ERS at 97!

With Pepperdine on break and Swiss schools ending at noon, we drove up the mountain to wish Mrs S "Happy Birthday!"

Sometimes I think she'll outlive me.

We gave a wonderfully read audiobook of Elizabeth Enright's children's classic, "The Four Story Mistake"

and multicolored roses arranged in a vase I gave the Schaeffers almost 30 years ago; filling this low-ceiling chalet with their fragrance.

Served up local patisseries - a local bakery does exceptional work - on one of Mrs S's hammered aluminum platters,

then lit up sparklers spelling 97.

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Jack's second patisserie was "mille feuille" ("thousand layers") - a puff pastry with French origins dating 400 years. Bakeries here serve a pink or white icing with custard layered between pastry dough.

As with cream puffs, when they're fresh, the dryness of the thin pastry balances the custard filling for a crisp contrast. Italians call it a Napoleon; a baklava with custard, maybe. I asked Jack, tasting his first mille-feuille, "What do you think?" Reply: "It's awesome, Daddy."

The chalet is crammed with the material traces of a rich past, objects that are lovingly used, granting a sense of celebration to everyday events: tea with English bone china, garden flowers on the table. As busy as L'Abri was in those days, it wasn't the drinking coffee on the run culture of Starbucks.

My own family had nice dishes that were used on New Years Day, then stored the rest of the year. I & others learned from ERS the utility of beauty - its "use value," as Marxists say - recovering not only theological purity, but an eye and ear for, lack of a better term, aesthetics.

The beauty of holiness, a love of the Law, a poetics of truth, an historical faith; the relationship between content and delight.

These aspirations for a full-orbed approach were an ERS hallmark, as she tirelessly strove for art in everyday life, the vitality of prayer, musical imagination, appreciation of craftsmanship, children's literature, & breaking bread as the workshop for human belonging - all with an incredible taste for flair & style. A Christian Chanel.

Many of us now self-consciously reach for what she evinced, naturally, reminding me of her often spoken wish, "I pray my children will not be veneer, but solid oak, maple, cherry."