight the next morning went back to work.