the visit

I visited my mentor, Dr. Charles B. Jones, today. The drive to Catholic U. was as stressful as always, but I made it in time for the 2PM lecture, parking by the Columbus School of Law, where I dumped enough coins into the four-hour parking meter to make it gag.

Before I entered the building, I checked by BlackBerry for messages, and saw one from Dr. Jones: "NO LECTURE TODAY" was the subject line. I opened the email, and saw:

Sorry, Kevin, the lecture is on Friday, not today. I seem to have left that part out.

I smiled. Such a mistake is not typical of Dr. Jones; it made him human.

So I walked uphill to the main campus, passing unfamiliar structures-- buildings and benches and sidewalks that weren't there back in 2002. It occurred to me that, despite having been back home several times during my 2002-2008 stint in Korea, I had never, in all those years, taken the time to stroll through CUA's campus. One building in particular, the new University Center, looks spanking new.

I made my way to the Caldwell Building, where the School of Religion and Religious Studies is housed. Dr. Jones's office used to be on the third floor, but that's been taken up by the School of Canon Law (which didn't use to be a school unto itself). I asked the admin assistant in the Canon Law office where Dr. Jones would be, and she pointed me back down to the first floor. I found him tucked into a quiet corner office there, a calligraphy saying "cha-do" (literally, "tea-way") over his head on the back wall.

It was great to catch up with him. He still chafes at the fact that CUA's Asian Studies program is almost nothing, and that more isn't being done in terms of interreligious dialogue (he took a moment to praise the Georgetown program, about which I know little). We kicked around a few topics in religious diversity (Dr. Jones is probably more sympathetic to Heim than I am), talked about Asian culture, the new crop of undergrad and grad students (I envy the new group their opportunity to do an 800-level seminar on Zen with Dr. Jones), changes in the school's structure, family matters, and renovations inside the Caldwell Building.

And so the conversation drew to a close. Dr. Jones rose and walked me partway down the first-floor hallway, then turned left into the men's room while I continued down to Caldwell's exit. I had to grin: before we'd left Dr. Jones's office, I asked him whether it'd be all right to snap his picture for the blog. He joked that maybe we should get a pic of him lying in a ditch somewhere, covered in vomit, with empty bottles of booze around him. "Ah, so this is what's become of him!" the people would say. Yeah, Dr. Jones is like that. I told him that, if I didn't think it would affect his career, I'd seriously make arrangements to photograph that scenario. We both laughed.

The informal plan is for us to meet again this coming Friday, and I'll be bringing along my digital voice recorder so we can talk shop about issues in dialogue, pluralism, and the like. Ought to be fruitful.


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