It is only Jesus

I never finished college.
In May, 1971, spring semester ended, and having finally secured for myself and a buddy a much-coveted room in the counter-culturally prestigious Butler Hall basement for my fourth and final year, I left Blackburn College for good, though at the time I didn’t know it. Rather than hauling the heavy piece of furniture back home to Joliet where I lived with my divorced mother and two younger siblings, I left behind in storage an heirloom bookcase that I thought I would again be using in my new room.

I used to play with my figurines and toy soldiers on the shelves of that bookcase when I was a three-year old child in the sunny living room of our tiny flat in inner city Chicago. From its shelves as I got older, I discovered books, histories, novels, and atlases which sparked my first interests, and my dad’s collection, on old 78 rpm’s, of classical music—Hungarian Rhapsody #2, The Firebird Suite, An American in Paris. Music that my more pop-minded mom called “dead music”—she preferred the latest music on her favorite radio stations. (This was in the early 1950’s.)

Back to college.
Yes, I never finished, and one of the prices I’ve paid all these years is not an unpleasant one, but somewhat tragicomic: I have “college dreams” on a regular basis. Usually they’re dreams about going back to school, to Blackburn, and trying to fit it in to whatever stage of married family life I was in at the time. These dreams always ended with my failure to properly enroll and stay at school, to go to classes and still be back in Portland, working and taking care of my wife and kids. The commute was terrible. (Just kidding!)

Tonight I had another college dream, not quite like any of the others.

I was apparently on a visit to my old college with others of my own generation, probably alumni like myself. The college had grown tremendously—in the dreams I’ve been having lately this is a recurring theme—and I had some difficulty finding the buildings I had known as a young student and recognizing them when I did find them. Blackburn is a “work college” where all the students are employed, many in construction and maintenance of the college’s property, and so there was always some building or remodeling work going on, then and now. I was lodging as a guest in a dorm that didn’t exist back in 1971, and it was Sunday morning.
I wanted to go to a church service.

Knowing that there was no Orthodox church in Carlinville, a small county seat of about 5000 souls hidden in a hollow of the southern Illinois prairie, I asked a student that I saw in the dorm if they still had Sunday services in Clegg Chapel, and what time they took place. She responded that there would be a service, at 10 a.m. I looked quickly at my watch and, sure enough, it was about 9:53 a.m. I should have time enough to make a run for it—if only I could find my way through the totally unrecognizable, rebuilt campus.

I found the chapel, attached as it was to Hudson Hall where I took many of my classes. I entered and went upstairs to the chapel entrance. The doors were flung open, and I could tell from the contemporary worship music that a service was already in progress. Through the open double doors I could see students sitting on (gasp!) wooden bleachers in neat rows, singing and clapping hands. “Oh well,” I thought to myself, “I guess I shouldn’t have expected the old hymns I was used to when I went to chapel forty years ago.”

What really surprised me was that the inside of the chapel had been converted into a kind of maze of wooden corral fencing, as on a ranch where animals are being funneled through the narrow passages and sorted. I slipped right in behind a long queue of students, mixed in with a few parents, as we almost danced to the music while slowly moving forward through the maze. Just before we got out of it, there was a gate that had to be raised up between two posts that everyone must pass under. As I came to it, I exclaimed, “Oh, this is the gate of the sheepfold, isn’t it!” Then I held the gate up above my own head, passed under it and out, and then let it slide back down onto the waiting hands of a woman behind me.

I found myself near the front of the chapel, where the raised area was. In a Presbyterian church, the front is like a stage where the pulpit is and, in Clegg Chapel, the choir stalls were in two opposing groups facing each other. Well, that’s how things were back then. But in my dream, taking place now, things were different.

First of all, the huge, shimmering leaded glass windows that were on one long wall of the chapel were shrouded in heavy plastic to protect them from remodeling work. Through the plastic I could see that someone had altered those simple windows by adding a stained glass medallion right in the center of some of them, the topics of which were not biblical in theme, but something to do with athletic awards, and they looked very much like neon restaurant signs with Coca-Cola style lettering.

The end wall of the chapel above what used to be the choir stalls was no longer a solid wall with a large, plain wooden cross on it. It was now a gigantic clear glass church window. I was oblivious of the service at this point (if it was even going on), and there was no band where I expected to see one. I found myself talking to the woman who had been behind me and who seemed to be the mom of a young student. This woman was about 40 years old. She was getting an explanation of the chapel by her daughter, and I occasionally commented on it, joining in their conversation.

I added historical reminiscences as, for example, telling both of them that when I was at school “thirty-nine years ago” there was no giant window up above, just a solid wall with a cross, and there were two groups of pews arranged as choir stalls. We three went up to the stage to see what was up there now. It was a mess. All just a scattering of amplifiers, electronic instruments and tangles of cables and switch boxes. Nothing like pews or the small organ that used to be up there, or the piano. Just props and portable back drops and other show-biz stuff in disarray.

That’s when I woke up. I looked at my watch and it was 1:15 a.m.

Then, awake, I remembered some more of the conversation I’d had with the woman. I had been telling her, “When I was at college here, I really liked to go to services in this chapel, because ‘everything emptied into white,’ as the song by Cat Stevens goes. The chapel walls were white, the pews and woodwork around the doors and the heavy beams of the high chapel ceiling were a rich dark brown. The large windows along one length of the chapel, and the even larger window at the back were inset into the deep masonry walls without frames, and each shimmering piece of leaded glass let through, along with the sunlight, the muted silhouettes of the trees that lined the outside sanctuary walls. The overall effect was that of worshipping, or praying, in the bright, greenish half-light of a forest of tall trees.”

I told her, “I liked going to chapel here because everything was so pure and uncluttered. I’m Orthodox, and that’s the fanciest religion there is. It was good to get away from all that sometimes.” (Remember, this was a dream, and I’m being very candid.)

That was it for the dream and its receding memory. Then, as I lay on my cot wondering whether to get up and write this dream down or not, my mind began a mental dialogue with itself.

“So what is church, what is religion, anyways? Is it the Byzantine splendor and intricacy of the Orthodox service, or is it the stark, natural simplicity of the unimaged Presbyterian chapel or Quaker meeting hall?” A passage from one of my favorite poems ran through my mind,

“Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones
There's something in this richness that I hate.
I love the look, austere, immaculate,
Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones.
There's something in my very blood that owns
Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate,
A thread of water, churned to milky spate
Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones.”
—Elinor Wylie, Wild Peaches

Then, in the following few seconds, the original question came bat-fowling again through the cavern of my awakened consciousness,
“So what is church, what is religion, anyways?” And then, in a flash of light, I saw Jesus, dressed a simple white robe, walking with a few disciples, crossing a shallow stream picking their way over the stones, and my mind read unwritten words, and my heart heard,
“It is only Jesus.”