bookends: jack & lexy

Again, my apologies for the long silence. February has been an overwhelmingly busy month. With Friday’s meeting of the Society of Christian Ethics behind me, however, I have a moment to step back from pressing deadlines and catch my bearings again.

I returned yesterday from a wonderful weekend in San Jose. I’d flown up Thursday to attend the SCE conference in Santa Clara and to spend a couple of days with Mom & Don and Todd & Dianne.

I felt very good about Friday’s conference. The papers were arranged thematically; under the heading “Liberalism, Pluralism, and Christian Theological Ethics,” my presentation on Karl Barth’s use of religious language in public political discussions was paired with Jack Crossley’s on the affinity between liberal theology and liberal politics. Jack, who will retire this year from teaching theology and ethics at USC, wrote his dissertation on Barth 45 years ago and is recognized as one of our regional experts on Barth studies. Our papers were so closely related, and so opposite in their arguments, that it almost sounded as if I had written mine as a rebuttal to his. Jack argued that liberal Christian theology, by virtue of its recognition that descriptions of the transcendent are projections of human subjectivity, has both contributed to and benefited from the humanist ideals of democracy. I, on the other hand, argued that Christian communities contribute best to public discourse by laying out a distinct social vision in terms of orthodox theology, not as a projection of human subjectivity, but as a divine promise of reconciliation and economic justice. Of course, Jack & I both recognize that the political ramifications of liberal and orthodox theology alike have been distorted by welfare policies that understand common good in terms of distributed endowments, libertarian economics that remove personal freedom from social responsibility, and socially conservative agendas that reduce Christian morality to questions of abortion and gay rights.

It was a privilege to interact with Jack during the Q&A time after my presentation and over the course of conversations throughout the day. He mentioned to me in private that, in his younger years, he had been profoundly swept up in the logic and beauty of Barth’s theology, but that as he became more acquainted with Schleiermacher, he became less sympathetic toward Barth. He hopes that I’ll step out of my loyalty to Barth enough to look at him more critically, and I think he has a point. I have been very much under Barth’s spell over the last couple of years, as I was for a time in my late 20s, and it wouldn’t harm me to spread out a bit.

But enough about the conference. Todd put together a terrific plan for Saturday: viewing the M.C. Escher exhibit at the San Jose Museum of Art, dining at a nearby brewery, and taking Mom to see Pan’s Labyrinth in the evening. I was especially delighted that my stepbrother Steve and his wife, Deanna, were able to join us for the day. I and everyone else in the family have been enamored with Deanna since the wedding nearly five years ago. Saturday, however, was perhaps my first real opportunity to visit one-on-one with Steve in our entire adult lives, and I have to say I was struck by what a gentle and thoughtful person he is behind the sarcastic all-guy persona he puts forward. He occasionally comes down this way on business trips, so we’re going to try and get together on one of them in the near future.

The weekend wrapped up with an unexpected gift. Mom, Don and I went out for breakfast before heading to the airport. We had about a fifteen minute wait for a table at Mimi’s, during which time we sat across the entryway from what appeared to be a grandmother, a young couple of parents and a three-to-four-year-old girl. She seemed to be watching me intently as she held up three pages from a dot-to-dot coloring book, presumably torn out for her to work on over breakfast. After a minute or two of waving and winking back and forth, I said to her, “You have a beautiful smile.”

With that, she left the space in front of her mother and walked across to about two feet from where I sat and asked, “How come you don’t have any hair?”

I gasped in jest, put my hands on the top of my head, and exclaimed, “Where’d it all go?” Then I said, “Well, I have a question for you. How come you have such a beautiful smile?”

She shrugged, walked the next two feet and put her hands on my knees. I’m sure that had I extended my arms she would have crawled right onto my lap, but I considered that a line not to cross. Instead, I put out a hand, which she quickly grabbed in hers. I asked her name. It was Lexy. “Lexy!” I responded, “Why, your name is almost as beautiful as your smile. My name’s Scott.” (Just a word of wisdom to other guys, based on past painful experience: these lines never work on girls past the age of six.)

She told me about her pictures, and how she liked to connect the dots and to try and stay within the lines when she colored. Soon, understandably, her father soon came to bring his daughter back within his own immediate circle of contact, telling her that when she colored in one of her pictures maybe she could show it to me. As he led her away, she turned back to me for a moment and held out her hand. We shook, and she said, “It was nice to meet you.”

I answered, “It was nice to meet you, too, Lexy.”