On our first visit I am dazzled by the plush dorms and student lounges, so different from the utilitarian buildings at the Bible college. Entranced, I study the bulletin boards covered with splashy posters announcing concerts, plays, and other student activities. I want to be one of these people more than I want to convert them. I long for a brighter, more invigorating world—perhaps how a North Korean feels when staring across the border at the gleaming lights to the south.
I expect to find the decadence of drug parties, panty raids, and binge drinking. Either that culture hasn’t yet hit South Carolina or it stays hidden, because instead I see ordinary college students doing their homework in coffee shops and playing Frisbee on the lawn. Their casual dress, mostly Levi’s and T-shirts, stands out. But anything would look casual compared to the Bible college, where we wear sports coats and ties to dinner each evening and blue jeans are banned.
Strolling through the campus, I notice a group of athletes sitting on a patio. “Where are you guys from?” I ask.
“We’re with the Yale baseball team. How about you?”
“Um, I attend a Bible college down the road, and we came over here to see if anyone wants to talk about spiritual things.” They exchange smirks. I continue, “You see, in God’s economy…”
“That’s funny,” one of the athletes interrupts. “I didn’t know God had an economy.” His teammates laugh, and blood rushes to my face. I head toward the student center to watch TV.
“Don’t worry, Philip,” my fellow students reassure me when I report on my botched attempt at witnessing. “At least you sowed the seed. God’s Word doesn’t return void.”
After that first attempt I spend nearly every Saturday night in the student center, catching up on sports and the news. I engage in just enough conversation to collect a few tidbits for our required evangelism reports. The rest, I embellish.
* * *
—
Class assignments force me to keep studying the Bible, which unexpectedly captures my interest. I read Ecclesiastes and recognize my own dreary cynicism: “I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.” I read Psalms and Job and marvel that these sacred books would include such angry accusations against God. “How long, LORD? Will you hide yourself forever?…For what futility you have created all humanity!” Such biblical outbursts are common, though the professors usually skip over them.
I realize I don’t know much about Jesus, apart from the stories I learned in Sunday School. Churches in my childhood focused mostly on the Epistles and the Old Testament. As I study the four Gospels, I encounter more surprises. “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free,” Jesus promises, which strikes me as ironic on a campus that stifles freedom. I’m beginning to like this guy. When someone asks him a question, he never uses circular reasoning such as “God always answers prayer, but sometimes the answer is no.” He’s enigmatic, elusive, impossible to pin down. Most times, he tosses the question back to the person who asked it.
If Jesus showed up on campus, I wonder, what would the administration do with him? Would he, too, get shot down for questioning his teachers?
Marshall has encouraged me to read books by C. S. Lewis, which I eagerly do since he’s persona non grata on campus. Reading him, I feel a gentle pull toward belief. The book that hooks me most deeply was published the year I entered high school: A Grief Observed, a journal of anguish over his wife’s losing battle with cancer. I read about Lewis’s struggle to survive the “mad midnight moments,” then I lift my head and confront the happy-faced students around me, and the oyster shell snaps shut.
Shockingly, the college has hired a sociologist with a degree from Harvard. I sign up for his classes, which soon help me step outside the bubble of the Bible college and better understand my environment.
The professor assigns Erving Goffman’s book Asylums, a landmark study of what the author calls “total institutions.” Goffman suggests that institutions such as prisons, military academies, convents, insane asylums—and Bible colleges?—progressively condition their subjects so that in time the insiders habituate to their controlled setting. The ability to make a bed so tight that coins bounce off, or to polish shoes so bright that they reflect the sergeant’s face, doesn’t help a recruit on the battlefield. It does, however, reinforce a military command structure: “I am in charge, and you must do what I say.”
Our school, I realize, is using tried-and-true methods of social control. As if to confirm my suspicions, in one of our private meetings the dean of men admits to me that he retains some petty rules simply to teach students to obey. Which gives me an idea for my sociology project.
I distribute a printed survey form to every male freshman and senior, asking such unscientific questions as “Which rule bothered you most on entering this school?” and “Has your attitude of rebellion against the school declined since you enrolled?” True to my hunch, the seniors accept, and even defend, rules and policies that freshmen think ridiculous.
When the dean finds a copy of my mimeographed survey in a trash can, once again I land on the faculty’s watch list. “This is an insurrection!” says the college president, who grills my professor about my project. “He can’t survey freshmen. They don’t know us!”—which was my point, exactly.
The project helps me separate the school’s subculture from the body of faith it so jealously guards. Perhaps, the thought crosses my mind, I am resisting not God but people who speak for God. I’ve already learned to distrust my childhood churches’ views on race and politics. What else should I reject? A much harder question: What should I keep?
At this same time, eight hundred miles away, my brother has begun his manic spiral at Wheaton, accelerating ever faster from aestheticism to atheistic despair to Pentecostalism to mental collapse. I rush to the campus mailbox every day and look for the latest report. My fellow survivor, my pioneer and guide, is failing me. I feel alone, desperate for a solid plank to hold on to, some way to keep afloat.
One scene from the Gospels, in John 6, grabs me. I’ve pictured Jesus as the crucified Messiah, rejected by his own people. But John’s account gives a glimpse of his early popularity. Huge crowds follow him around, dazzled by his miracles and hanging on his every word, eager to crown him as their king. How does Jesus respond? By retreating to a mountain, a place of solitude. Undeterred, the crowds pursue him. The next day, Jesus gives some of his harshest teaching, so alienating the crowd that all but his closest followers abandon him. When Jesus asks his twelve core disciples if they, too, want to leave, they answer, “Lord, to whom shall we go?”
I have always thought of God as an arm-twister, a cosmic bully who schemes to break anyone who dares resist. In this account, Jesus appears wistful, even forlorn, showing no interest in compelling belief. Jesus clearly did not use the techniques of Goffman’s total institutions.
Like Marshall, I fully expect God to crush me someday—the threat Mother has held over us. Yet from the Bible I am learning about a God who has a soft spot for rebels, who empowers such people as the adulterer David, the cheater Jacob, the whiner Jeremiah, the traitor Peter, and the human-rights abuser Saul of Tarsus. A God whose Son makes prodigals the heroes of his stories.
Could that God find a place for a cynical sneak like me?
* * *
—
One Saturday evening I return to the Bible college from my ministry assignment at the state university. The contrast between the two campuses puts me in a reflective mood: a noisy, thriving cultural community set in the midst of a city compared to a quiet enclave surrounded by forests and farmland.
I think back to my high school years, living in a trailer on the grounds of a fundamentalist church that prided itself on separation from “the world.” We avoided so many pleasurable activities. No artwork adorned the walls of the church. We had music, yes, but much of it
expressed a longing for a future life. The goal seemed to be enduring life on earth in hopes of making it to Heaven someday. “This world is not my home, I’m just a passin’ through,” we sang.
A basic question occurs to me: Why would anyone anticipate a better life without experiencing at least hints of it here?
In my reading I have discovered Augustine, a connoisseur of women, art, food, and philosophy, who celebrates the goodness of created things. He says of his preconversion years, “I had my back toward the light, and my face toward the things on which the light falls.” The Latin phrase dona bona, or “good gifts,” appears throughout his writings. “The world is a smiling place,” he writes, and God its largitor, or “lavisher of gifts.”
A smiling place—not once have I thought of the world like that. Perhaps I lack certain receptors for goodness, as Mr. H. suggested. How can I find the dona bona?
* * *
—
Sometimes at night, after curfew, I steal out of the dormitory and make my way to the chapel and its Steinway grand piano. Living in the shadow of my preternaturally gifted brother, I have never played in public, not since the sixth-grade debacle with Mrs. Wiggins. But I can passably sight-read Mozart, Chopin, Beethoven, and Schubert, as long as I slow the tempo and keep a heavy foot on the sustaining pedal. I spend many hours in that chapel, the room completely dark save for a small light above the keyboard.
I have always faltered at polyrhythm, which calls for, say, the right hand to play a sequence of three notes while the left hand plays two. I start simply, counting out six, with the two hands coming in at different beats. Three notes against four proves much more daunting. Then one day I can do it without counting, and I realize that for the first time my hands are operating independently of each other.
During those nightly interludes, my fingers press some tactile order into my disordered world. In great music, only one right note or chord can come next; miss it, and the mistake jars the ears. The better I play, the more true, even sublime, the music sounds as it echoes through the empty sanctuary. And because classical pieces end with a sure resolution, that satisfying finish gives me a sense of an ending, which the rest of my life sorely lacks.
I am creating something of soul-calming beauty. Doubts, social snubs, buried wounds, hypocrisies, insecurities—they all vanish, displaced by the music. In a way that I feel in my gut but cannot articulate, I leave the chapel more hopeful that all shall be well. For a moment the world is a smiling place.
One night I try Debussy, so unpredictable after Mozart and Beethoven, his melodies light as a cloud. I feel daring, experimental, and my heart flutters in response. Then I attempt Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and piano transcriptions of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies. The music draws out of me emotions I have no words for.
Lenin once said that he refused to listen to Beethoven because the music made him want to pat children on the head. There are no small children on the college campus, but now I understand what he means.
I leave the chapel and step out into the cool night air with its canopy of stars above, feeling refreshed and transported, humming—until I climb back to reality through an open dorm window, hoping I won’t get caught breaking curfew.
* * *
—
Occasionally before turning in at night, I jog out beyond the lights of the campus, along a road lit only by the moon and stars. On one such night, a childhood memory comes to mind: a church-sponsored field trip to Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute. We kids dashed from exhibit to exhibit, and only one time did we sit still: in the planetarium. The room went completely dark and then one by one the planets and stars shone out. Soon the entire ceiling was sparkling with lights.
Finally, the earth came into view, blue and beautiful, a small dot suspended in space. For a second, a mere second, we saw ourselves for what we were, a tiny group of kids on a tiny planet in an ocean of immensity. As I stared in wonder at the gleaming lights on the dome, I had a sensation strangely new. Only now, while jogging in the dark, do I recognize it as a profoundly fitting sense of creatureliness.
In search of more solitude, I begin taking daytime hikes in the forest surrounding the four-hundred-acre campus. Following railroad ties until I tire of the smell of creosote, I then detour into the deep woods, where the scent of honeysuckle hangs in the air like a woman’s perfume. The South Carolina landscape brings back memories of my boyhood explorations with a loyal dog at my side.
One day, a glimmer of beauty catches my eye: a gold-studded chrysalis nestled among fallen leaves, cast aside for the birth of something even more resplendent. I reach down and hold the split cylinder in my hand. It seems art of the highest order, but for whom—and by whom?
I come across a pond and sit there in stillness until the animals forget my presence. After ten minutes a snapping turtle crawls out to sun on a half-submerged log. A muskrat’s nose cuts v-shaped ripples in the pond’s glassy surface. I watch a spotted fawn approach the water, eyes and ears alert, and warily lower its head for a drink. A gangly blue heron, taller than a child, lands gently by the pond’s edge and wades in on stilt legs to stand at stiff attention.
Just then I hear a deep bass croak and look up to see a fat green bullfrog, big as a catcher’s mitt, closing his wide-grin mouth. He jumps in the water with a loud splash; I flinch; and all the creatures disappear.
They take my breath away, these brushstrokes of nature that happen whether or not any human is there to observe. “I have learnt to love you late, beauty at once so ancient and so new!” Augustine confessed, regretting how long it took him to turn to God. Yet, “in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made.”
Classes at the school focus so intently on the invisible world—on concepts such as omniscience, omnipotence, and sovereignty—but here in the visible world, at the margins of belief, I feel the first uninvited stirrings of desire to know the source of such beauty. As G. K. Chesterton put it, “The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.”
Nature teaches me nothing about Incarnation or the Victorious Christian Life. It does, though, awaken my desire to meet whoever is responsible for the monarch butterfly.
* * *
—
“And the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone…’ ”
My freshman year at the Bible college, I asked various female students to join me for dinner in the allotted eighty-minute period of “socializing.” These were clumsy affairs in which overdressed male students marched across the sidewalk to the women’s dorm to collect their “dates” for a closely monitored time of touch-free conversation. Because of my reputation as a renegade, some women turned me down flat. Others made sure we had a miserable enough time that I would not ask them again.
In my sophomore year, romance does not really interest me. I’m not even sure romantic love exists. Most of the world gets along fine with arranged marriages, often loveless, and I’ve read that our Western concept of love is an invention of twelfth-century Italian troubadours. From what I can see, romance nearly always leads to misunderstandings and hurt feelings.
To help with tuition bills, I sign up for one of the nastiest jobs on campus, working in the hot and crowded dish pit, where students deposit their cafeteria trays after eating. We workers scrape excess food off the plates, separate glasses and silverware, spray them all down, and run them through a hissing, steaming conveyor-belt dishwasher. In a stainless-steel sink, we scrub bits of meat, pasta, and grease off the large cooking pots. It’s smelly, dirty work, reminiscent of working on a garbage truck.
The dish pit is where I meet Janet, a new student who has just transferred in. I notice her slender figure and flip hairdo as she nears the counter, sharing a laugh with her older sister. She makes some lightly sarcastic comment as she hands over her tray, and my eyes follow her as she
walks away and out the door. She is wearing a summery cotton dress that tests the mid-knee rule. I am wearing a white T-shirt stained with food and sweat and brownish dishwater.
I talk a friend into letting us join him and his girlfriend on a double date to town the following weekend, and Janet accepts my invitation. The evening gets off to an unpromising start. That afternoon, rushing back to the dorm from broadcasting a soccer game, I hit a rock that sends my borrowed motorcycle airborne. It lands on my leg, breaking it.
The three pick me up at the hospital, where I’m practicing with a pair of crutches. Janet’s first words to me—“Some people will do anything to get a little attention”—get my attention. She is lippy in a playful kind of way, unlike what I’ve come to expect from prim and proper Bible-college coeds.
We settle on a pizza place where Janet and I can sit while the other couple roams the downtown streets. “I’ve always wanted to try pizza,” Janet says, and for a minute I assume she comes from a background as sheltered as mine. Quite the opposite. She grew up in Colombia and Peru, the daughter of missionaries. While I was shuffling between suburban elementary schools, she was catching piranhas in a tributary of the Amazon River and looking after her pets: a parrot, an ocelot kitten, and a three-toed sloth.
I am seventeen and she all of twenty, but to me she seems world-wise beyond her years. She has an encyclopedic memory of the lyrics to pop songs from the fifties and sixties. She spent a year at a private college in Mississippi, and another at a community college in Florida. In Mississippi she tried smoking to stay awake while studying and developed a fondness for rum-and-Cokes. “So how’d I end up here? you’re wondering. Simple. I ran out of money, and my father promised to pay my tuition if I transferred to his alma mater.”
Where the Light Fell Page 24
