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In the the late 1960’s I attended a little Lutheran college, a two-year coeducational school, across the Bay from San Francisco. I shouldn’t suppose you would be surprised to hear that I was a little Lutheran myself. These many years later, I am a little less Lutheran, but my theological evolution cannot be entirely attributed to that particular institution.
A little Lutheran high school was on the same campus. The college and high school shared classrooms and a chapel, a dining hall, dormitories, and even some of the members of the faculty. A high school girl told me a story about one of our instructors, an unmarried and youthful man, not even a decade ahead of me in age, who taught a first-period, thrice-weekly sociology class for high school sophomores and often entered the room and stepped to his lectern in the same moment as the first-hour bell was sounding.
Though the man wore a coat and tie, his manner was casual and warm, his hair and sideburns were bountiful. One morning, as he began the day’s lesson, he became aware of a bit of tittering rippling round the room, but when he frowned at the students, they settled themselves down. He continued with what he had to say.
Not long later, on another morning in that same class, the giggling occurred again, but this time it was less suppressed, and when the instructor once more frowned in puzzlement, a girl rose from her desk, approached him, and whispered an explanation. The professor was wearing, she gently informed him, a bit of shaving lather, like a dainty bird’s egg, behind each sideburn. He thanked the girl, plucked a handkerchief from his hip pocket, and wiped the whiteness away.
Then he sighed and smiled and told the class, “This, I am afraid, is your loss! You could have enjoyed a quiet chuckle at my expense for the rest of this semester, but now, ladies and gentlemen, I don’t expect I shall ever fail to rinse my face again!”
As with some of the other principles promoted in the Lutheran curriculum, a few of the students pondered whether they should accept this one as a literal and immutable truth.
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