In an old Seinfeld episode, a sort of unintentional Samson/Delilah twist, Elaine breaks the news to George: 'Women tell men that bald doesn't matter to us...but really it does.' To this, George moans: 'I knew it! I knew it!'

Overheard. One bald guy to another: 'You've got to hand it to Trump. Whatever your take on his positions, you've got to appreciate that he makes it clear, there are worse things than being bald.'

Colleague Sally Allocca put me onto JAYBER CROW by Wendell Berry. Bald bachelor barber Jayber, in his 70's, looks back over his life in the hamlet of Port William, Kentucky. Just a great read!

"I have raked my comb over scalps that were dirty above and beneath. Lowered the ears of good men and bad, smart and stupid, young and old, kind and mean. Of men who have killed other men and been killed...think of that! Of a good many that went to wars and never came back.

"I became a pretty good student of family traits, shapes of heads and so forth. Sometimes funny, as when I got the suspicion of a kinship that was, you might say, unauthorized.

"I came to feel a tenderness for them all, a pleasure to touch them, help them in and out of the chair, shave their weather toughened faces...faces that had suffered things they did not talk about...

"It was moving, after a while, to realize that under my hands a generation had grown up and another passed away." (125;127)

There is a measure of pleasure in recent years that baldness is somewhat cool, that many younger men embrace it, courageously resist always comic comb-overs, and shave their heads. Still, though I guess most of us grieve a bit for our departed parts.

I have noticed there is a persistence in women and men for our periodic trips to beauty and barber shops. Noticed that in the barber shop, we hair free tops are as numerous as the hair tops. It is important to take care of the sides, even have the mocking few top stragglers mowed down. A kind of homage to what we once looked like, but an even deeper, persistent "yes" to the enduring person we are beneath our scalps and in our hearts.

Another aspect. The blessing of human touch. Not referring here to the subset of sexual touch, but the wider, deeper need to touch and be touched among humans. There is the element of kind touch that goes with barbers and beauticians, a tender taking care of, cherishing the skin we are in now.

Surely not ignoring the differences among those who sat in his chair, Jayber affirms his inclusive care for them all. "I loved to listen to them. For they spoke my native tongue."

The God we experience in Jesus, despite our digging trenches of excluding separation between the us's and them's, en-planets a circle of acceptance and grace holding us all. To live a life of including love does not dilute ethics but calls us to that higher ethic of love...not achieved by us but empowered by God in and among us.