Mother refuses to fill out the financial-assistance forms required of parents, which Wheaton graciously disregards. She also makes good on her promise to block Marshall’s friend Larry from transporting him. In the end, our uncle Winston drives my brother to the airport to catch a flight to Chicago. At Marshall’s age, he had hitchhiked all the way to California, and thought it would do his nephew good to see more of the country. Plus, as he told Marshall, “You’ve got a chance to become the first Yancey in our line to graduate from college.”
Bereft of my main companion, I return to the Bible college as a sophomore. I hang around Marshall’s friends, most of whom seem envious of his transfer. By now I’ve abandoned any effort to play the Christian game. Perhaps my brother’s cynicism has proved contagious.
In high school I knew how to compete: by working hard and using my brain. At this place, intelligence seems like a negative.
Bible classes stir up questions for me. What are we supposed to make of all the violence in the Old Testament: Elisha calling on bears to maul his tormentors, Joshua’s genocide against the Canaanites, God’s deadly punishment of people who make a simple mistake? And should we believe John’s account of the Resurrection or Matthew’s—which of the conflicting details can we trust? When I raise such questions in class, other students look on me as a heckler intent on destroying party unity or a germ that has broken through the immune barrier.
More and more, I accept the general opinion of me as a “bad seed.” Ostracism I don’t mind. I have years of experience in turtling down under a hard shell, resisting pressures to conform. I simply can’t swallow some of what goes on at this school.
Take Mr. S., son of a U.S. congressman and a legend on campus. He attended the Bible college in its early days and now is a revered professor. He gazes straight ahead and at the top of his lungs shouts his lectures, which are usually held in the school chapel to accommodate all his students. He seems almost robotic, waving his arms and speaking in a rhythmic cadence, with a Southern accent like the one I’ve been trying to overcome.
“Some people ask me, ‘Frank, what’s yo’ favrit book in the Bible?’ I tell them, mah favrit book in the Bible is the book I’m studyin’ rat now. And mah favrit chaptuh in the Bible is the chaptuh I’m studyin’ rat now. And my favrit vus in the Bible is the vus I’m studyin’ rat now.”
Or he starts down the alphabet: “Jesus Christ is the alpha and the omega. That means Jesus Christ is the A, Jesus Christ is the B, Jesus Christ is the C…” To my astonishment, he goes through all twenty-six letters.
From taking his Old Testament survey course my freshman year, I know it is impossible to derail Mr. S. unless you sit directly in front of him and wave your arms like a person in distress—which I do, regularly. Only then might he tolerate a question. No professor frustrates me more, because Mr. S. has the most extreme views of anyone on campus. He lambastes Catholics. He opposes the J. B. Phillips version of the Bible because Phillips had a friendship with C. S. Lewis, who drank beer and smoked a pipe. He refuses to read the Sunday or Monday newspapers since producing them obligates employees to work on Sunday.
Like most of the Bible-college staff, Mr. S. seems uptight about sex. Married for twenty-five years, he nevertheless directs his wife to sit as far away from him as possible on the car’s bench seat, lest someone who doesn’t know they are married draw the wrong conclusion from their physical closeness. He disposes of his stock in a department store chain because it sells swimsuits, which goes against his convictions about “mixed bathing.” In a baleful tone of voice, he warns the virginal girls in class, “When you wear lipstick, you are saying to the world, ‘Kiss me! Kiss me!’ ”
Some of his views make the administration nervous, though they tolerate Mr. S. as an icon and alumni favorite. Besides everything else, I oppose his style of teaching. He insists, “Sophistication is the greatest barrier to the Holy Spirit,” and perhaps for that reason he gives us inane busywork assignments. Every day we complete fill-in-the-blank questions in a 250-page notebook. Not even my high school would use such antiquated methods.
My freshman year, I worked at least an hour each night on my notebook—more time than anyone I knew. Yet Mr. S. gave me a B. Was he punishing me for asking questions in class? I scheduled an appointment with him and asked, “I’d like to know what criteria you use in grading the notebooks, because I want to improve in the future.”
A stack of more than two hundred of the thick black notebooks towered behind his desk. Somehow he’d managed to grade them in a mere three days. Mr. S. smiled and answered, with a tone of utter confidence, “The Holy Spirit tells me what grade each notebook deserves.” I couldn’t argue with that.
But during my sophomore year, my new roommate sees my copious notebooks and thinks, Why should I do all this work? Unbeknownst to me, he changes the identifying sheet at the front and submits my notebook as his own. This time Mr. S. awards a grade of A+. My suspicion is confirmed. I doubt that the Holy Spirit would reward a cheater.
* * *
—
Another professor, Mr. S.’s opposite in style and temperament, is the most beloved figure on campus. A shy, painfully introverted man, Mr. H. assumes a different persona when he stands before a classroom. “Look up heah,” he begins, moistening his lips with a sideways flick of the tongue, and proceeds to captivate students no matter what he teaches. His classes on child psychology, the Prophets, and biblical hermeneutics, or interpretations, are among the school’s most popular.
One day Mr. H. approaches the podium in chapel as the scheduled speaker. He stands there for a moment, looking out over the gathered faculty and students. He clears his throat, moistens his lips, and says, “All week I’ve been listening for a word from the Lord. I never got one. You’re dismissed.” Then he sits down, leaving the entire assembly stunned. We file out in silence.
After that, I like Mr. H. very much.
He alludes to deep wounds from childhood, which he never spells out. Whatever their source, those wounds keep him from teaching a formulaic faith. Believing Mr. H. is a person I can trust with my growing frustrations about the school, I ask for a personal appointment in his office.
“I don’t think I belong here,” I tell him. “People treat me like some kind of deviant, but to tell you the truth, the school itself seems a little sick to me.” He shows no sign of surprise, and nods for me to continue.
“I don’t see much grace on this campus. Some of us are upset about the way the school handled Dan’s death.” (The previous year, a junior had drowned in a nearby river when a dam release unexpectedly raised the water level.) “Did you know that students openly said in class that Dan drowned as God’s punishment for swimming on Sunday? Teachers didn’t contradict them either. And then the administration slapped a work penalty on his companion for breaking the rules—a guy who was traumatized over losing his best friend.”
He keeps listening, so I keep talking. “We hear all this stuff about the Victorious Christian Life, but it seems to me it just sets up a kind of self-righteousness competition. Students give fake testimonies to appear more spiritual. Professors dismiss C. S. Lewis because of a silly thing like smoking a pipe. And I think you’re aware of what the dean put my brother through last year over drinking a cupful of wine.
“I never hear the administration admit they’re wrong about anything, even though you and I both know they’ve made some bad decisions. Rules get changed every year, but the deans never acknowledge the previous rules were arbitrary—they’re couched in all this talk of biblical principles. No one challenges the extreme views of a Bob Larson or Mr. S. And that Bible professor who was reported by female students—he simply disappeared, with no explanation. To me it looks like a cover-up.”
Mr. H. removes his glasses and rubs his bald head. He hasn’t said a word, not once interrupting me. I wonder if I’ve gone too far.
“I guess w
hat I’m trying to say is that I don’t experience any grace here. There’s authority and control and high ideals. But not much room for error and not much place for somebody who thinks outside the party line.”
He rocks his desk chair, waiting a while before speaking. “You’re right, we’ve made some mistakes,” he says at last. “We’re ordinary people here. We’re not perfect.” His soft tone of voice helps me relax.
We talk for almost an hour, and I feel relieved just having someone to vent to. One thing that he says sticks with me: “Perhaps the grace is here, and you don’t have the receptors to receive it.” From any other professor, I would have resented the suggestion, but not from Mr. H.
Perhaps so, I think, as I walk back to the dorm. What is it that tempts me to see the worst in people? Perhaps I’m as much at fault as the school.
A few days later I am sitting in chapel. The school requires students to attend services daily, with no absences excused apart from illness. This is one of the most anticipated chapels of the year, a visit by Anthony Rossi, owner of Tropicana. An immigrant from Sicily, Rossi has built Tropicana into the world’s largest supplier of fresh orange juice, a company ultimately purchased by PepsiCo. We know him as one of the college’s major benefactors, a generous man who sends refrigerated trucks to our school direct from Florida. Every week when the truck pulls up, students dash out to help unload boxes of orange and grapefruit juice, which the cafeteria serves at breakfast in unlimited supply.
Anthony Rossi is a school hero. If he spends his chapel time reading from Leviticus in Sicilian, we’ll give him a standing ovation. We sit quietly, listening to his message delivered in a thick-tongued accent.
Of all the things he could talk about that day, Rossi chooses his greatest failure. One year when an early freeze damaged the crop, he tells us, he illegally dumped sugar into the orange-juice vats to sweeten it—and got caught. He paid hefty fines, and competitors almost drove him out of business. He was humbled by the ordeal, his Christian reputation ruined for a time. But he says he learned more from that blunder than from any of his successes.
In my time at the Bible college, I’ll end up hearing several hundred chapel talks. Only two speakers stand out to me: Mr. H. and Anthony Rossi, the only two to admit failure and weakness.
* * *
—
After a class on the Gospels, I conclude that Marshall and I both represent the stony ground described in one of Jesus’s parables. Our soil has been baked hard—overexposure to the sun, maybe—and the seeds of faith that fall on us don’t take root.
I’m convinced I’ll never become a model Bible-college student, which leaves me two options for my remaining time here: I can fake it as a loyal hypocrite or live authentically as a truthful traitor. I choose the latter.
In a sort of reverse-silent-witness, I sit outdoors and read provocative books, such as Harvey Cox’s The Secular City and Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian. I take secret satisfaction in my reputation as the antitype of the ideal student. I don’t care what others say or think about me. In fact, a devious part of me enjoys the estrangement.
I keep to the margins, flaunting authority just enough to cause irritation but not enough to prompt serious retribution. I begin reading magazines, Time and Esquire, during chapel. As speakers exposit the Bible, I brush up on the Tet Offensive, the My Lai massacre, and the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia. Within a few days one of the attendance takers in the balcony reports me, and I receive a summons to see the dean, the same man who nailed my brother for drinking.
“It’s come to my attention that you’ve been reading magazines during chapel,” he begins.
“That’s right, sir. I have been.” A look of surprise crosses his face at my ready admission. But he doubles down.
“We put a lot of planning into these chapels with the intent that students learn from the wisdom of the speakers,” he says.
“I understand, and you should know that I’ve mastered the ability to listen to the speaker and read magazines at the same time.”
Evidently the dean has not heard the multitasking defense before, because he sits back in his chair and strokes his chin for a while before responding. “What about the speaker? Surely he can see you reading magazines as he’s talking.”
“Good point, sir. If you’d like, I’ll gladly explain the situation to the chapel speaker beforehand.”
That conversation, unlike some others, ends in a draw. Soon a friendly professor lets me know that my name has landed on a faculty committee’s special-prayer list. I now rank among the deviants, just like my brother.
It’s time to flee the nest. I fill out an application to transfer to Marshall’s new home, Wheaton College. Now I need only survive the rest of this school year.
* * *
—
As I struggle at the Bible college, Marshall is exulting in his newfound freedom at Wheaton. He has arrived during one of the most contentious times in the school’s history. Every few weeks he sends me a copy of the school newspaper, which editorializes against the Vietnam War and reports on student protests against mandatory ROTC training. One dissident student has begun standing on the steps of Edman Chapel with a bullhorn, giving instant rebuttals to objectionable chapel messages.
Marshall proves to be a surprisingly faithful correspondent. Each week I get a turquoise-ink letter written in a tiny spidery script, around five hundred barely legible words to a page. And each epistle records a new intellectual adventure.
In one letter he says that at last he has come to accept a rational basis for Christianity, though he doubts he’ll ever experience God’s reality at an emotional level. Within a few more weeks, he has read a dozen books by atheistic existentialists and concluded that suicide is the only honest response to a meaningless existence.
The next letter reports that he’s attending a High Episcopal church, entranced by the artistry and the liturgy. “Maybe I’ll try Catholic,” he writes. Then comes an enthusiastic account of his campaigning for presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy in the Polish wards of Milwaukee (this from a former fan of Barry Goldwater).
In a rare phone call, Marshall tells me of a weeklong visit to Wheaton by Francis Schaeffer, a speaker from Switzerland, who dresses in knickers, like an alpine hiker. “He’s a bit strange, but he knows a lot about modern culture. He quotes Sartre and Camus and refers to the films of Fellini and Bergman. We’re not used to that around here.”
Marshall mentions that he had a chance to ask some of his questions in private after one of Schaeffer’s talks. “You say the Bible is a living Word, and God speaks to people directly through it?”
“Absolutely,” Schaeffer replied.
“Then how can you tell the difference between the Bible and, say, Billy Graham or Norman Vincent Peale?”
Schaeffer’s answer—“You just know it”—failed to satisfy him.
Marshall’s next letter is the most surprising of all. In the school newspaper he sends me, I’ve read about an authoritarian, almost cultic church frowned on by the college authorities. Out of curiosity, Marshall arranged a visit. “Praise God!” his letter begins. “It happened—I received the baptism of the Holy Spirit and the gift of tongues. I’ve never had such a powerful experience. I’m beginning to know God.”
I don’t know how to respond to these letters, because by the time he gets my reply, he’s already moved on to something else. As each week passes, the pace of change accelerates, and I fear my brother is losing his grip. His mind, his very personality seems to be spinning out of control.
It happens. At the end of that first semester, Marshall’s brain suddenly shuts down. When he tries to read textbooks, he can no longer put two words together. He meets with the school counselor, who grants him a deferral on his impending philosophy exams and refers him to a psychiatrist.
After giving him a battery of tests, the p
sychiatrist says, “Marshall, I won’t treat you unless you agree to enter a mental institution. Frankly, in your case suicide is a definite risk, and as a professional I can’t accept that liability.”
Marshall retreats to his dorm. He drops his philosophy courses and devotes himself instead to piano, finding a refuge in music. He meets another piano major, an attractive blonde named Diane, and it calms him to play duets with her.
By the time I see him in Atlanta that summer, he has resumed the role of the cosmopolitan older brother. We stay up night after night discussing his experiences. He recounts his first year’s highlights: an epic Chicago blizzard, making out with Diane on the roof of her dorm, canvassing blue-collar voters in Milwaukee, the thrill of smoking cigarettes, the Ouija board that correctly predicted all of Wheaton’s football scores.
When I mention his report of the baptism of the Spirit, he brushes it off. “Who knows what’s real and what’s fake?” he says. “It happened, and that’s all I can say.”
PART FIVE
GRACED
Who would have thought my shriveled heart
Could have recovered greenness? It was gone
Quite underground…
—George Herbert, “The Flower”
CHAPTER 20
TREMORS
Meanwhile, I’ve been on a different trajectory than Marshall’s. My own cynicism has gradually softened over the course of my sophomore year. I found some relief in a new Christian Service assignment: “university work.” Instead of preaching to prisoners in chains, four of us male students started visiting a nearby state university every Saturday night with the goal of engaging students in conversations about faith.
Where the Light Fell Page 23