Where the Light Fell

by Philip Yancey

  I soon learn that Janet is the only student whose dissatisfaction with the Bible college matches my own. We spend the evening grousing about the rules, the underqualified teachers, and the college’s cloistered atmosphere. She seems unthreatened by my smart-alecky attitude and parries each sardonic comment with one of her own. She has opinions about everything and defends them fiercely. When we return to campus, I hop back to the dorm on my crutches as if I have been in a jousting contest—and lost.

  I lie in bed mulling over the evening that began with pain and ended with pleasure. I cannot get Janet out of my mind, nor do I want to. She has the quaint idea that emotions are meant to be expressed, not repressed. If she doesn’t like something, she gets angry, and lets everyone know it. Her joy is equally infectious. “I wear my heart on my sleeve,” she explains, the first time I have heard that odd phrase.

  We meet again over dinner the next night, and the next. Janet is impulsive, spontaneous, and fully engaged with anyone she meets—exactly the opposite of my flatlining, standoffish demeanor. Unlike me, she believes life is meant to be lived, not observed or analyzed. When I catch her in an inconsistency, she shrugs it off with a line from Walt Whitman, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself…I contain multitudes.” And she does.

  That winter the campus receives a rare snowfall. Janet, reared in the Amazon jungle and south Florida, has never seen snow. She rushes out of the dorm in her bathrobe—no doubt breaking a rule—and her roommate snaps a photo that catches her in unposed ecstasy: both palms upward, head lifted to the sky, eyes shining, mouth wide open, with her tongue extended to catch the white diamonds falling through the air.

  Beauty, joy, softness, unrestraint—I marvel at what she has so quickly summoned up in me. Hesitantly, I bring up stories from my past, stories I have never told anyone: life in a trailer park, my deliberately broken arm, the turtle episode, my racism, Mother’s split personality, Marshall’s mental breakdown. Each time, I brace myself for rejection and instead she responds with empathy. Usually I say more than I intend; often I reveal more than I know.

  My careful program of emotional self-control has disintegrated.

  * * *

  —

  I write a love letter almost every evening, drafting it in a notebook and copying it over on real stationery in my best handwriting. Janet responds on perfumed stationery that I hold to my nose and drink in before reading.

  What does a woman see in a man? I don’t know what attracted Janet to me, nor do I give it much thought. I only know that I want her in my life and cannot imagine a life without her.

  I send her a poem by Yeats:

  I would spread the cloths under your feet:

  But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

  I have spread my dreams under your feet;

  Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.

  Tread softly she does. She replies with one of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnets:

  And as a vanquished soldier yields his sword

  To one who lifts him from the bloody earth,

  Even so, Beloved, I at last record

  Here ends my strife…

  Make thy love larger to enlarge my worth.

  What is happening to me? The simple act of a desirable woman extending her hand has changed everything. Goodness has become believable. I feel inspired to dismantle the shell, rejoin the human race, and stop being a jerk.

  Over Christmas break, I visit Florida to meet Janet’s family. Compared to my own home, bathed in sullen silence, hers seems a beehive. With six talkative daughters in the house, I hardly speak, and don’t need to.

  For the first time, we have long hours alone together, on the beach or simply sitting on a swing at a nearby park. I find that the Bible college’s ironclad rules against physical contact have the unintended effect of making it more exhilarating when away from school. Today’s hookup culture cannot possibly fathom the shivery thrill of sitting close enough to feel another’s heat, or the brush of fingers under a blanket, or a kiss that on campus would risk expulsion.

  “Here’s an idea,” I say on a whim. “How about if we finish out this school year, then both transfer to Wheaton College, where my brother is? We’d get a much better education.”

  Spontaneous as always, Janet quickly agrees. “I’ve already tried three colleges—why not a fourth?”

  A few days later I ride a Greyhound bus across the state, where my mother is visiting relatives. As I stare out the window at the flat, featureless landscape, every mile taking me farther from Janet, a lump rises to ache in my throat. Sensing something in my eye, I blink rapidly a few times, and for the first time in seven years, I feel the moisture of tears on my cheeks.

  Back at college I undergo surgery to repair yet another broken bone—this one in my foot, caused by a soccer injury. For five days I lie in the hospital staring at the pale green ceiling. Somehow Janet finds a way to sneak off campus and visit me. She rests her hand on my feverish skin and suddenly she is crying, her tears falling straight down like raindrops on my hospital gown. I tremble, though not from cold.

  Her birthday comes a few weeks later. Still on crutches, I clomp down the stairs to the dorm kitchen and manage to bake my very first cake. I don’t know to soften the butter, and small chips of yellow fleck the chocolate icing. My roommate carries it across campus as I hobble, and once again her tears flow.

  That night we skip dinner and I ask her to follow me into the chapel. “I have a present for you,” I say. “You’ll be the first person since the sixth grade to hear me perform.” I adjust the Steinway bench, and Janet finds a spot on the floor, tucked behind a chair, out of sight from anyone who might walk by. My hands are shaking. For weeks I’ve been practicing Beethoven’s Sonata Pathétique and must screw up all my courage to attempt such a piece, even for an audience of one. But it’s her birthday present, and the name says it all: the Emotional, or Passionate, Sonata.

  Her eyes are glistening as I hit the final chords. “Thank you,” she says at last. “I’ll remember that always.” She blows me a kiss—the only kind allowed—and we leave the chapel separately, lest someone report us for being alone together.

  * * *

  —

  “You write such beautiful letters,” she says one night as we sit in a borrowed Volkswagen Beetle in the driveway of her grandmother’s house, “but I want to hear you say it. Tell me how you feel.”

  I freeze. We have discussed our futures together, have spoken even of marriage. Still, I have been unable to utter the words. I have said them to no one since childhood because, simply, I have not loved and have not known myself capable. She waits a minute, another, ten minutes in all—ten heart-pounding, dry-tongued minutes before I am able to form and say the words, “I…love…you.” She has drawn them from my deepest self.

  Augustine said, “Show me a man in love; I’ll show you a man on the way to God.” Many exceptions spring to mind, but for me it proves true. In my dorm room one night, I thumb through the book Janet gave me, Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. Among them I find one that reads:

  My own, my own,

  Who camest to me when the world was gone,

  And I who looked for only God, found thee!

  I would soon reverse that last line: “I who looked for only thee, found God!”

  Had I not seen the Sun

  I could have borne the shade

  But Light a newer Wilderness

  My Wilderness has made—

  —Emily Dickinson

  CHAPTER 21

  CONTACT

  Nature, music, and romantic love have formed a ladder of ascent from my emotional and spiritual flatlands. But ascent to where? On my walks in the woods, I have the occasional sensation of being watched, the skin-prickling possibility that something unseen—a bear
, a cougar—might be out there, stalking me. While playing the piano in the darkened chapel, now and then I feel a rush of transcendent beauty. With Janet I experience the flutter of romance and my first real taste of joy. Never, though, can I mount that top step on the ladder.

  God hangs like a mist over the Bible-college campus—sung to, testified about, studied, feared. Yet for me, whether in family, church, or college, the motions of faith have always proved unreliable. I have proved unreliable. Too many times I have adopted the guise of a Christian, only to have the reality vanish like vapor.

  I resign myself to an identity as the campus apostate. Bible-college students don’t know what to do with someone like me, a sophomore who argues with their beloved professors, reads Esquire in chapel, and disdains prayer meetings. Mostly, they avoid me. Janet gets painted with the same brush: she is the only woman in her dorm not assigned a roommate, lest she wrongly influence some impressionable young soul.

  There are exceptions. After my surgery, my Portuguese friend, Joe, temporarily switches roommates so he can look after me. He builds a cardboard contraption that lifts the bedclothes off my healing foot and brings me food from the cafeteria. Joe and the two other members of the university team know that I am spending most of my Christian Service assignment watching sports on TV in a university lounge. Yet they don’t hassle or report me.

  * * *

  —

  In late February of my sophomore year, Mr. H. gives an assignment to his class on hermeneutics: “Write an essay about a time when God spoke to you through a passage of the Bible.”

  I have no idea what to write. To my knowledge God has never spoken to me, let alone through the Bible. At times I have parroted the correct answers, and prayed the right words, but always with the sense that I’ve memorized the part for a performance. I can’t distinguish the authentic from the fake.

  Mr. H. sets the essay’s due date for the following week, and I start reviewing my Sunday School past in order to contrive something acceptable.

  A few days later the university team gathers for a prayer meeting, as we do every Wednesday. We follow a consistent pattern: Joe prays, Craig prays, Chris prays, then all three pause politely, waiting for me. I never pray, and after a brief silence we open our eyes and return to our dorm rooms.

  With the essay deadline looming, I join the team grudgingly for the requisite meeting. Joe prays, Craig prays, Chris prays, and they wait the usual few seconds. To everyone’s surprise—most of all my own—I begin to pray aloud.

  “God…” I say, and the room crackles with tension. A door slams down the hall, interrupting me.

  I start again. “God, here we are, supposed to be concerned about those ten thousand students at the university who are going to Hell. Well, you know that I don’t care if they all go to Hell, if there is one. I don’t care if I go to Hell.”

  I might as well be invoking witchcraft or offering child sacrifices. Even so, these are my friends, and no one moves. My mouth goes dry. I swallow hard and continue. For some reason I start talking about the parable of the Good Samaritan, which one of my classes has just been studying. “We’re supposed to feel the same concern for university students as the Samaritan felt for the bloodied Jew lying in the ditch,” I pray. “I feel no such concern. I feel nothing.”

  And then it happens. In the middle of my prayer, as I am admitting my lack of care for our designated targets of compassion, the parable comes to me in a new light. I have been visualizing the scene as I speak: a swarthy Middle Eastern man, dressed in robes and a turban, bending over a dirty, blood-stained form in a ditch. Without warning, those two figures now morph on the internal screen of my mind. The Samaritan takes on the face of Jesus. The Jew, pitiable victim of a highway robbery, also takes on another face—one I recognize with a start as my own.

  In slow motion, I watch Jesus reach down with a moistened rag to clean my wounds and stanch the flow of blood. As he bends toward me, I see myself, the wounded victim of a crime, open my eyes and spit on him, full in the face. Just that. The image unnerves me—the apostate who doesn’t believe in visions or in biblical parables. I am rendered speechless. Abruptly, I stop praying, rise, and leave the room.

  All that evening I brood over what took place. It wasn’t exactly a vision—more like a vivid daydream or an epiphany. Regardless, I can’t put the scene out of mind. In a single stroke my cockiness has been shattered. I have always found security in my outsider status, which at a Bible college means an outsider to belief. Now I have caught a new and humbling glimpse of myself. In my arrogance and mocking condescension, maybe I’m the neediest one of all.

  A feeling of shame overwhelms me. Shame that my façade of self-control has been unmasked. And also shame that I might end up as one more cookie-cutter Christian on this campus.

  I write a brief note to Janet, telling her cautiously, “I want to wait a few days before talking about this, but I may have had the first authentic religious experience of my life.”

  * * *

  —

  Although Mr. H. has promised to devote the next class period to students reading their essays on “when God spoke to you,” he gets sidetracked and glances at the clock to find only ten minutes remaining before the closing bell. “Oh my, we only have time for a couple of your reports,” he says with regret. “Who would like to read?”

  One student raises her hand and says she had a hard time choosing because God so often speaks to her through the Word. Her reading takes about six minutes. I am keeping track because I have toyed with the idea of reading my account. I feel pinpricks of perspiration on my forehead as my classmate drones on. Now, to my relief, it seems I will miss that opportunity.

  After the student finishes, Mr. H. says, “Thank you. And it looks like we have time for one more.” Hands shoot up around the room, and I raise mine no more than halfway. He scans the room and looks directly at me. After our private counseling session, I don’t think there’s a chance he’ll call on me.

  “Philip, how about yours?” he says.

  As I stand, I can see other students exchanging glances. I clear my throat a few times and begin. “C. S. Lewis once said that God sometimes shows grace by drawing us to himself while we kick and scream and pummel him with our fists. That is my story.”

  The paper is trembling in my hands, and I work to gain control. There is a hush in the room and no one stirs. I continue: “I groaned when Mr. H. announced this assignment. Until Wednesday night, I had no clue what I might write about. Here it is.”

  I look up at the clock, then back to the paper.

  “I wish all of you would ignore me after this class. Your encouragement comes sincerely, I know, but it makes a great crutch, too. Around this place a testimony and a few well-placed tears usually earn acceptance into any group.

  “I’m not blind to what most of you think of me. I don’t smile and I sit alone in class. I don’t pray before meals. I read magazines in chapel. I think I’m intellectual and try to reason out everything. Just like my brother. Why should I pray before tests when I could get A’s anyway? And why pray for people about whom I couldn’t care less?

  “Before I continue, let me add one item: those who appear the least lovable usually need the most love.”

  The bell rings, abnormally loud and shrill. Other classrooms empty out and the hallway fills with chatter. In ours, no one makes a move to collect their books and papers. Mr. H. motions for me to keep reading.

  I briefly describe the experience in the dorm room and my impromptu prayer.

  “I started to tell God how much I hated people and I really didn’t care if the whole blasted university went to Hell. I told God I didn’t love him, that I never had, I never knew how—as if God didn’t know already.

  “Something happened. This time God didn’t slam the door in my face. I was asking God to somehow, even though I didn’t want him to, give me the l
ove of the Good Samaritan. Who loved irrationally, with no reason. Who loved a repulsive, filthy tramp.

  “Then it hit me. I was the tramp and God was trying to help me. Every time he leaned over I spit in his face. What’s more, I wanted to remain a tramp. An intelligent, sophisticated tramp by choice.

  “In the words of Job, ‘I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear. But now mine eye seeth thee: wherefore I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes.’

  “That is how God spoke to me last Wednesday night.”

  I pick up my books and head toward the door before anyone else in the room has a chance to move, and immediately I’m swallowed up by the noisy crowd in the hallway. Other students honor my request all that day. No one pats my arm and welcomes me to the inner circle. They leave me alone, just as I asked.

  Part of me—a rather large part—expects this, too, to pass. How many times have I gone forward to accept Jesus into my heart, only later to find him missing? I feel a kind of sheepish horror at regaining faith. But I also feel obliged to admit what has taken me unawares, a gift of grace neither sought nor desired.

  * * *

  —

  I date my conversion from the tiny prayer meeting in a sparsely furnished dorm room. Some five decades later, it still stands out as the singular hinge moment of my life. That Wednesday evening the sand gave way beneath my feet and I had no clue where the next wave would sweep me.

  Once, I recounted the experience to a skeptical friend, who listened with curiosity. He pointed out that there are, of course, alternative explanations for what happened. For years I had been reacting against a fundamentalist upbringing, and undoubtedly that repression had created a deep “cognitive dissonance” within me. Since I had gone so long without praying, should it surprise me that my first prayer, no matter how untraditional, would release a flood of emotions that might induce a “revelation” like that of the Good Samaritan parable?