In Defense of Christian Education, or, How CCU Broke My Faith

This is long. I ask you to read it anyway, and to tell me your own thoughts.

Andrew and I went to CCU together. Though he was a few years ahead of me, he lived in freshman housing at the same time I did, in a one-bedroom apartment awkwardly manipulated to accommodate the dorm’s laundry room on the reverse side. I knew him then only as the Art Garfunkel to his friend’s Paul Simon – they would leave their doors open and sing out from their subterranean home the beautiful tunes I knew by heart: “Many is the time I’ve been mistaken, and many times confused. Yes, and I’ve often felt forsaken, and certainly misused…”

Four years later, Andrew and I share an apartment. He works at a company that runs background checks, and comes home with stories regularly resembling episodes of The Office. He plays jazz guitar, and is applying to various universities for graduate studies. I am now graduated as well, and we both find ourselves somewhat unfulfilled.

Andrew and I spoke the other night about something that puzzled us – namely, that we entered CCU as exuberant, conservative evangelical Christians, and left it in moral and theological confusion, with our evangelical drive permanently hobbled. I don’t presume to speak for Andrew on this, but there has not been any part of the faith I have not questioned either directly or indirectly, and if I believe any of it now, it is not from an evidence- or experience-based compulsion, but a simple, and seemingly arbitrary, choice.

I certainly don’t make the claim that our experience is the experience of small Christian colleges, or even that it is a general one. But in my circle of friends, it is one that I see more than any other: as the years of college go by and eventually become the past, so do all of our old ideas. Many of us don’t even go to church anymore. “Disillusionment” sounds too egotistical, as though everybody else remains “illusioned,” but it captures the feeling properly.

The tenets of the faith, the sanctity of all these many things, the truth of these occurrences, the validity of the bible, the moral imperatives scattered throughout – they all seem so optional. We’re not against them by any means – we just don’t know what to do with them. All questions, no answers, and in the end, just a decision to either continue or not.

This is certainly not unique to the small Christian college, but I began thinking about what would have happened had I gone elsewhere. I imagine that at a large state school, I would have shunned the overt partying scene. I would have shrunk away from those places that appeared to be dens of vice, because, aside from simply not being interested in them, I wouldn’t want to be associated with them. My friends would be of broad and various backgrounds, as they always have been, but my core friends, my best friends, would have been Christians. So far this is not any different from my time here at CCU.

This, I believe, is where the difference comes in: on a non-Christian campus, I and my friends would set ourselves up as specifically Christian; we would other-ize ourselves from the normal goings-on of campus life and set ourselves in opposition to them. In this state of opposition, we would hold to a sort of solidarity code – some unspoken idea of sticking up for each other, supporting each other’s faith, and above all, not undermining each other by focusing on prickly doubts or frustrating questions. (Also, we wouldn’t have any bible or theology courses, which do much to transform formerly vague feelings into glaring questions.) As with any self-styled rebel group, the cause/purpose of the group begins to fuse with the maintenance of the group itself, to the point where the good attitude, health, or growth of the group is equated with success, and low morale or shrinking numbers is seen as failure.

In this atmosphere, I would have gone on believing roughly what I believed when I entered. Not only would there have been fewer questions raised, but there would have been an active desire to suppress certain lines of inquiry. Any questions which were raised would tend to fit within the us/them dichotomy (questions from “them” being questions of supposedly deleterious nature), ensuring an easy answer and group solidarity, because given the options of A) making slight adjustments to one’s own belief or ignoring a few nagging feelings, or B) risking group fracture or possible dissolution by focusing on one’s own personal issues, people will tend toward the former. The feelings are swept under rugs or discussed in quiet sessions with close friends which end in everybody agreeing to pray for the doubter, reinforcing the idea that this person is in the wrong, and requires divine assistance to relocate the true path.

Simply put, I would have formed my Christian identity around my actions. I do these things, and not these; I hold to these classic beliefs, and not these watered-down, ear-tickling modes of modern thought. This identity would reinforce and be reinforced by a larger group of similar mindset, and upon leaving the university I would not easily break from these habits and beliefs, because they would have become synonymous with my very self.

Strangely, I found that attending a school entirely composed of a large group of similar mindset to my own had a much different effect on me. I’ll admit the possibility that I and my friends are flukes, aberrations in the system, but all the same I’d like to explore how we turned out as we did.

As I mentioned above, many of us have emerged with a faith battered and scarred from our time at CCU. Our faith has been praised, questioned, evaluated, stuffed into half a dozen different containers, lost in the waste, found among the garbage, and hung on a line to dry while we figure out what to do with it. I’ll mention once more, just to be sure I’ve covered myself enough, that this happens to any number of people in all sorts of places. But how did it happen in a hothouse of “faith and learning,” in what seems Freshman year to be a utopia of common belief?

I believe that the answer lies in our lack of the obvious common enemy of open disbelief and hedonism. In another place, our Christianity would have been forged against these most pernicious evils. At CCU, our Christianity was a given. If we were there, we were Christians (at least, we all signed the same statement of faith), and instead of a single unifying front, we found ourselves at odds on countless smaller fronts within the faith.

Only gradually did the significance of this become clear. As time passed, we were confronted with different faces of Christianity, different approaches to it, different conceptions of it. Differences which would have been eclipsed by a state of war against the “secular” were thrown into relief on this campus, and instead of mingling only with those who attended the same church, we found ourselves daily with Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, a few Catholics and even an Orthodox believer, high-church people, low-church people, no-church people, people and professors who believed every literal word of the bible and people and professors who believed the bible to be a collection of good ideas with a number of human mistakes. And in the right places at the right times, you could find discussions on any of these topics and more, including Calvinism/Arminianism, post-modern approaches to faith, the effects of culture on the writing and reading of the bible, and feminist interpretations of God, Jesus, and the bible. To name a few. The choices were not between Christianity and Secularism, but between 200 different versions of Christianity with a friend’s face behind each.

Truth be told, I wish I had seen ten times the amount of discussion that I did – I make it sound like these debates were ever-present. They weren’t, but the differences were. And for many of us, the exposure to all of this caused our perfectly-sculpted Greek statues of faith to melt. Just melt. Where a different environment would have hardened our ideas into permanent thought, a Christian environment caused them to lose all shape and form. Frankly, the experience was, for me, terrifying.

And for this, I realize, I reluctantly thank God. Reluctantly because I am uncertain of how to approach this God, uncertain what attributes I can expect of Him/Her and how these will be manifested. In some ways, I feel like the first pagan, trying blindly to ascertain the qualities of a perfectly separate being. And yet I thank God that my sculpted theology of old was destroyed, shattered like the statue of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. It was only ever an idol before.

I leave the university not with answers but with questions. Now, it is a struggle, as I believe it ought to be. It is the search for balance between the desire for objective knowledge of God and the subjective pursuit of God. As long as I am struggling, I will call it faith. As long as I settle complacently into either a questionless faith or questionless atheism, I will call it evil. I do not propose, exactly, to question all things at all times – who can live in such a state of flux? – but to leave all things open to inquiry. I have spent too much time disengaged lately. I choose now to re-enter the faith.

Shall I commit to being interesting?

I found myself last night in conversation with one of my close friends, to whom I began to attempt to explain (justify?) this past year of my life. Variously, I said that I had moved out of a sort of existentialist phase and into an unwelcome nihilism. Or I had been depressed. Or I had been removed from established social structures that kept me healthy and thinking. Perhaps my focus had moved outward. Or inward. Or I had lost it altogether.

I gave up trying to explain as I realized that all of these were part of the truth, none were themselves the truth, and that I couldn’t parse out exactly what was the source of my languid, reclusive year. I could, however, say rather firmly that I don’t want next year to be the same.

At the end of the conversation, I found in myself a sort of recommitment to the old existentialist struggle. Mind you, I’ve a fair bit of cynicism and more than a sense of embarrassment attached to this (I can only take existentialists seriously for so long), but while I’m searching for a larger meaning, I’ll continue to create my own.

More basically, I am recommitted to life – to being and doing and interacting, to working, to thinking, to all of the things I have put off for a whole year now. If you are reading this, give me a call – let’s go do something.

I’m not sure whether this blandiose “commitment” will amount to anything, but we will see. One of the things I would like to do is write more, which means both blogging more and writing more on my own. Writing does not develop on its own, and it does degrade through lack of use; looking back on papers written in a flurry of activity last year, I am reminded what I can do when the stars are properly aligned. They have not been so aligned lately.

I will force them into place.

Michaelmas '06

For those I met and delved so briefly into
I have many fine names, many “beloved”s and
“light of my life”s, which are true names if
also untrue, the light being temporary as flintspark
and the beloving only possible during the term of proximity

-- still I think of you all as lovers I have known, male female
and other, other being the designation for you who exceeded
such silly limits and flew burning past them like terrible birds in my mind,
somehow modest all the while. You fly there still, storming
up and down the aisles of books, fluttering ominously the pages of
my fading recollections, overturning them suddenly yet
vanishing when I raise my head.

I hold here a photograph, taken in Wales, and here, in London,
and this oh my treasure is of you, all my many loves, in
these skimming watercraft, myself once at the helm, still
captured in my unbelieving giddiness that you could just then
regard me as I did you, could love me past that silly damn hat,
perched on my head like the lid of
a jar (bursting with hair).

These things, these objects of love and memory I hold
greedily, miserly, amassing and caressing them, crooning night
-time runes and archaic words of summoning,

I cannot accept that this life was in the past, that it, pinpointed,
will never up itself from its Then to walk alongside me in
the constant Now, that the fire of one Guy Fawkes Day
lights only an ancient face in an ancient photograph --

still I look for its flash.

The Latest in a String

If, somehow, you remain unaware of the shooting at Virginia Tech on Monday, you should check a news site. Any news site – they’ve all got plenty of the latest information up. Who was killed, how many. A timeline of events, a list of complaints from the parents to the police, a section for mourning, a section for witnesses to describe the events.

I write this from Lakewood, Colorado – only a few minutes away from Columbine High School. Columbine wasn’t the first school shooting, but I believe that for many of our generation, it was the most memorable. Almost eight years ago exactly, I walked into my friend’s home after school to see frantic news coverage flashing across the screen, his mother with her hand over her heart, saying, “Oh my Lord, oh my Lord,” just as a bleeding student heaved himself from a window to safety. He left a streak of blood on the wall.

The shock was immense, then. Eight years and many school tragedies later, the display of shock on the news has something of a practiced feel to it. Alessandra Stanley writes in today’s New York Times: “The amazing thing is how familiar campus shootings have become. For viewers, initial disbelief is quickly folded into a methodical ritual of breaking bad news. News trucks race to the scene, witnesses upload images recorded on cellphones and video cameras, students on the scene calmly and patiently recount their impressions in front of news cameras.” We all wait; we all watch to see the tragedy unfold.

I don’t understand the fascination we all feel with such unimaginable tragedies. In the next few days, biographies of the deceased will begin to fill the pages of the news – they have, in fact, already started. And I read them compulsively, unable to control a sharp eye for irony, the tragic twist for each of them. Take, for example, Liviu Librescu, 75 years old, a senior researcher and lecturer who had survived the German Holocaust, only to be killed some sixty years later in an American holocaust.

Once the victims have been bled onto every news page, the climax will arrive: a comprehensive biography of the killer, an analysis of his behavior, a “reason why,” as though there could ever be a reason for such an atrocity. He was angry, or he was hurt, or he was crazy – probably all of these. His mother won’t know why he did it; his friends will say he was a considerate man, going through a period of turmoil in his life. And thirty-three people, including the man himself, will still be sleeping under a blanket of earth.

I extend my heart and my prayers to any affected by this event. And tomorrow I will flip through the headlines, reading the prayers and speeches of others, looking for something, anything, that might indicate why people keep getting the idea to wreak so much havoc within institutions of hope and progress, erasing so many unwritten futures.

A Frost on the Day Before Easter

A night of falling mist froze
tight around the windows and doorknobs,
lintels and posts, encasing the apartments
and their courtyard garden
in the coldest coat.

Beneath the feeble morning gray, nothing shines
or sparks; the light falls flat
and seems to die within each item that
it shuffles across: a child’s bicycle
fringed with hanging teeth,
an abandoned pail,
the tools left out in yesterday’s sun:
hammer and nail.

No birdsong breaks the shuddering quiet,
The silence of a stillborn spring – yet
what can they all be murmuring,
this row of tousling evergreens? What peasant prayers
or tears does this procession offer,
bowed low in rumpled robes of ice?

No ear to hear, nor any eye to see,
but each plant lies expectant and
the scattered objects wait,
whisper, indicate

to where a fallen statue lies
cracked at head and hands and side,
His shroud of ice shook loose, and sloughing off withal,
beginning to thaw.

A Psalm

Let us praise You, Lord, with abandon, and let us not restrain our voices,
For You are a walking Truth and a sounding Love,
And You search out Your children without rest.

For I left your ways and said to my heart,
"I am well without Him,"
And I turned from Your voice and said to my soul,
"I am satisfied."
Yet my heart grew callous and firm,
And from my soul there came an arid wind,
And all I believed myself to be withered before it.

Praise to the God of the weak and the ignorant,
For though we do not know our needs, You rescue us,
And You come when we do not know to call.
We praise You, God of the only joy, God in the face of the cynic,
For though you have the strength to bend the knees of the strong-willed,
You use instead a Love more powerful than all force.

For I had sunk deep within myself, and stopped my ears to Your guiding heart-beat,
And though I felt Your germ within, I pressed it down
And streched over it the web of my concerns.
I lived, but sank to dust; I laughed, but my mirth rang hollow.

We will yet praise You, Lord, for You will not be buried;
You will not remain in the tombs we create for You.
For You will resurrect the Christ within us,
And put to death our flesh;
You will stamp the lingering flames of our own will
And rob us of ourselves, leaving only You.

Lord, hear our praise:
You are the path-finding Truth-God, redeeming Jacob to Israel,
And You are the Love-burst of Righteousness,
Who draws the suffering thief to Paradise.
Great is Your name, and forever to be praised.

A Fusillade at the Christian Right

I suppose I would say first that I don’t think there should be a Christian Right. I think religion is a terrible thing to mix with politics – neither side comes out of this clean. Once a candidate becomes a Christian candidate, everything done by him or under him is linked to Christianity. You know what Christians seem like to the rest of the world right now? Opinionated, intrusive, war-like people who know that everybody else is wrong. Strangely, everything that comes out of America is also associated with Christianity, so along with these traits, people (in the Middle East, particularly) link Christianity with pornography, alcohol, and sacrilege of all types. Advertising ourselves as a Christian nation pulls everything within our nation under the Christian banner, and I find that appalling.

Nor do the politicians come out of this easily, necessarily. If a candidate admits his faith, he has to battle with people who want to put him in the same camp as Westboro Baptist Church (known and vilified for its outspoken stance that “God hates fags”), or as the people who think evolution should be banned from schools. Frankly, I don’t care if the politicians make it out easily or not, but I would like it if these sections of Christianity could stay out of the press for a whole week.

I find it mortifying that the same Christian Right who purports to stand for freedom, democracy, and the “American way” wishes to stifle all opposing voices so that it can form a homogeneous voting bloc with which all must assimilate. The group that wants personal freedom to own guns wants to eliminate the freedom to disagree. [It just occurred to me that those two desires are particularly creepy when put together – who would disagree with the barrel of a shotgun?] But seriously – how can you support freedom of speech in one way (I think of the Right’s disdain for “political correctness”) and at the same time wish to forbid speech acts like flag burning, or, yes, even disagreeing with the president? How can you claim free speech as the basis for allowing the Ten Commandments while trying to ban talk of evolution?

The Christian body is diverse – that’s why it’s a body, and not a colony of single-celled organisms in a Petri dish. The Christian Right does not allow for this in the slightest: the topics of interest are established (abortion, public prayer, taxes – wait, what do taxes have to do with Christianity?), and the others discarded. If you have an interest in using government aid to help house and educate the poor, or to develop the ailing arts, you have no place in the Christian Right, and by their logic, no place in Christianity. Because a true Christian would value lower taxes. (Here’s a sobering verse: Proverbs 22:16 – “He who oppresses the poor to increase his wealth and he who gives gifts to the rich—both come to poverty.”).

The conflation of faith with politics, the idea that a belief in one area equates certain beliefs in the other, is as dangerous as it is ubiquitous. Even the president of my own educational institution does it. And believe me – that makes me angry. What follows is an excerpt from the CCU Profile section, “Greetings From the President”:

"Colorado Christian University is very different from the typical American university. We hold tightly to traditional values and high academic standards. We strive to impact our culture in support of traditional family values, sanctity of life, compassion for the poor, biblical view of human nature, limited government, personal freedom, and other such causes that preserve and promote high moral and ethical standards." (italics mine)

Regardless of what I personally believe about these issues, I believe it is a terrible thing that our president (a former congressman, incidentally) felt the need to pin down a list of “Christian” stances, and then, of all things, to use our university to support a political platform. How can the leader of a university – supposedly a marketplace of ideas, a center for debate and critical discussion – declare what the body stands for? This is an abuse of the faith, an abuse of the institution, and a crime against the American political system. I might even extend that accusation to the Christian Right.

My own stances on conservative issues are very mixed. Sometimes I even agree with the Christian Right. But the day I let Dr. Dobson read my Bible for me and then tell me how Jesus wants me to vote is the day that...

A loss of words, a loss of respect for the scientific community

I learned a strange thing today: apparently, genes can be patented. According to an article in the New York Times (contributed, incidentally, by Michael Crichton), about one fifth of all the genes in your body are privately owned by scientists and research institutes. If any other scientists want to do research on these genes, they must pay a royalty to the patent holder. You can’t even donate some of these genes for study without permission.

This inhibits research, it inhibits the development of treatments and accurate genetic testing, and it can raise the cost of treatment prohibitively. And you know why I find this issue particularly galling? Because the companies own pathogens as well, including Hepatitis C. And my mother and I have Hepatitis C.

Just last year, my mother and I finished a forty-eight week treatment study for the disease. We took several pills a day, and every week injected a solution into the skin on our stomachs. Every evening after I’d given myself the shot, I would experience headaches, chills, aching, and sometimes a fever to boot. Other, more constant side-effects included a loss of attention span, loss of energy, some depression, some emotional lability. And in the end, the treatment was unsuccessful, both for my mother and myself – within weeks of stopping treatment, the virus was back to full levels in both of us.

“The owner of the genome for Hepatitis C is paid millions by researchers to study this disease. Not surprisingly, many other researchers choose to study something less expensive,” Crichton writes. Right now, I know of only one available medical treatment for Hep C – the one that didn’t work. Efforts to produce a newer, more promising treatment have been severely hampered and long postponed, and people like me are left just waiting, trying to take care of our livers by other means.

I can think of no more odious way of amassing wealth than from a disease affecting millions of people. There are people who donate most of their income to ending diseases around the world (multi-billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffett come to mind), and there are those who ensure that certain diseases remain by charging people to study them.

I’m at a loss. This is absurd.

Of Orchestras and Pathology

My initial response to the comment on my last post is to say, petulantly, that yes, an orchestra is better than an ensemble because there are more people playing. And if "extreme relationality" is the sort of pathology that the term sounds like, I want it. Being involved with a number of people does make one a more complex person.

I don't intend to discount the value of having a select number of particularly close friends, and developing those relationships over time. That's exactly what I'm missing: relationships that could have been more fully developed. But if I were given the choice of having either A: a small group of close friends, or B: a slightly larger group of close friends, with another ring of friends slightly less close, and another ring of friends slightly less close than that, I would not hesitate to choose B. There is a limit to the relationships one can earnestly commit to, but I am interested in being always at that limit, and nudging it back at all times. I enjoy my time to myself, mind you, but that is another matter.

If I were to go back to that music metaphor, I would say that if you have an orchestra, you can pare it down to a select group when necessary, but if you only have a small group, you can't just grow an instant-orchestra. We could even get extravagant with our metaphor here and say we'd like a piano concerto, where one instrument carries the theme, but couldn't do so without all the others.

Who am I when I'm alone? Well, who is alone? Who is not either receiving communication from an absent other, via music, literature, photo, video, or another form of art? Or perhaps they are themselves communicating to an absent other, as I am now. [No, I wouldn't classify these as the most full types of relationships, but they are relationships]. And there is God, the eternal point of reference. Perhaps it is cheap to invoke the divine in debate. Oh well. But I could say that when I am alone, I am volcanic potential; I am churning waters. I may boil and empty myself into nothingness, or I may surge onto another, and be struck by their own overflow in turns.

Lost Selves

I tend to subscribe to a relational, interpersonal theory of identity - the idea that how I relate to you is, in some ways, the definition of who I am. You and your history strike against me and my history, and what arises between the two of us is who I am and who you are, whether spiteful, grateful, quiet, thoughtful, or mischievous, whether friend or son or something else. If I think, in the solitude of my own mind, that I am a wise man, yet I give those around me foolish advice, the fact that I give bad advice supersedes the fact that I think of myself as a wise man - what occurs between two people is more important than what occurs in the mind of one alone.

I'm not satisfied with that summary of it - not even sure to what degree I agree with it. Perhaps I can clarify further: I am not solely my thought life or my group of ideas; I am my unique interaction with unique others. Thus, to some degree, anybody I've ever interacted with knows me; I can't put on a false self because to put on a false self is to adopt that self as part of my own. I suppose, then, that I am ingratiating, that I am also sly and evasive, that I am forthright and honest and dour, yet humorous. "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes." There is a different me for every different you out there, a me that could develop through time and continued relation, or a me that could be cut short and lost.

I have returned from a semester abroad, during which I lived in a house with some twenty-six others, each enrolled in the program, each, by the end, a true friend of mine. Each, in a very real way, a facet of myself, a person who reflected me back to myself in a way that none other ever has or will. I hope that I was as much for each of them. I am now sharing an apartment with one other, and three friends live down the way. And I don't get out much. So my regular, daily identities have shrunk from twenty-six to four, and I feel the void. I feel like an amputee.

I realize how selfish this sounds - that I would like all my friends to return so that I can be a full, twenty-six sided person again. But I state things in this way to emphasize their significance, to say firmly that they were not ephemeral collections of molecules and bodily systems with whom I cohabited for a few months and then departed from; no, getting to know each of those people, and many others, was like being born, coming into existence - and the separation is like death. Not the death of a separate thing, of a man in the news, but a true, internal, personal death.

How was my time at Oxford? I was born in innumerable ways, and on December 9th, much of me died. Perhaps more accurately, they were put to rest - these selves of mine did not cease to exist, but they ceased to develop, they ceased to bear fruit. They are an indelible part of me. I try to keep up those relationships, I do try, and there are some that I trust will last.

It should also be noted that this feeling applies to all of the stillborn friendships in my past, and that I bring it up now only because of the scale of the event. Even if the event is two months past, and I'm the only one still griping about it.

Whatever sense of loss clings to me, I would never assert that it was greater than what I gained from these people. Please do not think me ungrateful - I would break myself again for a similar experience. But I doubt it would hurt any less the second time around.

Cold Eyes, Closed Hands

Cold Eyes, Closed Hands

What sleep we breathe and love we spend
To feel our voices home again;
These ships that pass in thunder winds
Return to spirits waning thin.

And out from each a finger flies
And darts to where another lies -
Each gapes and hopes to recognize
The touch of one upon their eyes.

But few are they so keen of sense
Can drop their sheathing sorrowments
And grasp a stranger’s soul intent
To make for both a recompense.

Whenver I post anything up here - whether it is a piece of creative work or just a thought process for the day - I'm looking for criticism and insight. If something strikes you as strong or poor, I'd love to hear why. If you think something could have been done better, or if you disagree, tell me. I do love to hear the sound of my own voice, but that's not why I post - I post to hear other people's. After I hear my own. Which is sweet and soothing.