June 30, 2002

June 30, 2002.
Turning Corners

Yesterday, while sorting through some boxes of old rubbish, I found a piece of paper that changed my life. Rediscovering it took me back to 1993, a year of great change.

The piece of paper arrived when I was a sophomore at a very strict Christian liberal arts college. When I say "very strict," oh, I mean it. There were a boatload of rules and policies designed to keep us boys and girls in ship-shape.

No members of the opposite sex are allowed inside the dorms. Each student must attend chapel every day. Students who do not attend church services each Sunday will be subject to disciplinary action. There were lots of religious rules, lots of behavior rules. A dress code was enforced on all students, and a haircut code was enforced on the boys ("men's hair may extend no more than one inch over the top of the collar and may cover no more than one third of the ear...."). It went on and on and on.

For the most part, I got along well at this school. I kept the rules.

That is, until one Saturday evening late in my sophomore year. I was off campus with my then-boyfriend Owen. He was a new flame, someone I was just starting to see. I was very excited about him. Owen attended another school about an hour away, and almost every weekend he would drive down to see me. (Owen was regarded with some suspicion by other students, since the length of his hair did not conform to the adjurations of the Student Life Handbook.)

That Saturday evening, time got away from us, and I ended up returning to campus 20 minutes past curfew.

Twenty minutes. No big deal, right? Three days later I got a this piece of paper in my campus mailbox. And that is the note I found in the shoebox yesterday. (Click here to read it.)

I like to replay that moment in my mind, that moment when I first read it. For arriving at campus 20 minutes past curfew one night (no, it was not for "leaving the dorm without permission" as the memo suggests), I was basically locked up in my dorm room for an entire weekend. Like some beatnik Rumplestiltskin.

I am not a person given to an excess of wrath, but I boiled with a sublime rage when I got the memo. My heart checked out of the school at that moment. From that time forward, I knew that I could not leave that place fast enough.

That weekend, while locked in my dorm room, I filled out an application to transfer to Owen's school. And six weeks later, the school year ended, and I left the campus once and for all.

In the shoebox with the note, I discovered some more relics from that fertile time in 1994 and 1995. When I transferred to the new school, I entered what I now regard as the most creative period in my personal history.

But the note still bothers me. It seems unfair, even now. I know I agreed to abide by the rules of the college when I enrolled. I was aware of the rules, and I broke them. But why was the punishment so severe?

When a college imposes a network of rules that are that severe, it seems to attract two particular kinds of students: The ones who want to be there because they cherish rules and cannot function without them, and those who are wild and cannot function with them. (Usually those students are dragged to the school by their frantic parents, in a last-ditch effort to drill some personal discipline into their child.)

This college certainly had plenty of those two types. But I was neither a rebel nor a pollyanna. I was an average, middle-of-the-road kid. I think I was the type of student that they wanted to attract. But even then, I wasn't good enough.

Leaving that college sparked a minature personal rebellion against the two forces that had led me there: my parents, and organized religion.

I was so very sick of attending church and chapel that I made a concentrated effort to avoid those things at all costs.

Sometimes, after spending two years at this Christian college, I'm amazed that I emerged from it with a scrap of faith still intact.

That school where I got the note — it meant well. I still believe that the people making the rules had a sincere faith. I believe that they truly loved God and wanted the best for the students.

But all those laws didn't help me one bit. They just crippled my faith.

I wish I could pay a visit to myself, locked in my dorm room in 1993. I wish I could give myself a hug, and say, honey, do you really think God is worried that you were out 20 minutes past curfew? Honey, do you think God really cares if your ears are double-pierced, or if the hem of your skirt comes to two inches above the knee? Do you think God is really concerned about any of those things?

I think God is too big to be hung up on that stuff. I think he cares about the condition of your heart, not the dust bunnies gathering under the bed.

I was talking about God with Jessamyn. She commented that a lot of churchy people would encourage you believe that if God is a loving parent — but one that loves us "by sacrificing for us, working late at night and going without." This image of God is so prevalent in the church; it's no wonder that the notion of God travels in tandem with a big, elaborate guilt trip.

When I think about the Christian college, and about how much I wanted to be rid of God during those few years of rebellion, I remember of one of the sermons I heard when I was just getting back to the church in 1997. (Somehow I had found this church that managed to be electrifying and meaningful and real and very sincere in its love for God. I love that church.)

The sermon being preached was about Jesus' first recorded miracle. The pastor explained that this miracle is the first thing Jesus did when he stepped in front of a microphone. Did he tell people to clean their dorm rooms or attend synagogue more frequently or cut their hair? No. He turned water into wine at a wedding feast.

The sermon went on. Wine is all about joy and celebration. It is the sweetest reward the earth can give. "Jesus did not come to impose a stricter network of rules on the people," explained the pastor. "He came to make the world run with wine."

Today, I'm half of a mind to track down an audio tape of that sermon. Make a copy for myself and then mail one in to the dreaded old Student Development Office. It wouldn't hurt to remind them — and myself — that the God we're both serving is so much greater than haircuts and hemlines.