But this is the fatal mistake. Of course we never wanted, and never asked, to be made into the sort of creatures He is going to make us into. But the question is not what we intended ourselves to be, but what He intended us to be when He made us."
-- C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
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From Friday to Sunday, I was in Hillsdale.
Lots of talks about movies, literature, and memories. All of it worth more than the sum of its parts, truly, and I have to say I had a blast reconnecting with friends. Also spent plenty of time with former professors, some of them buying me food and some of them giving me mead (more on that later). Got to see The Rev. Dr. John Seth Reist, Jr., give his first service at the Presbyterian Church in Jonesville, MI, and I also had dinner with him (the night quickly regressed into a string of offensive jokes).
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Something happens, to some extent, to everyone who visits their alma mater: You begin to suspect that you will not be making such visits for much longer. You are wearing out your welcome and the number of friends you have there is dwindling. You are not able to "keep up" with the college students any more, either in the number of drinks you consume or the hours you stay up. You realize that the thing you talk and joke about is the one most important thing that you have failed so far to look straight in the face: You are no longer in college.
The process is faster or slower for different people. For me, it took almost two years. I'm glad to have reached this point. In one sense, it places a hedge around my college years, sets them aside as something that is fun to remember but which I do not need to spend a lot of time and effort to reclaim. I can never go back, and at the same time, I can go back as often as I like. It restricts me from pretending I'm eighteen again, but it liberates me to act like I'm twenty-three. It forces me to stop trying to be "an old boy" and to be a young man. It is very easy to be inclined towards the former, and very difficult to attempt the latter.
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All told, it was a good trip. Got to see the Tower Dancers Concert, all three performances, as well as a friend's senior art show. Both the concert and the art show were beautiful and impressive. I get the sense my former dance instructor, Corrine I., has grown as a choreographer because she is now working with students who have grown as dancers. She trusts them in a way she never could have trusted the group when I was there, probably because amateurs like me hindered her vision. The student-choreographed pieces, too, showed more confidence and clarity than I think were possible two years ago. Sometimes coy and feminine, sometimes sharp and reflective, all the dances radiated the goodness and happiness and energy that attracted me to the group when I was a student.
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While in college, I experienced all the normal things people experience in college, and in that sense those four years were not unusual at all. But in terms of Who I was and What I did, I realize they were in fact very strange. Before Hillsdale, I was not the sort of person who would indulge in all appetites, or help a friend to be unfaithful to their fiancée, or think of going to church as if it were voluntary slavery,--all the while imagining that I was doing pretty well. But that's precisely the Who and What of college for me.
Removed from it now by two years of work, I see that I rejected Christianity. Even while I quoted C. S. Lewis in my freshman papers, argued theology with friends during lunch, and kept "Christian" as my Religious Views on Facebook, I was becoming a cold, proud, gluttonous wretch.
Dr. Jackson, who insists I call him by his first name from now on, suggested at lunch on Friday that perhaps one reason I fell away from my Christian upbringing is, Hillsdale Christianity isn't Christianity. It's apologetics. It's only an academic question to be debated by people who know a lot about the Bible but little about Christ, and to participate in that is to argue and do nothing more. What you'll find here is pious, self-absorbed intellectualism, not a daily dying to self.
Whether that's the truth of it or not, I'm not the one to say. But it does make some sense. Regardless, I feel I am returning to the self I was before the necessary (and admittedly pleasurable, exciting and educational) experience of college. Even as a kid I never had much regard for testimonies or "born-again" stories, so I won't create another martyr-ish example of self-righteousness here talking in unimportant specifics about my return to Christ. But I will say this:
It's not easy.
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I mentioned a few weeks ago that a friend, Nick T., spent some time with me on his way back from a trip. He's being chrismated into the Orthodox Church in a few weeks with his little sister Erin, who was one of the dancers in the Concert and who, especially after this weekend, has become a close friend of mine.
In the basement of the music building, while our friends jammed in a practice room, four of us sat in the hallway, talking (like ya do) about life. The question of Erin's Orthodox conversion--and I'm not sure "conversion" is the right word, but it'll have to do--came up, and she spoke for a few solid minutes about faith, the "historical church," and her love for liturgy.
Someone speaking so frankly about their faith is something I haven't heard in a while, not even during the occasional--and dodgy--chat about religion with co-workers. And it's made me reconsider my own faith, which cannot be a bad thing. I get the feeling that reconsideration of my faith, the realignment of my trajectory towards Christ, needs to become a daily practice.
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Incidentally, Erin also lent me her copy of The Orthodox Church, by Timothy Ware, which I will get started on today. I finished Mere Christianity this morning.
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