Keys
It was Trauma City when our town’s swishy university discovered that all the door locks had come from Yale. Trouble was the keys had, too, so it was a campus-wide piece of bad PR all around. Certainly, the development office’s call on Schlage proved to no avail. It was almost as bad as the time a grant application misspelled Procter and Gamble.
I’ve recalled this event largely because keys, and by implication locks, are suddenly in the news. Specially keys to cities, an honorific frequently given to some dignitary usually either by the mayor or her representative. Not so with us and the Iraqis. Finally, TBTG, we’re moving out, but only from the urbs to the hoods.
So what did we do? We gave back the key, a big symbolic key to the mayor or his look-alike. Humor, thy name is irony. Over here, we’ve been bailing out eroding municipal infrastructures with megabucks, and now all we do is give a key, albeit a fancy one, to cities whose infrastructures we’ve spent the last six or seven years megabombing.
The church has been into keys ever since Peter got his set to the Kingdom. Trouble is, when Peter got them, let himself in, and might even have been prone to lead us all, Rome changed the locks. So far as I know, no Pope has ever offered a key even to the Archbishop of Canterbury, let alone to the Vatican and certainly not to the Kingdom.
Nothing is said that I know of about anybody making copies of Peter’s keys, but surely, to be on the safe side, somebody must have either tried to or are still trying, like some Anglo-Catholics I’ve met. What Jesus did with them after his Ascension, I suppose only his mom knows.