I sometimes see in her face a look of fear and loss. I try to think like her—a disillusioned widow and parent. I soon give up. I can only think like me.
One thing becomes clear, though. If this is the Victorious Christian Life—if this is what a person who hasn’t sinned in decades looks like—then I want no part of it.
* * *
—
Every few weeks I get a letter from Marshall, written with a fountain pen in his trademark turquoise ink. He seems genuinely happy.
At the Bible college, his gifts were recognized at once. He took a music test required of all freshmen, and the professor announced the results: “One student got 199 of the 200 questions correct. He only missed one question about popular music.” Regardless, Marshall still has to enroll in the basic music-appreciation class; this college runs by rules.
Immediately, Marshall falls in love with the glorious nine-foot Steinway in the school chapel, which has a sound and touch like no piano he has played. Other students wander in and sit in the back rows just to hear him practice. To earn money, he signs on to accompany voice students, who are taught by a barrel-chested tenor in a run-down building at the bottom of a steep hill. The voice teacher finds to his delight that his new accompanist can play anything, in any key, with or without music.
One Sunday, Marshall volunteers to fill in as the pianist for a church service. “Brothers and sisters,” the host pastor announces, “I want you to choose a hymn, and our guest pianist will on the spot compose a special arrangement of it.” Word gets around, and soon my brother’s booked every weekend.
Marshall becomes the main pianist for the school’s traveling choir. He and Larry, the choir organist, work up dueling keyboard arrangements for the offertories. One night at a church in Ohio, Marshall discovers that the piano, dragged into the sanctuary from a Sunday School room, is tuned to a pitch one half-note lower than the organ’s. “It’s the most challenging thing I’ve ever done,” he tells me over Christmas vacation. “I had to transpose everything into a different key one half-note higher, on the fly. It drove me crazy to play the A key, which should be an absolute 440 cycles per second, and hear an A-flat. I had to force myself not to hear the music, rather to play it as an exercise in pure mathematics.” At last, my brother is a hero.
He plunges into class work with enthusiasm, spurred on by a group of upperclassmen who take pride in their reputation as Hyper-Calvinists—hardcore believers in a sovereign, all-controlling God. That same Christmas he talks up the virtues of Jonathan Edwards’s sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” which I studied without pleasure in my high school English class. By the end of his freshman year, Marshall has read all two thousand pages of John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion.
Even on vacation he studies a set of flash cards to learn Greek and Hebrew vocabulary. “The classes are easy,” he says. “When I found out that the school charges a flat tuition rate, I signed up for twenty-seven weekly hours of class time”—almost double the normal load of fifteen hours. It appears, for the moment, that my brother has found his stride.
It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers.
—James Thurber, “The Scotty Who Knew Too Much”
CHAPTER 18
COLLEGE
During my senior year, I apply to the same Bible college my brother is attending in South Carolina. “Are you sure about this decision?” the high school counselor asks. “With your record here, you could probably get a scholarship to a place like Duke or Davidson.”
Her words sorely tempt me. But I’ve witnessed so many clashes between Marshall and our mother over acceptable colleges that I decide not to fight the inevitable. I figure I can tolerate a Bible college for a couple of years, treating it much like a junior college, and then transfer somewhere else—following in Marshall’s footsteps once again. It will give us time together my first year away from home. Besides, a year at this school in 1966 costs less than two thousand dollars, including room and board.
On the four-hour drive to the college for freshman orientation, Mother retreats into one of her dark moods, and we barely speak. All week the scowl on her face has warned me not to act too excited about leaving home. When we arrive on campus, I collect my dorm keys and she stands by the car under a hazy September sky as I move the sum total of my earthly belongings—two suitcases full of clothes, a box of books, and a reel-to-reel tape recorder—into my new home. “Take care, y’hear?” are her last words to me.
From the second-floor window I watch, puzzled, as her car circles the campus three times before disappearing. Years later, I learn that she cried all the way to the Georgia border after dropping me off. At the time I have no way of seeing behind her stern mask.
Not the strained farewell or even the oppressive South Carolina heat can dampen my spirits, however. I feel as if a cage door has swung open. I’m on my own now, free at last.
* * *
—
On debate trips I’ve visited colleges where the elevators smell like urine and graffiti covers the walls. Not here. The dorm is spotless and smells like Lysol. To control costs, the college requires all students to accept a work detail. I sign up to clean bathrooms—not a prime assignment, but one that doesn’t bother me after my summer job on a garbage truck.
Soon I meet my roommate, Bob, a graduate of a boarding school in Asheville, who has two main interests in life, girls and soccer. As he changes clothes after a workout, he catches me staring at his socks. “Yeah, I wear garters,” he explains. “It’s the only way I’ve found to hold up my socks. You can see how soccer practice has thickened my calves.” I nod, as if all my friends wear garters.
That first night, many of the guys in our freshman class gather on an outdoor patio to get acquainted. One by one they speak, introducing themselves. An older student tells us about his life of sin in the navy, when he had a woman in every port. “I’m thrilled to enter a college where we’re sharing our faith in Christ together rather than having a beer party,” he says. “I’ve tasted that life, and it leads nowhere.” Another freshman thanks God for a wealthy Christian businessman in Florida, who found him living in a rat-infested shack in an orange grove and offered to pay his way to the Bible college.
I stand at the edge of the group, wondering if I should jump in. Surrounded by eager Christians, I have that old feeling of splitness. Part of me wants to belong and part of me wants to flee this place. But the best way to fit into a Christian college, I decide, is to act like a Christian—a routine I know well. After swallowing a couple of times, I, too, give a testimony. “Unlike some of you, I’ve been a Christian almost all my life,” I begin. “But I’ve strayed from the Lord these last few years.” I continue along that line, repeating phrases I have perfected in similar gatherings at summer camp.
When I finish, a stranger standing next to me slips his arm around my shoulders and says, “Bless you, brother. I believe God’s going to use you mightily.” I feel a wave of approval, quickly followed by an undertow of self-disgust. There I go again, doing whatever it takes to climb the ladder.
Even during orientation week I have the sinking feeling that I don’t belong here. The students’ smiles seem glued on, their music saccharine, their words predictable. I’ve heard this spiritualese before. “God provided a car for me” really means My parents gave me a cool high school graduation gift. “God closed the door for me to attend a state university” means I didn’t get accepted. “I missed the bus today…Well, the Lord must have a reason for it.” Maybe you should set your alarm next time instead of blaming God.
When my brother arrives a few days later, he introduces me to a few of his upperclassmen friends, who laugh when I confess my skeptical attitude. “Think of life on campus as a kind of game,” they say. “It has its own language and its own rules. If you want to fit in here, you have to play it. Just go along, do
n’t make too many ripples, and try to survive. There’s life after this school. We’re just hanging on.”
Sometimes I have the unsettling sense that everyone possesses a spiritual secret but me. Other students speak of God as an intimate friend. They seem perfectly content studying the Bible all day, and unquestioningly accept whatever the professors say. More often, I conclude there is no secret, just a learned pattern of conformity, of mimicking others’ behavior and parroting the right words.
I begin to find a perverse pleasure in acting as a renegade. I prepare for class by researching questions that might stump the teachers. I stare silently at other students until their faces flush and they turn away. I sit by a girl in the cafeteria and ask, “Do you think you’re pretty?” or “Have you ever had sex?” or “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” just to watch the response.
* * *
—
Every student gets a copy of the college’s rule book, which we must read and sign. Its sixty-six pages make for a perfect setup: “Hey, we get a page of rules for each of the books in the Bible!” The college sees itself as a substitute parent for its students and a strict parent at that. Forbidden activities include bowling, dancing, playing cards, billiards, skating at public rinks, movies, boxing, wrestling, and “the presentation of opera and musical programs which include ballet, dancing, and suggestive songs.”
In a series of required meetings, the dean of men reinforces the code. “We take these rules very seriously,” he says. “Each of them is based on a biblical principle, and all of you have signed your willingness to abide by them while you’re on campus.” The prohibition of facial hair and restrictions on men’s hair length seem odd to me, since our textbooks depict Jesus, the apostles, and most male saints with flowing hair and beards.
The sixties sexual revolution has swept the culture elsewhere without penetrating this school’s airtight environment. “Students must absolutely avoid holding hands, embracing, kissing, and other physical contacts,” reads the rule book. To limit temptation, underclassmen are allotted two dates a week—double dates, of course—and one of these must be to a church service. Apart from that, even students engaged to be married can “socialize” just once per day, during the evening meal in the cafeteria. Otherwise, no casual conversation between couples is allowed. No phone contact either.
Female students have even stricter standards. The rules forbid slacks on women, except for certain activities when slacks are permitted if worn under a skirt. My freshman year, coeds’ skirts must extend below the knee. Staff members stand in the lobby of the women’s dorm to scout for scofflaws, making suspects kneel on the floor for a more accurate check.
The school treats sex as something radioactive. As Valentine’s Day approaches, a classmate who works in the school office tells me about a bizarre scene she has just witnessed: the dean of women in white gloves individually censoring the tiny heart-shaped candies to be used as decorations for a party. You’re mine, Friends forever, Be my Valentine pass muster; Cutie pie, Hot lips, Love ya go right into the trash can.
Despite the school’s best attempts, American culture is changing too fast for the rule makers to keep pace. Over the next two years—the miniskirt era—the acceptable skirt length for women students creeps up to mid-knee and then to the top of the knee. As for male students, Billy Graham steers some of his long-haired “Jesus people” to the school. To their consternation, these new converts are met by deans who order them to a barbershop and confiscate their record albums.
Students are supposed to avoid any music not “consistent with a Christian testimony,” a phrase open to much interpretation. Though I still prefer classical music, I sometimes listen to tapes of Simon and Garfunkel or the Beatles in the privacy of my headphones. Elsewhere, rock ’n’ roll is taking over the airwaves, and during my freshman year a visiting speaker, Bob Larson, spends several days on campus lecturing on its dangers.
A musician himself, Larson stands in front of the chapel with a shiny electric guitar and plucks a few loud chords to demonstrate the threat we face. According to him, the vibrations permanently alter the medulla oblongata at the base of the human brain. He quotes the manager of the Beatles, who says about his band, “Only Hitler ever duplicated their power over crowds.”
Bob Larson’s visit sparks an antirock revival. One night, I come across a bonfire in the center of campus. Scores of students are smashing their records and throwing them into the flames. I plead with one zealous young student to please not throw his classical albums into the fire. “They don’t glorify God,” he says, tossing Beethoven and Brahms on top of the melting vinyl of Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones.
After a few months I get accustomed to the cloistered environment of the Bible college. It begins to seem almost normal—until I return home for a vacation break. On the streets of Atlanta I see braless women in miniskirts, angry protests against the Vietnam War, and civil rights marches with students raising their fists in a Black Power salute. I experience an abrupt culture shock, not unlike what an Amish person must feel visiting Times Square.
At my grandparents’ house I flip through the photos in Look and Life magazines and see a civil rights leader’s bleeding head, housing projects ablaze, cops beating hippies, and a naked young girl screaming from napalm burns. I wonder why no one talks about these things at the Bible college. The United States has sent thousands of young men to their deaths in a Southeast Asian jungle, has suffered riots in major cities and universities, and has undergone a sexual revolution, all while we Bible-college students have been debating the fine points of Calvinism and measuring hair and skirt lengths.
* * *
—
Marshall lives in a different dorm, which limits our contact. I can tell that the glow of his first year at the Bible college has worn off. One indication: he spends more of his spare time playing Ping-Pong than the piano. “Let’s take a walk,” I suggest one day. “You don’t seem happy.”
“No kidding,” he says, bitterly. “Joyce just broke up with me. She says I’m not spiritual enough.”
We stroll down a paved road to a dirt path that leads to woods I’ve been exploring. Marshall brings up a recent incident in his speech class. “This school practices a form of thought control,” he says. “In this class everybody has to deliver two speeches on any topic they choose. In the first one I argued that dancing should be permissible. In the second I discussed the school’s position on rock music. As you know, I can’t stand listening to rock, but the school’s ban makes no sense. You can’t find anything in the Bible about immoral music.”
When I show interest, he recaps some of the arguments from his speech. “The church has long opposed whatever’s new in music. For instance, in medieval times they wouldn’t allow a composer to use the interval tritone—you know, three adjacent whole tones. They called it ‘the devil in music.’ Yet now we hear it all the time in classical music. Before long we’ll probably start hearing rock music in churches and this school will look ridiculous.”
For the two speeches he received a D- and an F. Marshall knew he got those grades not because of his preparation or delivery but simply because the teacher disagreed with his opinions. He appealed to the faculty dean, who advised him, “Just choose a topic that won’t upset the professor.”
“What’d you do?” I ask.
“I gave a speech on servanthood and got an A+.”
A few weeks later Marshall tells me he’s not sure he’s a Christian. He invited a woman on a date to hear the pianist Van Cliburn. Afterward he critiqued the performance, and then the conversation turned more personal. “I’m not sure I’m saved,” he admitted. His date led him through a series of verses from the book of Romans, reviewed the Sinner’s Prayer (which he knew by heart), and then prayed with him. The next day, he felt no different.
“I don’t know what should be happening, but I certainly feel
no calmness or peace, like people around here describe. I’ve never had the sensation of being caught up in something supernatural, something greater than myself.” He stops himself, adding, “Except in music maybe. But you don’t need to be a Christian to feel that. How do you know what’s fake and what’s real?”
I have no answer for him, because I’ve been struggling with the same question as long as I can remember. I bring up a recent example: “Remember that chapel service when Tim gave the tearjerker story about his fiancée dying in a car accident on the way to visit him? The whole school’s crying and praying for him. Next we learn from his sister back in Atlanta that Tim’s a repressed homosexual, was never engaged, and made up the whole story.”
Marshall and I part, our doubts unresolved. A short time later, during a chapel service, I’m surprised to see my roommate, Bob, mount the steps and ask the school president if he can take the microphone. Between sobs he confesses his high school sins in more detail than the administration probably appreciates. I’m stunned, having no inkling of his lurid past.
“Though I’m the son of missionaries, I’m just now becoming a Christian,” Bob says. He speaks with such authenticity and power that several other students come forward and ask him to pray with them.
A few months later Bob admits to me that he fabricated much of what he said that day—“I just started talking, and all sorts of wild stories came out.”
Marshall’s question comes back to me. How do you know what’s fake and what’s real?
* * *
—
The school requires every student to select a Christian Service assignment to support a local ministry. Marshall naturally opts to play the piano at nearby churches. I study a list of alternatives that includes chapel services at Fort Jackson, a stint at an institution still called “Home for the Retarded,” door-to-door evangelism, and visits to prisons or a juvenile delinquents’ facility.
Where the Light Fell Page 21