A Song in the Night

by Bob Massie

  I went through the spring and summer pondering what to do. I analyzed the calendar strategically. Bicker survived each year because the actual choosing came up suddenly in the dead of winter. The choices and consequences were so swift that there was little time to react. Within a few months the seniors graduated and the juniors took control, and the whole dance continued.

  This time, however, we would start organizing early, in September. With a group of friends I created the “Social Alternatives Coalition.” Our goal was to push the clubs to open up and the university to create a college system, including a student center, which, incredibly, we did not have. Dozens of people came to our weekly meetings, and we followed a very loose form of democratic decision-making in which anyone who was in the room could vote. This meant that one week one group of students would decide one thing, and the next week a different cast of characters would decide something else. I chaired the meetings, torn between my delight at the growing engagement and frustrated by the uneven and unpredictable process. Eventually we lurched into a major decision: we were going to hold a demonstration on Prospect Street during Bicker Week.

  Suddenly I was the head of an organizing campaign. To get our message out without money for flyers (the Internet, of course, did not yet exist), we simply decided to call every student in the school. We tore the school phone directory into columns and handed them out to dozens of volunteers. This worked well: rooms with more than one occupant got more than one call. Every club member was informed of what was going to happen. We arranged for candles and bullhorns and all the other paraphernalia of public marches. We notified the administration and the local police.

  When the day came, I went over to Prospect Street an hour early with two or three fellow organizers. It was winter again, and the sky was cold and gray. For a long time we waited, and no one showed up. Well, that’s okay, I thought. I will walk up and back with this small band and then I can retreat into my humiliation. At least it will be over.

  And then people arrived, dozens and dozens and dozens. Eventually more than four hundred people gathered in front of the Woodrow Wilson School. We began our march, shuffling quietly along the sidewalk with our candles. There were a few signs, and occasionally people broke into chants, but mostly the march was solemn. When I passed Ivy Club, I glanced over and thought I saw a few faces looking through the curtains. I sighed with sorrow, wondering if I could have done something else to persuade my friends.

  The next day the student paper announced that we had held the largest demonstration since the Vietnam War. The president of the university immediately appointed two committees. The first, the Committee on Undergraduate Residential Life, or CURL, was made up of students, faculty, and administrators. The second was made up of trustees who were designated to receive and debate the CURL report when it came through. One assistant dean came up to me in the months that followed and said that the administrators had been looking for some ways to make changes, but they could not initiate them for fear of the reaction of the alumni and trustees who were still angry about admitting women. Our march had provided the impetus to act.

  And oddly enough, it all worked. A participant in the march, Sally Frank, filed a lawsuit against one of the male clubs for banning her from admission. The clubs argued that they were private establishments, independent of the university. Sally, who advanced the case during her remaining years in college, in law school, and then as a law professor, argued that the university and the clubs were inextricably bound. There were no members who were not students. The university relied on the clubs to provide services it could not offer. Thus the clubs should be held accountable under the same rules barring discrimination among public accommodations. The case cranked on for fourteen years, until it reached the New Jersey Supreme Court. The court agreed with Frank and ordered the all-male clubs to admit women.

  The CURL process also took decades and continued through three university presidents. Eventually the committee issued a report calling for Princeton to institute a college system. The trustees accepted it, and the university raised hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for these new internal entities.

  Today Princeton has six residential colleges. Some of the clubs remain selective, but all admit women. It took nearly thirty years, but through the hard work of hundreds of people, it is a less discriminatory campus.

  “Do you think thirty years is a long time or a short time for major institutional change?” I asked a classmate over dinner about a year ago.

  He paused and thought for a moment. “Of course in some ways it should have happened much faster,” he said. “But then again, there is always the chance that it might never have happened at all.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Faith AND Fortune

  When was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?

  MATTHEW 25: 38–39

  While we were still in France, we visited the great cathedrals and monasteries—Notre Dame, Beauvais, Sainte-Chapelle, Mont Saint Michel—and each time I found myself deeply moved. The soaring stone, the stunning stained glass windows, and the cool, peaceful interiors flickering with thousands of candles quelled me into silence whenever I stepped inside. On the site of the magnificent cathedral of Chartres, fifty miles outside Paris, five churches had risen in sequence before the final building began to take shape nearly a thousand years ago. The idea that more than fifty generations of men and women had devoted themselves to the building, protection, and improvement of this place of worship astonished me.

  I had grown up as a nominal Christian; our family attended church at Christmas and Easter and a few other times a year. I had enjoyed my engagement with a church youth group in Paris, but I did not feel I understood the world’s religions, or my own supposed faith. I wanted to remedy this, so over the years I occasionally dipped into the Bible, particularly the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, trying to read these unusual stories for myself.

  I discovered, to my surprise, that most of my early impressions about Jesus of Nazareth had been false. Throughout my childhood Jesus had appeared to me as a benevolent authority figure, friendly in an abstract way, a distant leader venerated in stone and stained glass and in the tedious words of centuries-old prayers. As a teenager I thought that the whole enterprise of church reeked of hypocrisy, which in my calculus was perhaps the greatest of all sins. Through my youthful eyes the world was a mess, and much of the responsibility lay with the unwillingness of religious people to live up to the beautiful and challenging words of their own faiths.

  To my surprise, I learned when I opened up the New Testament that Jesus had agreed with this critique. Instead of appearing as a kind of super-parent, handing out exhortations to people who were bad to be good, Jesus reserved his most acute, and in some cases blistering, criticism for those who took on the trappings and practice of religion but then used their piety as an excuse to judge and condemn others. He explicitly confronted those who were preoccupied with superficial forms of public behavior while they neglected the deeper demand for justice, for love, for humility, and for reconciliation.

  In the texts Jesus comes across as a lively, dynamic, restlessly compassionate man. He chooses not to distribute approval to the pious, and he offers encouragement to people struggling with faith. “Go and learn what this means,” he says at one point. “ ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’ ” He attacks the professionally religious for obeying small rules of behavior and missing the core purpose of a life of faith. “Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites,” he says in the Gospel of Matthew, “for … you have neglected the more important matters of the law, like justice and mercy and faithfulness.”

  This unexpected splash of cold water woke me up. During one summer while I was still in high school, I suffered a bleeding that left me immobilized for a week. Looking for something to read, I picked up the Bible and worked my way through the gospels. Aga
in I was struck by Jesus’ energy, his restlessness, his bubbling passion. And having learned that about him, I was less surprised to read that he regularly felt great frustration when his message did not seem to penetrate the minds of those who loved him and followed him closely. To many he said sadly, “You have eyes but you do not see, you have ears but you do not hear.” And in one of the most poignant passages of all, he evoked the image of children using music to try to elicit some kind of response, happy or sad, and failing, implicitly likening this to his own inability to generate a response:

  To what shall I compare this present generation?

  You are like children calling to each other in the marketplace,

  “I piped for you and you would not dance;

  I wailed for you and you would not mourn.”

  This person, whose two-thousand-year-old story was sitting in millions of bookshelves and pews, was not, by my reading, someone who floated with gentle detachment above the sufferings of the world. This was a man who loved those around him with an intensity that even he sometimes found hard to bear.

  My own faith was still in its early stages, but what I read moved me and drew me in. I didn’t know if I really understood it, or if I could live up to it, but the reverberations of his fervent way of seeing the world began to resonate inside me. And once that resonance started, it started me down a path of wonderment and growth and change.

  While I was in college, I considered becoming a minister, but I rejected the idea decisively. It seemed like the ministry would demand too high a standard of behavior. I knew my own weaknesses and flaws, and I knew that even if I managed to control my greed, resentment, pettiness, lust, and pride, they would all still reside within me—and somehow that seemed even worse than acting on them. How could I pretend to be someone pure and loving when there were plenty of moments when I was not? How could I represent an institution with so many glorious ideals and so many ugly historical failures? The answer seemed clear: I could not.

  The decisive moment came for me at the end of my years in college, when I experienced a reawakening of my faith that is difficult to describe and even more difficult to explain. It came at a time when I felt broken and adrift, uncertain about my deepest values and my direction. I was not sure whether God existed and whether it mattered. I felt caught in a spiral of expectations about what I desired to be and knowledge of how frequently I failed. And at that point I met a young woman who asked me a very simple question: Had I ever mentioned my unhappiness in prayer? Had I ever actually spoken to God about the matter?

  I was embarrassed to say no. My first reaction was that it didn’t make sense to do so. Later I turned the thought around: What could I lose if I tried it? The greatest risk, it seemed to me, would be silence—and the resulting disappointment. So outside on a small bench one evening I cast my prayer into the vastness of the world, as one might throw a message in a bottle into the sea. My prayer rambled, but it was heartfelt.

  I don’t seem to have done the best with my life. I am not on the path to becoming the person I want to be—someone who is gracious and courageous, loving and trustworthy. I am not that good at caring about others. I don’t know how to move forward. And I would like to know if you exist. Jesus, if you are out there, I would like you to be part of my life.

  And oddly enough, that’s all it took. I didn’t see lights and I didn’t hear voices, but when I opened my eyes I felt different. Profoundly different. A burden had been lifted from my heart. I could breathe. The part of me that had felt empty since my birth felt complete. And, more than anything, I felt awash in grace.

  We all go through life carrying so much guilt and anxiety; we are constantly being measured and judged. In many of our daily roles we are expected to meet ever higher standards: as students and employees, as children and parents. We are told that our identity and our success depend on our performance, and we have internalized this message all the way into our deepest core. But the message of God’s grace—the center of the “good news” proclaimed by Jesus—is that in the eyes of the one who really matters, the Being who gave us our being, our performance is immaterial. We are endlessly, boundlessly loved. This love is not a sentimental characteristic that overlooks the innumerable ways in which human beings have hurt themselves and each other or that ignores the self-centered qualities in all of our lives. I came to believe that God is fully conscious of these, yet fully forgiving. Love is not an emotion and it does not hinge on behavior: it is an irrevocable decision about the essence of humanity and about each person, made by God in advance, which stands as a counterbalance and a cure to our endless self-judgment and fear.

  When I experienced this reawakening of my faith, just before the fall of my senior year in college, I wanted to understand how people in previous centuries and in our own had responded to this kind of experience. Returning to campus, I discovered that there were not many people to talk to about this, and so I did what many of my peers were doing when they wanted deeper exposure to a topic: I enrolled in graduate school. I received a scholarship from Yale Divinity School, a program that seemed to combine the intellectual rigor I wanted with the humanity and warmth that would make the exploration worthwhile.

  I arrived in the fall of 1978, and I swept through some of the happiest weeks of my life. I instantly fell in with new friends who treated each other differently from any group of people I had ever met. They were warm, thoughtful, attentive, curious, and unusually happy. Most, but not all, of them were Christians of one denomination or another. Some were recent graduates, like me, and others were coming back to school to pursue ministry as a second career. There were many women, some of whom had to show real grit in applying for positions of leadership in churches that still resisted the idea of women’s ordination. I was a throwback to an older model of ministry student: I was a young man who had come directly from college.

  I spent the crisp fall evenings throwing Frisbees on the green or playing my guitar in the dorm. I bought a huge stack of books with tiny print that I carried back and forth to the library. I made friends not only among the students but also among the faculty. One of my closest friends was a Catholic priest named Henri Nouwen, who I later learned was one of America’s most popular spiritual authors at the time. I often visited Henri’s daily services of communion to enter a deep place of reflection and peace.

  Even as I experienced the warmth of this exceptional community, I was not sure that I was going to pursue an actual career in the ministry. Still, everything proceeded wonderfully well for the first ten weeks, until just before Thanksgiving, when I came down with an illness that no one could identify. The symptoms resembled the flu, and I suffered from moments of extreme lethargy, when I could barely move or make decisions. I reported this to my doctors in New York, who urged me to go to Yale–New Haven Hospital in case I was experiencing a cerebral hemorrhage.

  For five days the doctors performed tests. Was it the flu? Or some other virus? Or perhaps even a seizure disorder? They scanned my body and analyzed my brain waves, but they came up with nothing. Although my condition improved, I lost the energy to do all the things that my schedule required. I muscled through the next few weeks to finish my exams, but when I returned after Christmas, I realized that the unnamed condition was still plaguing me. With enormous regret I said goodbye to my friends, withdrew from school, and went home.

  It was not easy living again with my parents, in my childhood room, without knowing what was bothering me or what I would do next. My friends were all making great strides in school or in their first jobs, while I was adrift. Slowly my physical condition improved, but I was still without direction and purpose.

  After a long car trip exploring the United States, I moved to Washington, D.C. I was fortunate to get a job as a researcher for Congress Watch, an organization that focused on the hidden pathways of dollars and influence that affected decisions in Congress. I worked directly for Mark Green, a dynamic young lawyer who had already written half a dozen books as part o
f Ralph Nader’s network. Nader at that time was still doing extraordinary work on behalf of American consumers, and he had set up small advocacy groups that focused on different topics, such as pharmaceuticals and health-care reform, automobile and transportation policy, and corruption in Congress. Though I later broke with him over his decision to run for president in both 2000 and 2004, in the 1980s I found him a provocative and in many cases inspired analyst of the structure of the American economy and the flaws in our politics. Mark Green was an equally brilliant scholar and organizer and went on to be elected president of the New York City Council (known as the “public advocate”) and to run as a candidate for both the U.S. Senate and the mayoralty of New York City.

  When I arrived in Washington, Jimmy Carter had been president for three years, and he was gearing up for his reelection campaign in 1980. I immediately fell in with a dynamic network from different parts of the American activist community: environmentalists, labor leaders, consumer advocates, and elected officials. The Republican Party and the corporate interests that tended to support it had been pushed back forcefully after the Watergate scandal, leading to the election of a huge number of new congressional representatives in 1974 and the election of Carter in 1976.

  By late 1979 the political mood of the country was changing. The inflation and unemployment rates were running unacceptably high. In November 1979, radical students invaded the U.S. embassy in Teheran and took fifty-two embassy employees hostage, triggering a year-long standoff. Carter, anticipating conservative pressure, seemed to many of us to be trimming his sails and slowing down on his commitments to progressive causes. Still, it seemed unlikely that the nation was about to take a major turn to the right. To many, Ronald Reagan seemed unelectable in early 1980 because of his strong brand of conservatism and because he was sixty-nine years old. Our job that year was to remind the president that he needed to stay faithful to the coalition that had elected him.