Where the Light Fell

by Philip Yancey

  I smiled as he talked, because I recognized myself in his words. I had used similar language to explain away the personal testimonies of scores of my fellow students. Conversions only make sense from the inside out, to the fellow-converted. To the uninitiated they seem a mystery or a delusion.

  Years later I received a letter from a Christian philosopher researching conversions. I gave him an abbreviated account of mine, and he wrote back, surprised that I had not responded with convincing rational arguments. “Are you a fideist?” he asked. I had to look up the word in a dictionary: “One who believes based on faith rather than scientific reasoning or philosophy.”

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “All I know is that the event happened, the surest event in my life, and one that I had neither planned nor orchestrated. I cannot possibly erase those moments from my life. I felt chosen.”

  In the end, my resurrection of belief had little to do with logic or effort and everything to do with the unfathomable mystery of God. The apostle Paul bowed before that mystery. Why was he, a self-described “chief of sinners,” chosen to proclaim the message he had sworn to eradicate? Why was conniving Jacob chosen and his brother Esau rejected? Paul has no answer other than to quote God’s own words: “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”

  I wince whenever I read those words, for I think of my brother, who pursued God even as I did the opposite. And I think of my father, a man far more devout than I, wholly committed to a life of service to God, who died before his twenty-fourth birthday. Like Paul, like Job, I cannot begin to answer for God. I can only accept the free gift of grace with open hands.

  Someone is there, I realized that winter night in a college dorm room. More, Someone is there who loves me. I felt the light touch of God’s omnipotence, the mere flick of a divine finger, and it was enough to set my life on a new course.

  * * *

  —

  By then Janet and I have already set in motion our transfers to Wheaton College at the end of the school year. We’ve been accepted and have filled out applications for financial aid.

  “Maybe we should rethink the transfer,” I say one evening, as we walk back toward her dorm. “Neither one of us has the money to pay for Wheaton. Besides, we both have so many extra-credit hours here that we can graduate a semester early.”

  All that semester and into the summer, we talk over our options. A new president has hired some promising new professors at the Bible college, and academic prospects have improved. Finally, we write the school asking if we can rejoin our classmates as juniors. We both sense, a bit reluctantly, that we have more to learn at this place.

  Tell me, what is it you plan to do

  with your one wild and precious life?

  —Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”

  CHAPTER 22

  MARSHALL

  My life-changing experience at the Bible college does not impress Mother. She’s seen me fake my way through camp and church. I’m the sneak, the dissembler. Whatever happened in that dorm room probably won’t last. Besides, she has to worry about Marshall, who has been careening down another path like a car with no brakes.

  The year is 1968, and like a lot of college students, Marshall has joined the counterculture. When he flew home for the summer after his junior year at Wheaton, Mother met him at the airport. As soon as she saw his long, shaggy hair and mustache, she turned her back and refused to speak. She lets him stay in the house that summer, but she bans him from attending church because it would hurt her reputation for people to see her son looking like a hippie. That rule, he gladly obeys.

  All that summer I feel caught in a family tug-of-war. I am gingerly edging back toward faith, searching for some steady ground. I’m also concerned about my brother, and I recoil from Mother’s attitude of righteous judgment. I wonder whether she has made good on her threat to pray a “curse” on Marshall, but I dare not bring up that volatile topic.

  As my mother and brother restoke their old conflicts, I mostly listen from the sidelines, tiptoeing between two emotional titans. In every discussion that comes up—politics, religion, the Vietnam War—he stands for her polar opposite. “I knew what would happen if you went to Wheaton,” she says. “Just look at you. It turned out exactly like I thought it would.”

  Shaken by his first-semester mental meltdown, Marshall begins seeing a psychiatrist. In a series of weekly sessions, Penny hears his life story, and near the end of the summer, she gives him a diagnosis of “chronic paranoid undifferentiated schizophrenia.” When he casually mentions that news, I stare at my brother, my confidant. Do I truly know him? He has wild swings of mood and behavior, yes—but mentally ill?

  “Tell me the truth,” I ask him, as he packs a suitcase to return to Wheaton for his senior year. “Do you really think you’re crazy?”

  “I dunno, but Penny saved my neck,” he replies. “A few weeks ago I had my physical for the military draft board. I passed the exam with flying colors until I handed the sergeant an envelope from Penny marked ‘Highly Confidential.’ He took one look at the letter inside and dismissed me. Her diagnosis saved me from the army and probably Vietnam.”

  During their final session, the psychiatrist gives Marshall one more gift. “You know Penny,” he tells me later that evening. “She’s got that soft accent that makes you think she’s one of those saccharine Southern women. She’s not. She leans forward, looks me straight in the eye, and says, ‘Marshall, I’ll deny ever saying this, but you do know your mother’s the crazy one, don’t you?’ ”

  His voice cracks when he tries to speak again. “Not once had that possibility entered my mind. I didn’t respond, but Penny could tell I was a bit stunned. She waited a few minutes and added, ‘And if you don’t come to terms with that fact, you’ll never get well.’ ”

  * * *

  —

  I return to the Bible college, and Marshall resumes his studies at the Wheaton Conservatory of Music. His letters that semester have a newly blissful tone after he reunites with his girlfriend, Diane. They spend every spare minute working on piano duets. “Your brother is the most gentle, sensitive, totally romantic person I’ve ever known,” Diane writes me. “Just listening to a piece of music can make him cry.” They start discussing marriage.

  Marshall and I are both in Atlanta for Christmas break when the bottom drops out. He writes her letters daily and gets none in return—except for one breakup letter. In it, Diane confesses that she told her parents too much about him. Her parents have absolutely forbidden her to continue seeing “that long-haired agnostic.”

  My brother is disconsolate. He sits in his bedroom brooding or goes on walks through the neighborhood, smoking cigarettes. Nothing I say or do can penetrate his gloom. Silence again rules the household.

  Back at Wheaton, he visits the school psychiatrist, who confirms Penny’s diagnosis. Marshall decides to drop out of school—just before his final semester. One day at the campus mailbox, I tear open an envelope and read this cryptic note: “It’s raining, it’s 32 degrees. Home, defeated, judged crazy.” He’s heading back to Atlanta.

  Penniless and with no place to live, Marshall shows up, bereft of hope, in Mother’s driveway. For the next few weeks he lives in a daze.

  In a phone call I ask how it’s going. He gives a bitter reply. “What do you think? I’m a failure. College dropout, crazy, living with a mother who can’t stand me.” Through the rest of that school year, I keep up with him through letters and phone calls. We’ve switched roles, as though he’s the younger brother and I’m the protector.

  Needing income, Marshall calls his old employer, Grady Hospital, and gets rehired. A tough charge nurse takes him under her wing, thrilled to have an orderly with some education. “Mr. Man,” she calls him, as she calls every male in the hospital. “How you feel about dead people, Mr. Man? Most all my other ma
ns are skeered of ’em.” On his first shift, he grabs the hand of a dead burn victim to transfer the body to a gurney, and a large patch of charred skin slips off the hand like a glove. It doesn’t faze him. From then on, whenever a patient dies the nurse summons Marshall.

  In the morgue, he studies the bodies laid out on steel tables. Our own father could have lain in that room, had he not been transferred to a chiropractic center. Marshall tries to imagine the victims’ lives before the diseases, gunshots, or knife wounds that led to their demise. “I like the morgue,” he reports in one phone call. “For one thing, it’s air-conditioned. And nobody bothers you. So I take my lunch breaks there, and read philosophy books.”

  Another orderly gives him The Urantia Book, a rambling, 2,097-page concoction of philosophy and spiritism that has influenced Jimi Hendrix and Jerry Garcia. Urantia claims to be dictated by celestial beings, and Marshall finds it totally convincing. Then again, he finds everything convincing, for a time.

  Each day when Marshall enters the house after work, Mother grimaces. This is the same son who planned to be a missionary, who was a Youth for Christ club president and a choir pianist. Now she sees a long-haired freak of nature. Once, she refuses to let him in because he shows up wearing round, wire-rim glasses like John Lennon’s.

  To avoid her, Marshall goes bowling after his hospital shifts, staying out past midnight so that their paths won’t cross. On warm nights he sits outside in a lawn chair, nude, and smokes cigarettes until he feels like going to bed. His subscription to Playboy gets forwarded to the house, sparking a major explosion.

  A few days later, Mother returns home to find Marshall’s room vacant. He has moved out, and she has no idea where he is. She won’t see him again for a year.

  * * *

  —

  I get out of school in May and track Marshall down. He has switched hospitals. He lives in an informal commune with a conscientious objector and his girlfriend, along with a revolving door of drop-ins who “crash” on the floor in sleeping bags. Marshall invites me over. “Hey guys,” he says. “Meet my straightlaced brother from a Bible college.”

  He shows me around, briefing me on the wonders of the peace-and-love generation. Marshall has painted one room orange and another purple, and fashioned a light fixture out of Styrofoam cups glued together. Colorful strips of batik hang from the ceiling, along with spiderweb sculptures made of yarn. He points out the accessories they’ve bought secondhand: lava lamps, beanbag chairs, and a black padded toilet seat.

  I visit him periodically, much to Mother’s chagrin. It strikes me that at last my brother has achieved a state of complete freedom. He has a new set of friends, none of whom monitor his behavior or judge him. He eats whatever he wants, mostly mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese. Some days he won’t talk at all, while other times he holds court, spouting philosophy and recounting stories of growing up fundamentalist. And whenever he sits down at the beat-up piano he’s scavenged from somewhere, all conversation ceases.

  Soon he moves into an apartment with members of a rock band, who school him in their style of music and life. “Try these,” they say, and give him some quaaludes. “You need the right stuff to listen to rock.” Neither the music nor the quaaludes have any effect. The next night, though, he tries psychedelic mushrooms, and the universe explodes. As the drug takes effect, he listens, mesmerized, to “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” by Iron Butterfly, a heavy-metal jam that goes on for seventeen minutes.

  Marshall is hooked. “I’m switching careers,” he informs me. “I’m going to become a rock organist.” I flash back to the letters he wrote me his first year at Wheaton, when his entire philosophy of life changed every week or so. Once again he is spinning like a roulette wheel.

  Instead of rock ’n’ roll, Marshall gets hooked on drugs, mainly LSD. Every Sunday afternoon he and a few friends pile into his 1949 Plymouth—a recent inheritance from our grandfather Yancey—and drive to Piedmont Park, where they drop acid, blow bubbles, and fly kites.

  Or they simply sit cross-legged on the grass and watch as the world around them morphs. A puffy white cloud in the sky breaks into two and drips toward earth, like a Dalí painting. The sun peels into blood-orange segments. A dog on a leash levitates off the ground and turns into a unicorn. Marshall reaches out with his hand and actually feels the tactile sensation of petting the unicorn.

  The world looks and sounds and feels better on acid. Flowers glow with an otherworldly intensity—yellow petals are spun gold, red roses are like rubies nestled in leaves of emerald—and they sometimes talk! Someone strikes a match for a joint: What radiant light! A nearby band is playing music, and Marshall can hear every individual note by every instrument.

  Marshall becomes an evangelist for LSD. “You ought to try some,” he urges me. “Timothy Leary at Harvard says it can help cure schizophrenia, and I think he’s right. Acid makes me forget my problems, and it opens up my mind. Maybe it would help you explore the spiritual, or even the supernatural.” I politely decline.

  I’ve learned never to say anything that might sound like judgment or even mild disapproval—it triggers mother-memories, and Marshall erupts.

  * * *

  —

  After that summer I return to the Bible college for one final semester. Janet and I graduate early, in January 1970, and move back to Atlanta to plan a June wedding. We both land jobs at the Census Bureau and start saving money for a move to Wheaton, where I’ve been accepted to the grad school.

  One cool March evening I am sitting at home alone, with Mother off teaching a Bible class. She hasn’t seen Marshall in almost a year, and I’ve provided very few details of his new lifestyle.

  The phone rings. “Is Mrs. Mildred Yancey there?” a man asks when I pick up.

  “No, she’s not. May I take a message?”

  “What about Philip David Yancey?”

  “Speaking. May I help you?”

  “Yes, this is the DeKalb County Police Department. We have a Marshall Yancey in custody, and he’s in pretty bad shape. He says he’s on acid—I don’t know. You better get over here, and I recommend that you bring along the strongest person you know.”

  “Could I ask why?”

  “Yeah, because he’s violent.”

  “My brother’s a pacifist,” I protest. “He wouldn’t hurt anybody.”

  The man laughs in a friendly sort of way. “Oh, really? He’s already flattened two people, and he had me on the ground in a hammerlock. You’d best not show up alone.”

  When I hang up, my heart is beating so hard I can feel it against my rib cage. I’m scared, agitated, and unbelieving all at once. I call Penny, Marshall’s psychiatrist, and ask her advice. She says I should take him to a safe place—she’ll work on lining up someone—and try to get him to eat and drink. “He’s hallucinating, so it’s important that you stay with him until he comes back down,” she says.

  Next, I call our dependable uncle Winston and ask him to meet me at the police station in Decatur, an Atlanta suburb.

  It’s forty degrees outside, and I throw an extra jacket in the car in case Marshall needs it. I force myself to stop at red lights and keep to the speed limit, even though my heart is throbbing like a race-car engine.

  The friendly officer, a sergeant, greets me at the station and fills me in. We are meeting in an open office, surrounded by crackling radios and policemen drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups. “So it’s like this,” he says. “We got a call from an elderly gentleman. He was out raking leaves when an almost-naked hippie wandered into his yard—that would be your brother. The old man asked your brother if he needed any help and got slugged in the jaw. You’re lucky the guy’s not pressing charges.

  “We showed up and found your brother sitting on the grass in his underpants. I’m the one he wrestled to the ground. It took two of my colleagues to pull him off me—and, as you can see, I ain’t a
small guy.”

  Soon my uncle joins us. We talk for a while, giving the sergeant some of Marshall’s history. Finally, he says, “Tell you what, I’m willing to give your brother a break. Far as we can tell, he’s got no record. Maybe this will teach him a lesson about those drugs. I can release him into your custody. I just have one question to clear up. He’s got needle marks all over his arms. When I asked him about it, he said he gives blood. Come on—nobody gives that much blood. Is he on heroin?”

  I explain that Marshall has a rare blood type and regularly gives blood plasma to earn extra money. The sergeant seems satisfied, and he leads us to a concrete holding cell. Directly under a bare lightbulb sits my brother on a metal stool. His wrists are handcuffed together behind his back and around a pole, forcing him to hunch over. He’s barefoot, still wearing nothing but underpants, shivering. His hair, a mass of unwashed curls, puffs out from his head. His glasses are missing. Slowly he lifts his head and his glazed eyes locate me, though with no sign of recognition.

  He keeps staring, and I feel a sudden chill on the back of my neck. Marshall has always been my sophisticated big brother. I have seen him quoting philosophers at university-hosted debate tournaments and performing at classical concerts in a tuxedo. This creature before me resembles a wild animal.

  I put my hand against the wall to steady myself. “Marshall, it’s me, Philip. And Uncle Winston. We’ve come to take you home.”

  The sergeant unlocks Marshall’s handcuffs. “Let’s go, buddy,” he says. “We’re lettin’ you off this time. Just don’t ever do something stupid like this again.” My brother rubs his wrists, but gives no reaction.

  I hurry to the car to retrieve the extra jacket, and the sergeant scrounges up a pair of dirty sweatpants for Marshall to wear. As we walk out into the cold, I can see my brother’s lips moving, and I realize he’s talking to himself. I open the passenger door for him, unsure whether he might turn on me. He looks me in the eye for the first time all evening.