THE EDGE OF SORROW

PART ONE (cont) The Year Before - September 5, 1995:

The Year Before – September 5, 1995:

Adams College, Vermont

           

     I entered Mather Chapel like a thief in the night and slid into the last pew, the last seat closest to the enormous doors.  No one else was sitting there. 

     I assumed a pious posture that said I had been there in contemplation all along.  I needed the space for escape once the boredom set in – but that wasn’t going to happen.  I couldn’t leave.

            It was dark and cool inside the chapel, as it always is.  Stained glass windows from the college’s beginnings run parallel to the lateral thrusts and create the vaulted ceiling – and the somber air.  Eyes are forced upward towards Jesus – a difficult thing for a Jew, especially for a non-believer like me.  I was raised secular.  My family believes in the God We Trust on the dollar bill.  Nothing else.  Occasionally I went to temple as a kid but I always knew that it was a social thing, not some adherence to a covenant.  My father did business at temple, when he went, which was not regularly.  Always some excuse for others to go, instead.   I was very different from my orthodox friends that couldn’t stop talking about finally being able to read from the Torah.   I learned just enough Hebrew for my Bat Mitzvah, and quickly forgot it all.   I was going to be an agent, alright, but for the Sachs family business, not for God.  It was about the law, the tradition and the ethics of the family business, money – the getting of it, the nurturing of it, the growing of it as if it was a plant or a garden, alive, budding.  Life-blood.  Unconsciously, I started rebelling against it as a child.

            Mather Chapel is either awe inspiring or frightening, depending on whether you’re a believer or not, a follower or not.  Whether you want to join the flock or be outside it.  That’s what scares me: I always want to be on the outside – a difficult thing to do at Adams.  Adam’s a religion too – like a cult.  Close to it.  The entire place is about doing penance.  Give up resistance and abide.  Temples, churches, all of them, even shrines, Adams – they’re all the same.  Give up, that’s what they say to me.  Surrender.  Way too scary.   Give up.  Give all of yourself to it – to us.  Them.  Self-reliance is a threat.

            I’m not one to abide, you see.   That’s what drew me to Javier Sicard; he wasn’t one to go along either.  “Why follow other men’s intent and be so docile?” he asked once.  “Why not follow your own path?  Trust your instincts?  At least, why not struggle to undo what others have done, and this way find yourself?”  I felt that immediately in the pages of his work.  I saw it first hand when we met; I felt it in his unorthodox class, his manner.

            From my first day at Adams when I attended my very first Convocation, I was frightened of the chapel – too mysterious, too, I don’t know, like constraining.  Maybe even a false place.  False idols.  All the evil that has been done in the name of God.  Think of it.  Faith and hope and charity – miniscule ideas in the face of the violence done in God’s favor. That scares me.  In God’s name, life is cheap.  My classmates, however, were so excited to attend the ceremony that launched us into our academic lives.  Secular academic lives anointed by a Christian godhead concealed in the ceremony.  Very scary.  What else was concealed so easily? 

            The profs looked noble and full of grace – the givers of light slowly entering the chapel, looking at us, nodding to us, smiling, acknowledging us but making sure we knew that our job was to look up at them, then to God.  That’s how we’d find Him, I suppose.  Through them – because of them.  Almighty power passes through the elite faculty aglow in their regalia.   I don’t like Convocation.  I didn’t like the place at all.  Sure it’s beautiful, if we can just talk about architecture, a language, a strange narrative in and of itself: to make us small.  That’s what scared me: that a building made by men can push you down so easily, make you feel irrelevant – and elevate others into gods.  It’s not why I came to college.   The feeling was even more profound on my second visit.  And maybe it wasn’t the fear of boredom that compelled me to be the last one in the chapel, but the fear of what the place itself represents instead.  I needed an escape as soon as I felt the noose tighten.