Encounter

Professor Fred Parrella of Santa Clara University died last week. Fred was a consummate New Yorker who wore a starched shirt, cufflinks, a sports coat, and necktie in class. He liked to wax melodic about ballgames, Lucky Strikes, and planes circling in an August haze above LaGuardia Airport. I first met him in a graduate course whose reading list included social philosopher and theologian Martin Buber (1878–1965). Eventually, Fred became my mentor, colleague, and friend.

In his 1923 classic Ich und Du (I and Thou), Buber described two fundamental ways of being in the world. In the first, “causality holds sway,” and we experience the world as the product of cause and effect—an It. Even when we appreciate it, the world remains an object “out there.” In the second way, we encounter the world by being in relation with it (die Beziehung). Here, through will and grace, we recognize that the world is not merely an It but something uniquely other—a Thou.

Buber gave the example of a tree. When we come upon a tree, we may first observe its shape, its color, its root structure, and its leaves. It appears as “a rigid pillar in a flood of light.” If we delve deeper, we might classify it by family, genus, and species, or analyze its cellular processes. Yet by dividing the tree into these elements, we lose its essence—its wholeness. We might say we “lose sight of the forest” for the particularity of the tree.

For Buber, this drift into objectification dogged modern life. He lamented that society had “expunged almost every trace of a life in which human beings confront one another and enter into meaningful relationship.” What has been lost, he argued, is the capacity for genuine encounter—the ability to meet the other as Thou—and thus to glimpse a more expansive world.

In that graduate course, Fred’s presentation of Buber inspired me so deeply that I got hold of Ich und Du in the original German and struggled through it in the hope of understanding the nature of encounter. I’m not sure that worked—the German proved even more obscure than the English. I don’t know why that surprised me.

In studying Buber, I noticed something curious about Fred’s teaching. It took some time to get past the particulars of his style, but the reason Fred was acknowledged as one of the best teachers in the department was not simply that he was larger than life. It was that he made the world larger for his students. He opened up a world of relation to them, rather than reducing life to a purely mechanical chain of cause and effect. They came to view their own lives set against this higher, wider horizon.

It takes courage to do that—to give full throttle to the imagination. Buber put it in terms of taking a risk: “…the basic word can only be spoken with one’s whole being; whoever commits himself may not hold back part of himself.”

I saw Fred model this behavior in his lectures. By being open and comfortable with his own thought, he gave students permission to grapple with theological concepts freely. True, he was a performer who knew how to tell a story, but he also drew on something deeper, born of his life of relation. That is, he had compassion, and he wasn’t afraid to express it toward students and others.

I hadn’t seen Fred for some time, but the news of his death set me on my heels. We tend to think that the people in our lives are invincible and are shocked when we lose them, as if expecting them to stay suspended in time and space. We resist the fact that they are as vulnerable to the slow unraveling and impermanence of order as we are.

Fred taught for decades and inspired generations of students and teachers alike. He wasn’t a perfect man—just as Buber’s tree might have crooked limbs or blight—but he was genuine. He was witty. He was loyal. And he knew how to make the best damned martini I ever had–served with smoked oysters, of course.

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Image credits: luca romano. Want more? Click on “Amazon” for other publications or go to Robert Brancatelli. Visit other blog readers under “Who You Are.” Comment by clicking on “Leave a Reply” below, or contact us through the Contact tab above. This post is dedicated to the memory of Fred Parrella (1943-2025).