My first year was all about trying to find my way, taking general education classes, and working on the school newspaper. Having failed to win a role on the stage, I also helped in the theatre box office and built sets. Greek began my sophomore year. Although five women were in the class, our professor invariably addressed us as “Young men . . . ” I loved him anyway. He had studied with the author of our textbook, J. Gresham Machen, a name to inspire awe. He occasionally doled out little bits of advice. “Expect the Lord’s return at any moment, but have your life planned out five years in advance,” he challenged us. And one day, “Do it and don’t play at it.” I don’t recall what it was—the Christian life? our academic work? He had a habit of striking the desktop with the side of his right hand, then shooting it toward us out in three short bursts for emphasis. Like every other student in the class, I had a stash of vocabulary cards on a small metal ring, with new words being added each lesson. “Say it five times and it’s yours,” Dr. L. promised, exhorting us to always carry the cards and flip through them as we walked from class to class. “The other students will think you are weird, but they think that anyway, because you are taking Greek.” Every now and again, he would say, “Let me give you a little nugget from the Greek,” and go on to explain some tricky point. I kept a card file of these nuggets. Here’s one: John 3:16, one of the most quoted verses of the Bible, For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but may have eternal life. I had been given to understand that so loved was to be read as sooooo much, but no. The adverb in Greek is better translated in this manner. So was not a matter of the quantity but of the quality of God’s love—that is, sacrificially generous. On the first day of class Dr. L. directed our attention to a chart in the back for conjugating regular verbs. Five tenses, thirteen principal parts, so that one could identify, for instance, the aoristic active imperfect tense—or any other combination. The font was smaller than in the rest of the book, the margins tighter. “Memorize it,” he commanded. “It will be on the final exam in the spring.” I struggled with Greek, all three quarters, barely keeping my head above water, even though taking the class was my choice. I wanted to be able to read the New Testament in Greek, and I could, with occasional help from a lexicon. The night before our final the following May, I stared at the luo chart. I knew it wasn’t possible to memorize it; I didn’t even try. I was going to fail my final. Some of my classmates did pull all-nighters, still trying to memorize the chart. That morning Dr. L. placed our exams face down on our desks. When everyone had received a copy, he allowed us to turn the test over. Seeing that the luo chart was not there, I burst into tears of relief. The second year of Greek my grade dropped to a C for my final two quarters—too many extracurriculars. If I had remained for one more quarter, I’d have earned a minor in Greek, but I had student teaching to fit in, and fall seemed the best quarter to do that. I let my Greek slip away. On the rare occasions when it comes up, I tell people I know just enough Greek to be dangerous. If a word in a Gospel reading intrigues me, I can come home and look it up in my Greek New Testament and puzzle it out with a concordance and dictionary. I haven’t spoken the words of the New Testament in a long time, but sometimes I could toss out for my Sunday School class a little nugget from the Greek.
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Image: Library of Congress collection (not me!) After chapel we students, about 1000-strong, stop traffic crossing a two-lane state highway, still brick-paved, treacherous to walk across in high heels. (Not that I wore heels often.) Our chapel exodus toward the main campus brings to a halt all the trucks with pigs or cows, their noses visible between the steel bars., eaded to the slaughter house. We are young and therefore immortal; of course, traffic will stop for the tidal wave of youth headed for the campus post office (the PO, pronounced poe), then to a class, or lunch. The PO is critical in these days before internet and social media. I might—and probably will—have a letter from my mother, maybe one from a friend, or a graded exam or essay. On occasion, there is a "call for packages" note; the item too large for our post office boxes, might have snacks inside. We can place notes to one another in intracampus mail, too, so there might be a note and a candy bar from my secret prayer pal. (Each quarter we draw names of girls in our hall and are expected to be encouraging and praying for them.) The PO also houses the teletype machine, cranking out news twenty-four seven—and draft numbers. When the cheap paper scrolls to the floor, someone tears it off and posts the draft numbers on a bulletin board that also carries announcements and requests or offers for a ride home. The teletype also spits out news and weather. For a brief time I read news for the campus radio station, tucked into the back of the PO, which also broadcast to neighboring towns. Given the tight time between my class and my scheduled news slot, I followed the example of other readers, called “rip and read.’ As I walked in the door, I grabbed whatever was pounding out of the machine, reading the text cold, mangling names of places in Vietnam and Cambodia. By the time we cross campus, squeeze into the PO, and grab our mail, much of chapel is forgotten, and it’s on to our next class, or for people who plan well, lunch. My problem is that so many of the classes I need or want to take are at 11, so lunch is delayed. During my sophomore and junior years, 11:00 means Greek class. As we struggling students joked, "I’m not taking Greek; Greek is taking me." "Chapel is the heartbeat of this college," we were told. As such, attendance was required every morning at 10 a.m.
Ten weeks in a quarter times five days in a week equals fifty. Times three quarters is 150. Times four years is 600 chapels, with five permissible cuts each quarter. Plus two summers I was taking classes. What do I remember? I was part of the crush to get to the correct inner door (each representing a range of the alphabet) to cross off my name and get credit for my attendance. The chapel checkers were paid student employees, standing at the doors, holding clipboards with lists of our names. Some roommates whose last names were far apart in the alphabet had a system so that one of them attended and crossed off both their names at different doors. Others perfected “slash and dash,” running in one door to cross off their name and out another to study or go back to bed. The organist played “Sweet Hour of Prayer” to hush us before chapel began, followed by the lights flicking on and off as final warning. The most beautiful singing followed—a thousand young voices in four-part harmony singing “A Mighty Fortress is our God” or another great hymn. The theatre seats creaked—the building, once a church and later a gym, then doubled as chapel and theatre. Some ministers—we have a different one daily—tried to set us up. “Open your Bibles and turn to Hezekiah,” they'd begin, but we wise ones sat still, knowing there was no such book; Hezekiah was a king, not a writer. It’s not his fault he sounds like one of the minor prophets. I take notes on the sermons, which are mostly “three points and a poem,” as we joked. The three points are often alliterated, the easier to outline and recall. Only rarely was I in enough of a panic to study in chapel, but others did; staring at a textbook looked like staring at a Bible. (It should go without saying that we were supposed to bring our Bibles to chapel.) No one coordinated the men who preached in chapel or approved their sermon text. One Thursday we faced the fourth Baptist pastor of the week. He didn’t understand the groaning or giggling when he announced, “Turn in your Bibles to Romans 12: 1, 2.” He was the fourth preacher in the same week to exhort us to “present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.” For most of us, no matter how the Spirit had led, it had stopped being reasonable a few days ago. Each sermon lasted nearly forty-five minutes, just as it did during Sunday morning church services. We were grateful when one local pastor came to preach; he believed, “If you can’t strike oil in fifteen minutes, you can’t strike oil,” so we were out by 10:30, feeling wild and free. I was happy to be at the college I’d chosen, but I was introverted and shy. I was also struggling with my perceived need to squelch the young woman I’d been during my final years of high school, thinking she wasn’t Christian enough, or the right kind of Christian. She’d had fun and laughed, and that couldn’t be right. Finally, I was homesick for my church. I hid in my room much of the time, writing letters and reading.
Sitting on my bunk bed doing not much one afternoon, I was completely unprepared when the door burst open. A big girl catapulted into the room shouting, “This room has a noisy tradition to uphold!” I was terrified. My room had been her room, I learned, and we were already connected. Her dad knew my dad, who had asked that Bev look out for me. In a student body of a thousand, with multiple women’s dorms, Bev lived just down the hall. And her Grandpa Jay had been my junior high bus driver, whom I’d adored. What were the odds? She and her friends—all juniors—took me in, sort of like adopting a scared puppy, I imagine. I was privy to intel from young women who’d spent two years learning the culture of the place, including which profs and classes to avoid. I didn’t have to make friends among my own class, nor among those sadistic sophomores in my dorm. Bev had a motherly streak that benefited me in the spring, when I got blood poisoning from a cut on my foot. The campus doctor told me to soak it in hot water. Bev brought me basins of nearly boiling liquid, insisting I put my foot in the water, standing guard to make sure I didn’t wimp out. The red streaks going up my leg receded. As the doctor had told me, straight-faced, “Few people die of this nowadays.” I didn’t die of blood poisoning or loneliness. I had goodhearted, kind friends. When they graduated two years later, I was bereft. |
Baptist GirlI was a conservative Baptist girl who grew up to become a career Christian, working first in a Baptist school and then in a Baptist college. For about three decades, it was very good until it wasn’t, and I had to leave. But the Baptists formed me. This is my homage to the good times and good people of the world I left, finally, at forty-three, when I became an Episcopalian. These are my memories; others might disagree with my recollections. So be it. Archives
December 2023
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