Sunday, September 23, 2007

SEMINARY ARRIVAL 1978

Crossing the prairies and then the lakeland remnants of glacial melting was no preparation for Chicago, the city built in a marsh. I had been to the South Side when I was in school at Northwestern (Class of 1961 in the School of Speech, which no longer exists), but not much and not to the University of Chicago. I got off the freeway and just drove side streets, blundering south, trying to feel the layout of the city. It was terrifically hot and humid. I was going slowly so could see that weeds had taken root on the sides of buildings wherever there was a bit of dirt and I could hear the midwestern bugs singing and rasping.

Inevitably, I came to black Chicago and, knowing black Portland, Oregon, which most people don’t understand exists, I dropped to a crawl. Cars lined the curbs, people darted in and out between them, steps and windows and stoops were crowded with observers. If I’d struck a child, a dog or a rolling ball, I would have been in as much trouble as if it happened in... We see it on TV. They stared. In a van crammed with furniture and boxes of books, I was clearly not a social worker. So what was I? Who would miss me if I disappeared? A social worker told me that when she went into project high rises, she always paused out front and called up to a nonexistent person, “Hi! I’ll be right up! Is the elevator working?” This to give the impression that someone was watching for her and would report her loss. In spite of the heat, I rolled up the window.

Then I came to a large area of rubble, looking like London after the blitz or maybe Iraq today. Urban renewal. We had to destroy the neighborhood in order to save it. Finally Hyde Park, but nowhere to park. I circled a long time, but at least I got a sense of where things were. When I was finally able to stop and stagger to the Meadville/Lombard building, kitty-corner from First Unitarian Church which is a deliberate copy of a small European cathedral, I was surprised to be greeted by Kiyo Hashimoto -- the small, vivid, Japanese heart of the school that really kept it working. She already knew a lot about me, was eager to know more, and told me exactly what I needed to know. I didn’t meet any faculty for days afterwards.

The building was beyond anything I’d expected even though my minister had described it. Built in the days when religion was a big deal and treated with enormous respect for institutions, it was full of finely detailed panels and marble. A graceful staircase rose close to the entrance to the solitary classroom. The rest of that end of the building was closed doors, offices, all with high ceilings and tall casement leaded windows.

At the other end of the building were the library stacks which contained the elevator, creaking and cranky as it was. I probably rode it twice in the four years I was there. The stacks were only the steel skeleton of the structure, with wire mesh floors, nearly twice as many floors as in the rooms. Ceilings here were low enough to make a tall man stoop. What was tall windows outside, in order to match the rest of the building, was top-halves and bottom-halves inside. The priorities had been set by understanding education for a profession as being “reading with” some wise preceptor: it was meant to be mastering a body of literature in several languages, as the PNW ministers always put it, semi-jokingly, “salvation by bibliography.” Theology, no pesky people.

Most impressively, we were each given a key to the building and a key to the library. Checking books out was via the honor system, which had a few little opercula in it. For one thing Unitarianism, because it was persecuted in England, has a strong doctrine of tolerance which occasionally attracts people outside the mainstream in surprising ways. At some point a “sexologist” had given his entire library to Meadville and it was dutifully put on the stacks. (Probably some money came along with it.) The books were not porn, but they were old-fashioned -- waaaaay old-fashioned by today’s standards. All of us read most of the books but we declined to write our names on the cards and drop them in the proper box. As far as I know, the books were always returned.

Even if one considered these books to have some practical application (at least they were about people), few of the other books did. Mostly it was an accumulation of history, but a history of a movement that has always been full of quirks and leaps, wonderful insights and boring blind alleys. To me the books felt like live creatures and I loved to sit on the floor at the top half of a Gothic window with all the lights out -- the street lights made this practical. Crosslegged, I’d rock with my heartbeat and dream of the whispering voices around me. I was taking a decidedly romantic approach to the whole enterprise, quite nineteenth century.

Others did not. There were three faculty members at that point, all about my age. The oldest was John Godbey whose dreams were as romantic as mine but considerably earlier and centered in Transylvania where there was a utopian brand of Unitarianism that still persists as a more Christian variation. Then there were two men whose friendship was so close and long-standing that we’d taken to calling them “Shengle” -- conflating Shadle and Engel. They conspired to make Godbey the Dean, year after year, which interfered with his scholarship efforts. Godbey was my advisor. He was a complicated man whose hearing problem interfered with his earnest desire to understand people. Sometimes he heard only what he wanted to, which mostly suited everyone. Shengle were survivors of the Sixties who had worn workshirts with reversed collars and gone into “the wilderness of the city.”

Up on the top floor lurked Mircea Eliade, a giant and original thinker. That’s who used the elevator, unless someone were moving a big load of books. Pilgrims came begging to find him, as though he were Gandalf. Maybe he was.

At the left on the first floor was the Curtis Room, a kind of combination lounge and auditorium. It had a huge fireplace, rarely used for a fire, and a coffee pot that was constantly in use. At a round table sat the students, coming and going, quarreling and howling with laughter. I once said to Davidson Loehr, in all seriousness, “If I had a gun right now, I’d shoot you dead.” Others have felt that way after me, including the Meadville faculty who more or less forced him out. His intellect and chutzpah were formidable enough for him to transfer over the Div School straight, without the fiction of attending Meadville. Anyway, Langdon Gilkey took a liking to him (David made wonderful bookshelves for Langdon.) and others also helped him. But he was in the class admitted the next year, a class of four.

I belonged to a class of six, all quite a bit younger than me. Three were female. Shadle, who mostly got stuck with this sort of stuff, had us over for a nice little party at his apartment, which I thought was very kind. I thought I was in a novel and waxed enthusiastic about the wonders and privileges of ministry. I wanted to get a little drunk and stay until maybe 2AM talking Big Ideas. But the others hustled me out and informed me that my enthusiasm was unseemly and would only result in more work being heaped upon us. They assured me that so much emotion showed soft-mindedness. Well, it was mostly Peter who had this opinion, acquired at Princeton.

Harris, who looked exactly like Cher, was a Nuyorican Jungian and emotion was her meat and drink. In fact, she felt so starved after a while that she transferred to Union Seminary in Manhattan. Before she went, we three women spent many happy hours in the Greek restaurant nearby, not quite conscious that it had been the hangout of the famous Jewish authors (Roth and company) at an earlier time. Maybe someday all three of us will write novels about that first year. I suppose the guys got drunk down at Jimmy’s. Maybe not.

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