Lunching with the theologian

Don and Joan look at each other with eyes that are at the same time loving, deep, and hungry. It is the healthy look of newlyweds, in black and white, the same look they carry about themselves sixty-two years later, though mealtime is over. A war bride, Joan married into an age of rationing, she and Don--like many of our congregations--substantiating their diets with their own vegetables and the local rabbit population, practicing simple maths by counting the planes going overhead toward Germany and subtracting the remainders as they came back.

Don is our stooping theologian, an indefatigable spirit with a deep well of a mind, slowed only by two hip replacements and hearing aids that make crowded lunch clubs sound like white metal concerts. Joan darkens the door of lunch club to check on us, and just stand there, her smile a billboard across her face enhanced by old smile lines.

We talk for four and a half hours. About future. About the recent merger of the English Methodist Church back with the Church of England (which I will write about soon!) About postmodernism and how Don is worried about it, but how I feel that's just the tide changing--like the dawn of punk and the controversy they created--and how we need to roll with it and, daresay, enjoy it. How more important than anything in ministry to young people--apart from love--is honesty. We're all messed up people, right? Saved by grace or not?

We're at the extremes of age, Ryan and me at 23, Don and Joan in their 80s, but we are revolutionaries. We think Jesus is cool and must love God and neighbor--and we disagree on a ton--but we have the core! I would even venture to say that, should we have to flee earth on a spaceship because--and Ryan and I talk about this--global warming drowns the polar bears and the moose begin to take over the earth--then I think we'd be a pretty good team, their wisdom with our enthusiasm, their visioneering with our steadfast ability to... um... communicate with space moose?